STAUNCH BELIEVERS IN uplift and media suasion looked to NBC’s The Cosby Show, which premiered on September 20, 1984, to redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America. While many viewers enjoyed Bill Cosby’s brilliant comedy and the show’s alluring storylines, and many Black viewers delighted in watching a Black cast on primetime television for eight seasons, it was Cosby’s racial vision that made The Cosby Show America’s No. 1 show from 1985 to 1989 (and one of the most popular in apartheid South Africa). Cosby envisioned the ultimate uplift suasion show about a stereotype-defying family uplifted by their own striving beyond the confines of discriminated Blackness. He believed he was showing African Americans what was possible if they worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism. Cosby and his millions of loyal viewers actually believed that The Cosby Show and its spinoffs were persuading away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers. And it did, for some. For other Whites, Cosby’s fictional Huxtables were extraordinary Negroes, and the show merely substantiated their conviction—and Reagan’s conviction, and racist Blacks’ convictions—that racism could be found only in the history books. Some commentators understood this at the time. The Cosby Show “suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgement of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face,” critiqued literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the New York Times at the crest of the show’s popularity in 1989.1
Like every attempt at uplift suasion before it, The Cosby Show did nothing to hinder the production and consumption of Reagan’s racist drug war. Quite possibly the most sensationally racist crack story of the era was written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, Harvard medical degree–holding Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies,” he wrote on July 30, 1989. These babies were likely a deviant “race of (sub) human drones” whose “biological inferiority is stamped at birth” and “permanent,” he added. “The dead babies may be the lucky ones.”2
The column triggered the second major round of horrendous crack stories. The New York Times told of how “maternity wards around the country ring with the high-pitched ‘cat cries’ of neurologically impaired crack babies.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had one headline warning of a “Disaster in the Making: Crack Babies Start to Grow Up.” Medical researchers validated these reports—and the racist ideas that inspired them—alongside pediatricians like UCLA’s Judy Howard, who said crack babies lacked the brain function that “makes us human beings.” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia neonatologist Hallam Hurt began following the lives of 224 “crack babies” born in Philadelphia between 1989 and 1992, and she fully anticipated “seeing a host of problems.” In 2013, she concluded her study with a simple finding: poverty was worse for kids than crack. Medical researchers had to finally admit that “crack babies” were like the science for racist ideas: they never existed.3
BACKED BY SCIENCE or not, racist ideas persisted in American minds, and Reagan’s vice president made sure to manipulate them when he ran for president in 1988. George H. W. Bush had been losing in the polls to the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, until he released a television advertisement about a Black murderer and rapist of Whites, Willie Horton. “Despite a life sentence,” the scary voiceover stated, “Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man, and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime.”4
Setting himself apart from the “weak” Dukakis on crime, the “tough” Bush endorsed capital punishment and its rampant disparities. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that the “racially disproportionate impact” of Georgia’s death penalty—Blacks were being sentenced to death four times more frequently than Whites—did not justify overturning the death sentence for a Black man named Warren McCleskey unless a “racially discriminatory purpose” could be demonstrated. If the Court had chosen to rule in McCleskey’s favor, it would have opened the future to antiracist cases and to renovations of the criminal justice system, which was rotting in racism. But instead the justices disconnected racial disparities from racism, deemed racial disparities a normal part of the criminal justice system, and blamed these disparities on Black criminals, yet again producing racist ideas to defend racist policies. McCleskey v. Kemp turned out to be—as New York University lawyer Anthony G. Amsterdam predicted—“the Dred Scott decision of our time.” The Supreme Court had made constitutional the rampant racial profiling that pumped up the inhumane growth of the Black executed and enslaved prison population.5
Like their ancestors, young urban Blacks resisted the law enforcement officials who condemned them to twentieth-century slavery. And they resisted sometimes to the beat. Hip Hop and rap blossomed in 1988 after a decade of growth from the concrete of the South Bronx. BET and MTV started airing their popular Hip Hop shows. The Source hit newsstands that year, beginning its reign as the world’s longest-running rap periodical. It covered the head-slamming rhymes of Public Enemy—and “Fuck tha Police,” the smashing hit of N.W.A., or Niggaz Wit Attitudes, from straight out of Compton.6
Hip Hop and Black Studies programs blossomed together in 1988. That year, professor Molefi Kete Asante established the world’s first Black Studies doctoral program at Philadelphia’s Temple University. Asante was the world’s leading Afrocentric theorist, espousing a profound theory of cultural antiracism to counter the assimilationist ideas that continued their ascent after the demise of Black Power. Too many Black people—and too many Black Studies scholars—were “looking out” at themselves, at the world, and at their Black research subjects from the center and standards of Europeans, he argued in The Afrocentric Idea (1987). Europeans were masquerading their center as the finest, as sometimes the only, perspective. To Asante, there were multiple ways of seeing the world, being in the world, theorizing about the world, and studying the world—not just the Eurocentric worldviews, cultures, theories, and methodologies. He called for “Afrocentricity,” by which he meant a cultural and philosophical center for African people based “on African aspiration, visions, and concepts.”7
