Born in the Rubble

“During this era, “stories in east coast newspapers implied that crack [led] to violent and unpredictable behavior, to assault and murder; that crack [was] the most dangerous drug ever to appear; and that crack [would] destroy the nation’s youth” (Oetting et al., 1989). The myth of the “crack baby,” as one specific example of news bias, was created via the proliferation of inaccurate conclusions drawn from a very small study throughout major news outlets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, and reputable magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone (Ramsey, 2023). Cities with large populations of Black people were portrayed as lawless and irredeemable centers of urban decay in the nightly news (Ramsey, 2023). In short, this biased news coverage fundamentally misrepresented most Black folks and their realities. Filling the gap between how Black people were portrayed, and what most Black people knew of themselves and their realities, this belief in the media as a part of a broader state-run conspiracy to either incarcerate or eliminate them served as an explanation for why Black Americans and their experiences were so persistently misrepresented.”

Chapter 2 Paranoid or Perceptive?: Theorizing the Crack Conspiracy in Hip-Hop Music