Author: Matthew D. Lassiter
Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration.
“The Suburban Crisis” traces how politicians, the media, and political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today. Matthew Lassiter shows how the category of the “white middle-class victim” has been as central to the politics and culture of the drug war as racial stereotypes like the “foreign trafficker,” “urban pusher,” and “predatory ghetto addict.”
He describes how the futile mission to safeguard and control white suburban youth shaped the enactment of the mandatory-minimum drug laws in the 1950s, and how soaring marijuana arrests of white Americans led to demands to refocus on “real criminals” in inner cities.
