Destruction Of Blacks Allowed Again

Outrage.

I keep searching inside for another response, some finer, more reasoned thing to feel. But outrage is all I find.

I’ve just finished reading “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion,” a three-part series published in August by the San Jose Mercury News.

Among the key allegations in reporter Gary Webb’s story is that, in the early ‘80s, a drug ring composed of key Nicaraguan contras sold tons of cocaine to black Los Angeles street gangs and used the profits to fund their army. His bombshell is that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had to have known about the contra drug gang, given that the agency was funding, recruiting for and essentially running the entire contra operation.

In Webb’s telling, then, the CIA was complicit, if only tacitly, in urban America’s slow death by crack cocaine.

Which brings us, inevitably, back to outrage.

How many people do you figure we’ve lost to this insidious white rock? How many toddlers gunned down on front stoops? How many store clerks murdered for the contents of the till? How many law officers butchered in the line of duty? How many mothers who sold their bodies and fathers who sold their souls?

Me, I lost a cousin. When we were children together, he was a robust boy of many talents. Now I don’t know him. He’s a shrunken man who shuffles through his days searching endlessly for the next crack high. There’s so much he could have been, it makes me ache to see what he has become.

Outrage.

I was once taught that government exists to serve and protect its citizens. But it’s never been that simple when the citizens are black. Is it even credible to think the CIA would have stood aside and allowed foreign agents to pump deadly drugs into a white community? No. But we’re talking about a black community, so the allegation is at least that.

After all, when the choice is between expedience and the civil and human rights of black people, it’s not exactly unprecedented for the feds to sell us out. I’m reminded of the infamous Tuskegee Experiment, where the government allowed 412 African-American men to go 40 years without telling them that they had syphilis in order to determine if the effects of the disease varied according to race.

Ultimately, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between what they did then and what they are alleged to have done now. Each makes the same damnable statement: that the government considers us expendable and our lives worth less.

I think of Ronald Reagan and Oliver North singing hosannas to their beloved contras while the contras were allegedly poisoning places and people I love, and it makes me sick.

As a result of the Mercury News series, black leaders have made predictable demands. Before long, government officials will probably make predictable promises.

But I can’t muster much interest because I can’t get past this feeling that sits in my throat like a stone. I think of lives smoked up in crack pipes and I hear all those angry brothers decrying a conspiracy to destroy them.

I’ve never put stock in that. “Conspiracy” implies proactivity, an organized and concerted strategy.

Instead, I’ve long believed America practices what I call malevolent neglect. That is, less an active crusade to destroy black folk than a willingness to allow it to happen. Yet the distinction has come to mean less to me than it once did, because we’re talking about divergent roads that lead to the same destination, the same destruction.

In a better world, I could laugh off Gary Webb’s charges with a single emphatic reply: This country doesn’t do such things.

But I can’t laugh, I can only hope, because God help us, this country does.

xxxx