For those of you unfamiliar with the self-proclaimed "Black Intelligentsia", this diary may not have much meaning. A recent statement by one of the leading ebony tower academics, Dr. Cornel West has been troubling me for a few weeks. As reported in the Huffington Post, by writer Elon James White in a piece titled Thats What's Wrong with Black People
If you happen to have perused the latest Rolling Stone you might have come across an interesting comment by celebrated Black academic Dr. Cornell West:
That's not my calling. Yeah, brother, you find me in a crack house before you find me in the White House. I'll go into the crack house before I ever go that far inside.
Dr. West was answering a question about whether he would ever accept a position in the Obama adminstration's White House.
White goes on to critique the statement, as did blogger rikyrah at Jack & Jill Politics, and Danielle at The Black Snob.
While much of the discussion has centered on the all male trio of elite's; Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson and Tavis Smiley, who along with non-academics like Al Sharpton and others who are "spokespersons" for black folks, little has been said about the actual "crack house" part of the remark.
For those of you who have never had to deal with the impact of crack cocaine on the black community up close and personal, I took umbrage at the remark, since unlike many other academics, I have spent a lot of time in crack houses, and working with those unfortunate souls suffering from crack addiction; in the streets, in rehabs, and in jails.
In my role as a medical anthropologist, doing drug/AIDS research, I spent quite a few years doing first hand observation of both injection drug use (in "shooting galleries"), and crack consumption (in "casas de crack" and on the streets)in both New York and Puerto Rico.
Rarely is the horror of the scene reported in graphic detail in academic literature, but a few women in the field have published and spoken out for the those victims of the plague that has had such a devastating impact on communities of the poor, and its impact on women.
Among them are:
Behind The Eight Ball: Sex For Crack Cocaine Exchange And Poor Black Women, by Tanya Telfair Sharpe
Sexed Work: Gender, Race, and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market, by Lisa Maher
Fast Lives: Women Who use Crack Cocaine, by Claire Sterk
My last visit to a crack house found me in a dingy apartment on the third floor of a tenement building in NY. There were about seven or eight young women inside (3 under 18, the youngest was 15), partially clothed or nude, whose sole task was to service male "customers", with sex. They were not free to leave. They were paid, not with money but with "hits on the pipe". There were no condoms. The young woman who got me in the door was a former crack addict, who was found tossed in a dumpster, more dead than alive, the year before; arms and legs broken. badly beaten about the face, with severe vaginal burns from having a lit crack pipe shoved into her vagina by a "client". She was on a mission to help her "sisters" get out of hell. I was doing my job to document and report what I observed. I still have nightmares from those experiences.
For me, with years of experience under the belt of dealing face to face with moms who were/are addicted to crack, with their children who have educational challenges, with the teacher's and social workers who are swamped by case loads. crack is no laughing matter.
On top of all the other problems created by the crack epidemic, the disproportionate sentencing for users of crack (who are often charged as "dealers"), doled out by the criminal injustice system in America is undermining an already oppressed "underclass", and creating future generations who will have no hope or escape except jails, institutions and death.
While America wages war round the world, the real war for me is right here at home, the "War on Drugs" which in reality is a war on the poor, and increasingly a war on women, children and families.
Instead of addressing this harsh and stark horror, the ebony towerites, who had the luxury of elite educations crack jokes. But then their wives and daughters won't be crawling around on the floor scraping up crack crumbs, nor will they be labeled "stumps" or "crack ho's". They have made careers for themselves as the arbiters of the "black left", but what they have actually done is left our community behind, only to be used as the topic for yet another "discourse" in self-aggrandizement.
I have critiqued the new wave of "black republican" pundit class we have been subjected to on TV talk in the past few years, but I have remained silent about the so-called "black left".
No mo'.
I'm sick and tired of them, and will state that they don't speak for me, nor my sisters. They can take their PhD's and shove 'em in a crack pipe.
That's about what they are worth.