Stereotypes About Drugs, Race Don’t Hold
Who’s more likely to have ever used illegal drugs: a black, a white or a Latino?
Contrary to popular perception that drugs are primarily a black thing, the correct answer is none of the above: There’s little substantive difference in the proportion of whites, blacks and Latinos who have ever used drugs, reported Pat Roberson-Saunders of Howard University and researchers from the National Urban League in the latest Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education.
In fact, they found that black and Latino teens actually were slightly less likely to have reported ever using illicit drugs than adolescent whites.
Roberson-Saunders and her colleagues analyzed data on drug use by whites, blacks and Latinos collected in national surveys conducted in recent years by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
In 1990, about 67 million Americans had used drugs at least once in their lives, or slightly more than one out of three adults. While blacks make up 12 percent of the population, African Americans made up 10.8 percent of those who acknowledge ever using illicit drugs. Likewise, Hispanics represent about 9 percent of the total population but 6.9 percent of those who ever used drugs.
Among black teens, 20.6 percent reported ever using illicit drugs, compared to 24.8 percent of whites and 21.2 percent of Latinos. Even when the sample is restricted just to those who had used drugs in the last month, “a similar pattern holds,” the researchers reported.
Conventional wisdom isn’t entirely unwise. Blacks make up 37 percent of all drug users classified as “drug-dependent.” And it’s these addicts who do the most damage to themselves, their families and to society.
“While it is not true that drug users are disproportionately African Americans, it does appear that African Americans are at greater risk of becoming drug-dependent,” they wrote.
Rehabilitating Humpty
Political correctness may hold sway on America’s college campuses. But further down the academic ladder, kids continue to say the darndest things - despite the best efforts of race- and gender-sensitive, enviro-friendly, multiculturally conscious adults to curb their tart little tongues.
Harry Eiss teaches children’s literature and creative writing at Eastern Michigan University. He’s also the editor of a new book, “Images of the Child,” in which he notes that many overtly earnest attempts to sanitize children’s classics have met with predictably disastrous results.
Witness one serious attempt to rehabilitate Humpty-Dumpty, as recounted by Eiss:
The Traditional Version
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
The PC Version (from “Father Gander,” a popular rewriting of nursery rhymes meant to remove “negative sexual, classist and violent images.”):
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All of the horses, the women and men
Helped put Humpty together again.
The Playground Version (as heard by researchers on an elementary schoolyard):
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Stepped on him.
Humpty isn’t the only target of these neo-bowdlerizers.
The violence as well as the real or imagined sexual connotations in “Little Red Riding Hood” are eliminated in several recent retellings that make Red into a preschooler and downsize the big bad wolf into a dandified fox, Eiss said.
Eiss said these and many other attempts to rework the classics suffer from the same fatal flaw. They’re politically correct, but not “imaginative and fun … good sociology, not good literature.”