In 1989, Public Enemy recorded one of the most popular songs in Hip Hop history, “Fight the Power.” The song headlined the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s critically acclaimed 1989 urban rebellion flick, Do the Right Thing. “Fight the Power” tied together the commencement of the socially conscious age of Hip Hop and Black filmmaking and scholarship. Do the Right Thing was Lee’s third feature film. His second, School Daze (1988), addressed assimilationist ideas related to skin tone and eye color (the lighter the better) and hair texture (the straighter the better), a theme suggested by the fact that Black Power’s Afros were being cut or permed down. Some Blacks were even bleaching their skins White. The most known or suspected skin bleacher in the late 1980s and early 1990s was arguably the nation’s most famous African American, singer Michael Jackson. It was rumored Jackson lightened his skin and thinned his nose and lips to boost his career. Indeed, light-skins still secured higher incomes and were preferred in adoptions, while dark-skins predominated in public housing and prisons and were more likely to report racial discrimination. Racists were blaming dark-skins for these disparities. Antiracists were blaming color discrimination. “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence,” was a popular antiracist saying.8
SEVERAL DOZEN LEGAL scholars met at a convent outside of Madison, Wisconsin, on July 8, 1989, as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” topped Billboard charts. They came together to forge an antiracist intellectual approach known as “critical race theory.” Thirty-year-old UCLA legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw organized the summer retreat the same year she penned “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” The essay called for “intersectional theory,” the critical awareness of gender racism (and thereby other intersections, such as queer racism, ethnic racism, and class racism). “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices,” Crenshaw wrote three years later in another pioneering article in the Stanford Law Review. Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, the early formulators of critical race theory in law schools, were also in attendance at the 1989 summer coming-out party for critical race theory. One of the greatest offshoots of the theory was critical Whiteness studies, investigating the anatomy of Whiteness, racist ideas, White privileges, and the transition of European immigrants into Whiteness. Critical race theorists, as they came to be called, joined antiracist Black Studies scholars in the forefront of revealing the progression of racism in the 1990s.9
Angela Davis, a professor at San Francisco State University, working from the same antiracist intellectual traditions, was also calling attention to the progression of racism. “African Americans are suffering the most oppression since slavery,” Davis thundered at California State University at Northridge in 1990. Her speech angered believers in racial progress. After all, African Americans possessed 1 percent of the national wealth in 1990, after holding 0.5 percent in 1865, even as the Black population remained at around 10 to 14 percent during that period. “Our country is now replete with many blacks in positions of prestige and power,” which was “certainly a far cry from the ‘worst oppression since slavery,’” someone wrote in a miffed letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. It was not outside societal forces that were responsible for “impregnating unmarried girls” and forcing “young blacks to drop out of school and into drug-dealing, into gangs and into killing.” No one had compelled Ugandans to “kill and oppress each other,” or caused Ethiopia to make “such a mess of its economy” that its citizens were “dependent on handouts from capitalists to survive.” Apparently, in the United States and Africa, racists were imagining that it was Black-on-Black ethnic warfare and corruption, along with welfare handouts, that were causing global Black poverty and political instability and the lingering socioeconomic disparities between White and Black Americans and between Europe and Africa. In a much friendlier manner, Ronald Reagan echoed the letter writer’s projection of global African incompetence when he spoke in England following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The end of the Cold War had “robbed much of the West of its common, uplifting purpose,” Reagan declared. Americans and their allies should unite “to impose civilized standards of human decency” on the rest of the world.10
In the United States, it was poor, young Black women whom racists of all races supposed needed the greatest imposition of civilized standards of human decency. Producers and reproducers of racist ideas were saying that it was their loose sexual behavior—and not the actual declining number of Black children to married Black couples—that was causing the increase in the percentage of children born to Black single mothers. Assimilationists argued that these young Black women could one day learn to discipline themselves sexually (like White women). Segregationists argued that they could not, advocating sterilization policies or long-term contraceptives. In December 1990, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the long-term contraceptive implant Norplant, despite its gruesome side effects. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an editorial in support of it entitled “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” The paper advocated Norplant—not an urban jobs bill—as a solution to the poverty of Black children.
