Respected intellectuals circulated a bio-underclass myth about crack-exposed infants.

Evidence

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.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1101

Categorization

• CANDY: A Pulitzer-winning Harvard-educated columnist writing ‘The dead babies may be the lucky ones’ is a shocking, quotable fact for conversation.