Reagan-era prosperity rhetoric papered over Black youth unemployment quadrupling since 1954

Evidence

It may have been morning in America again in certain rich and White neighborhoods, which had awakened to prosperity repeatedly over the years. But it was not morning in America again in the communities where the CIA-backed Contra rebels of Nicaragua started smuggling cocaine in 1985. Nor was it morning in America for Black youths in 1985. Their unemployment rate was four times the rate it had been in 1954, though the White youth employment rate had marginally increased. Nor was it morning in America when some of these unemployed youths started remaking the expensive cocaine into cheaper crack to sell so they could earn a living. And the Reagan administration wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was not morning in America in Black urban neighborhoods, and that drugs—specifically, crack—and the drug dealers and users were to blame. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1086

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s core thesis — racist policy (disinvestment, unemployment) precedes and produces the drug crisis later blamed on Black people; mirrors the causal inversion at the heart of the book.