While antiracists spit outrage at the editorial, Angela Davis emerged as one of the few voices condemning the ongoing denial of the sexual agency of young Black women. But Black and White racists rushed to the Inquirer’s defense. Louisiana legislator David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, made a campaign out of it. He ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 on a pledge to reduce the number of Black welfare recipients by funding their implantations of Norplant. Duke’s plan was shrewd. Even though most Blacks eligible for welfare did not utilize it, one study found that 78 percent of White Americans thought Blacks preferred to live on welfare. Duke lost the election even though the majority of Louisiana Whites voted for him. The next day, the New York Times printed a photo of a poor White welfare recipient who had voted for Duke because Blacks, she said, “just have those babies and go on welfare.” The picture symbolized the power of racist ideas. Low-income Whites could be manipulated into voting for politicians who intended to slice their welfare, just as middle-income Whites were being manipulated into voting for politicians whose policies were increasing the socioeconomic inequities between the middle and upper classes.11
INSPIRED BY SOCIOLOGIST Patricia Hill Collins’s 1990 volume Black Feminist Thought, Black feminists led the campaign to ban Norplant. The negative portrayals of young Black women in the Norplant debate never failed to leave them outraged. Some Black feminists were less outraged about the sexist portrayals of women in Hip Hop, viewing “sexism in rap as a necessary evil” or a reflection of sexism in American society, according to Michele Wallace’s report in the New York Times on July 29, 1990. Wallace revealed the recent rise of women rappers, such as Salt-n-Pepa, M. C. Lyte, and the “politically sophisticated” Queen Latifah.12
Women rappers fared better than their sisters in Hollywood, because at least their art was in mass circulation. Aside from Julie Dash’s pioneering Daughters of the Dust, Black men were the only ones producing major Black films in 1991. These included illustrious films like Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City; John Singleton’s debut antiracist tragedy Boyz N the Hood; and Spike Lee’s acclaimed Jungle Fever. Jungle Fever got people arguing about Black men cheating on Black women with White women; about interracial relations being “jungle fever,” not love; about the discrimination that interracial couples faced; about whether anything was wrong with Black women (causing Black men to date White women); and about how “there ain’t no good Black men out there,” because all the Black men were “drug addicts, homos,” or “dogs,” to quote one character. Some moviegoers defended the anti-racist truth: that there was nothing wrong with Black women or Black men as a group. Some consumed Spike Lee’s satire at face value, probably not realizing that no good Black women plus no good Black men equaled no good Black people—equaled racist ideas.13
Black men produced more films in 1991 than during the entire 1980s. But a White man, George Holliday, shot the most influential racial film of the year on March 3 from the balcony of his Los Angeles apartment. He filmed ninety grueling seconds of four Los Angeles Police Department officers savagely striking Rodney King, a Black taxi driver. Holliday sent the footage to TV stations, and TV stations started broadcasting it across the country, from urban communities that had been suffering under the baton of aggressive policing for years to suburban and rural communities that had been cheering the aggressive policing of inner-city communities for years. Charges of assault with a deadly weapon and the use of excessive force were quickly filed against the four LAPD officers. In the emotional swing, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” reemerged with a social vengeance in thumping cars and on screaming televisions. President Bush condemned the beating, but he did not back down from the tough-on-crime mantra that he had ridden to the White House. It was a political mandate that the LAPD had executed on trampled and imprisoned Black bodies as efficiently as any department in the nation. Politicians created law-and-order America, but the police officers were the pawns carrying out the policies.14
Bush’s political dancing on the King beating angered antiracists as spring turned into summer. He fanned the fury on July 1, 1991, when he nominated a Black jurist, Clarence Thomas, to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Thomas saw himself as a paragon of self-reliance, even though he had needed antiracist activism and policies to get him into Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, and even though he had needed his racist Blackness to get him into the Reagan administration in 1981, first as assistant secretary of education for the Office of Civil Rights. He had been the backseat driver of antiracist and racist forces throughout his career. And now, Bush had called Thomas to the Supreme Court, claiming he was the “best qualified at this time,” a judgment that sounded as ridiculous as those officers trying to justify the beating of Rodney King. The “best qualified” forty-three-year-old Thomas had served as a judge for all of fifteen months.15
During Thomas’s formal confirmation hearings in the Senate that fall, Anita Hill, who had been his assistant at the Education Department and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), testified. She accused Thomas of sexual harassment and gender discrimination during their tenure in government employment. Thomas denied the allegations, framing it a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves.” The frenzied Senate confirmation arguments that followed spilled out into the rest of America, making the summertime arguments over Jungle Fever seem mild. Again and again, Hill’s defenders spoke out, arguing that the defamation of Black womanhood and the lack of awareness of sexual harassment was preventing Americans from believing her testimony. Thomas’s defenders, meanwhile, argued that it was another case of the Black man being cut down. Gender racists generalized Thomas and Hill to weigh in on what was wrong with Black men or Black women. In the end, Thomas was narrowly confirmed on October 15, 1991. But the defenders of Hill and of Black women did not walk quietly into the night. “We cannot tolerate this type of dismissal of any one Black woman’s experience,” several hundred Black women wrote in a protest advertisement in the New York Times a month later.16
Clarence Thomas joined a US Supreme Court that had gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, compelling Congress to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act over Reagan and Bush vetoes. The teeth of the bill bit down on provable “intentional discrimination,” hardly touching the octopus arms of discrimination that had privately grown in the past three decades, causing very public racial disparities up and down the job market, from Black professionals receiving less pay than their White counterparts to Black workers being forced into the dead-end service industry. White workers and professionals had come to widely believe that they must secretly help their racial fellows in the job market, on the false assumption that government policies were helping Blacks more than Whites. Discriminating Whites had replaced the “old black-inferiority rationale for exclusion” by a more sophisticated affirmative action rationale for exclusion. It was a new racist theory to justify an old job discrimination. As for the racial disparities in unemployment rates, the newest racist theory was that African Americans’ “refusal to lower their demands helps keep them jobless,” as NYU political scientist Lawrence Mead stated. Racists cleverly avoided the question of whether jobless Whites were more willing to lower their demands. Instead, they dispatched their ethnic racism, regarding African Americans as less industrious, more welfare dependent, and less willing to lower their job demands than non-White immigrants.17
African Americans were making millions in the entertainment industry. But not all was well there, either. On November 7, 1991, HIV-positive Ervin “Magic” Johnson suddenly retired from the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. Vowing to “battle this deadly disease,” he became the overnight heterosexual face of the presumed White gay disease. After a long and torturous and murderously oppressive decade in the 1980s, HIV-positive men and women were finally starting to be seen as innocent victims of a disease by the early 1990s. But Johnson’s public announcement, his face, and his admission of multiple sexual partners instigated a shift in perceptions of HIV and AIDS. The “gay White disease” affecting innocent victims—and necessitating protective politics—transformed into a “Black disease” affecting ignorant, hypersexual, callous marauders, and necessitating punitive policies to control them.18
FOR ANGELA DAVIS, 1991 began with outrage over the physical lashing of Rodney King and ended with outrage over the verbal lashing of Anita Hill. The year also ended for Davis in an unfamiliar place. She had taken a new professorship at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and she stepped away from the Communist Party after spending twenty-three years as the most recognizable Communist in the heartland of global capitalism. On the eve of the twenty-fifth CPUSA National Convention in Cleveland in December 1991, Davis joined with about eight-hundred other members to draft and sign an initiative critical of the party’s racism, elitism, and sexism. In a punishing response, none of the signatories were reelected to office. They bolted the CPUSA.19
Although she was in the market for a new party, Davis did not join the Democratic Party, or rather, the newest force in US politics, the New Democrats. This group was espousing liberal fiscal policies but accepting Republican-style toughness on welfare and crime. A dazzling, well-spoken, and well-calculating Arkansas governor was now billing himself as the ultimate New Democrat. On January 24, 1992, weeks before the start of the Democratic primaries, Bill Clinton traveled back to Arkansas. The country had gone through Nixon’s law and order, Reagan’s welfare queens, and Bush’s Willie Horton—and now Clinton made the execution of a mentally impaired Black man, Ricky Ray Rector, into a campaign spectacle to secure racist votes. “I can be nicked a lot,” Clinton told reporters afterward, “but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”20
By the time an all-White jury acquitted the four LAPD officers on April 29, 1992, for the Rodney King beating, Clinton had practically run away with the Democratic nomination. The millions of viewers of the beating were told that those officers had done nothing wrong. With justice denied them in the courts, Black and Brown residents rushed to claim justice in the Los Angeles streets. They had reached their own verdict: the criminal justice system, local business owners, and Reagan-Bush economic policies were guilty as charged of robbing the poor of livelihoods and assaulting them with the deadly weapon of racism. On April 30, 1992, Bill Cosby pleaded with the rebels to stop the violence and watch the final episode of The Cosby Show. Rodney King himself tearfully pleaded the next day, “Can we all get along?” It would take 20,000 troops to quell the six-day uprising and restore the order of racism and poverty in Los Angeles.21
Open-minded Americans seeking to understand the racist sources of rebellion and the progression of racism read Andrew Hacker’s New York Times 1992 best seller, Two Nations: Black & White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism—or, two years later, Cornel West’s Race Matters. Or they entered theaters to watch Spike Lee’s best-ever joint, a film Roger Ebert rated as the top film of 1992. In the opening scene of Malcolm X, Lee showed the beating of Rodney King and the burning of the American flag.22
“If you call it a riot it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason,” argued South Central LA’s new antiracist congresswoman, the walking powerhouse Maxine Waters. The rebellion, she said, “was [a] somewhat understandable, if not acceptable[,] . . . spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice.” To Vice President Dan Quayle, however, the rebels were not rebelling from economic poverty, but a “poverty of values.” The New Democrat Bill Clinton blamed both political parties for failing urban America before blasting the “savage behavior” of “lawless vandals” who “do not share our values,” whose “children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without families, without neighborhood, without church, without support.” On Clinton’s racist note, Columbia University researchers began a five-year research study of only Black and Latino boys in New York to search for a connection between genetics and bad parenting and violence. (They did not find any connection.)23
About a month after the LA uprising, Bill Clinton took his campaign to the national conference of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Though Jackson was widely unpopular among those racist Whites whom Clinton was trying to attract to the New Democrats, when Jackson invited Hip Hop artist Sister Souljah to address the conference, the Clinton team saw its political opportunity. The twenty-eight-year-old Bronx poverty native had just released 360 Degrees of Power, an antiracist album so provocative that it made Lee’s films and Ice Cube’s albums seem cautious. White Americans were still raging over her defense of the LA rebellion in the Washington Post: “I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” It was clipped and circulated, but few racist Americans heard or understood—or wanted to understand—her point: she was critiquing the racist idea of occasional Black-on-White deaths mattering more to the government than Black people killing Black people every day.24
On June 13, 1992, Clinton took the podium at the Rainbow Coalition conference. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Clinton volleyed at Sister Souljah’s post-rebellion comments. This dismissive assimilationist maneuver of equating antiracists with segregationists, this planned political stunt, thrilled racist voters nearly as much as Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton gained a lead in the polls that he never lost.25
By the 1993 Christmas season, rappers were hearing criticism from all sides of the racist rainbow, not just from Bill Clinton. Sixty-six-year-old civil rights veteran C. Delores Tucker and her National Political Congress of Black Women took the media portrayals debate to a new racist level in their strong campaign to ban “Gangsta rap.” Gangsta rap was not only making Black people look bad before Whites and reinforcing their racist ideas, she said. Gangsta rap lyrics and music videos were literally harming Black people, making them more violent, more sexual, more sexist, more criminal, and more materialistic (here she was sounding a sensational chord that would be replayed years later in response to Black reality shows). In short, Gangsta rap was making its urban Black listeners inferior (to say nothing of its greater number of suburban White listeners). It was a curious time for this well-meaning campaign, and not just because Queen Latifah had released her Grammy Award–winning feminist anthem “U.N.I.T.Y.,” which headlocked and shouted at men, “Who you callin’ a bitch?!” Political scientist Charles Murray was in the midst of reproducing racist ideas for the upcoming 1994 midterm elections, falsely connecting the “welfare system” to the rise in “illegitimacy” that, as he put it in the Wall Street Journal on October 29, “has now reached 68% of births to [single] black women.” He repeated the claim on television shows in the final weeks of 1993.26
C. Delores Tucker could have campaigned against the anti-welfare ravings of Charles Murray, which were much more materially and socially devastating to poor Black people—especially women—than the lyrics of Gangsta rap. Instead, she became the dartboard for Hip Hop artists, especially the twenty-two-year-old new king of Gangsta rap, the son of Black Panthers, Tupac Shakur. In 1993, Tupac encouraged his fans to “Keep Ya Head Up,” and connected to them with rhymes such as, “I’m tryin to make a dollar out of fifteen cents / It’s hard to be legit and still pay tha rent.”27
While Tucker remained focused on the scourge of Gangsta rap, Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Evelyn Hammonds mobilized to defend against the defamation of Black womanhood. More than 2,000 Black female scholars from all across the country made their way to MIT’s campus on January 13, 1994, for “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name.” It was the first-ever national conference of Black women scholars, whose academic lives and scholarship had been routinely cast aside by gender racism. In the cold of the Boston-area winter, these women came blazing about the public dishonor of Black welfare mothers, of Anita Hill, of Sister Souljah, of three of Clinton’s failed appointments (Johnetta Cole, Lani Guinier, and Joyce-lyn Elders): of the Black woman. Some of the attendees had signed the Times advertisement defending Anita Hill in November 1991.
Angela Davis was honored as the conference’s closing keynote speaker. She was certainly the nation’s most famous African American woman academic. But more importantly, she had consistently, prominently, and unapologetically defended Black women over the course of her career, including those Black women that even some Black women did not want to defend. She had been arguably America’s staunchest antiracist voice over the past two decades, unwavering in her search for antiracist explanations when others took the easier and racist way out of Black blame. Davis had looked into the eyes and minds and experiences of those young incarcerated Black and Brown women during her imprisonment in New York in 1970, and she had never stopped looking into their lives and defending them. Her career embodied the conference’s title, like the careers of so many of those accomplished intellectuals who listened that day to her speech.
Davis opened her address by taking her audience back to the origins of the conference title, “Defending Our Name.” She took them back to the moral policing of Black clubwomen in the 1890s, which, like the campaigns today “against teenage pregnancy,” denied “sexual autonomy in young black women.” Davis admonished the “contemporary law and order discourse” that was “legitimized” by both political parties and all the races. Black politicians were sponsoring “a deleterious anti-crime bill,” and Black people were “increasingly calling for more police and more prisons,” unaware that while African Americans constituted 12 percent of the drug users, they constituted more than 36 percent of the drug arrests. Davis called for her sisters to envision “a new abolitionism” and “institutions other than prisons to address the social problems that lead to imprisonment.”28
Ten days later, in his first State of the Union Address, President Clinton called for the very opposite of “a new abolitionism.” Congress, he said, should “set aside partisan differences and pass a strong, smart, tough crime bill.” The president endorsed a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law, bringing on wild applause from both Democrats and Republicans. Heeding Clinton’s urging, Republicans and New Democrats sent him a $30 billion crime bill for his signature in August 1994. New Democrats hailed the bill as a victory for being “able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.” The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in US history, created dozens of new federal capital crimes, instituted life sentences for certain three-times offenders, and provided billions for the expansion of police forces and prisons—and the net effect would be the largest increase of the prison population in US history, mostly on nonviolent drug offenses. Clinton fulfilled his campaign vow that no Republican would be tougher on crime than him—and crime in America was colored Black. As Tupac Shakur rhymed in “Changes,” “Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” (About two decades later, Hillary Clinton—in the thicket of a run for the White House—renounced the effects of her husband’s signature anticrime bill, calling for the “end of the era of mass incarceration”).29
Just as the discourse on the overblown welfare problem primarily defamed Black women, the discourse on the overblown crime problem in 1994 primarily defamed Black men. Media critic Earl Ofari Hutchinson passionately rebuked the defamers in The Assassination of the Black Male Image, his 1994 scorcher. The Queens-born rapper Nas released “One Love,” a composition of letters to incarcerated friends, on his debut album, Illmatic, an instant classic, as revered that year—and in history—as “Juicy,” the debut single of the Brooklyn-born Biggie Smalls. In Biggie’s music video, one lyric is sung over the sight of a Black male behind bars: “Considered a fool ’cause I dropped out of high school / Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood / And it’s still all good.”30
Biggie Smalls had no idea he had released his debut single on the eve of the most spirited academic debate in recent history on whether Black people were natural or nurtured fools. It was an academic debate that had serious political repercussions for Clinton’s tough-on-Blacks New Democrats and the newest force in American politics, which pledged to be even tougher.