Donovan X. Ramsey on How Media Sensationalized Crack

This week on The Maris Review, Donovan X. Ramsey joins Maris Kreizman to discuss When Crack Was King, out now from One World.

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From the episode:

Maris Kreizman: Donovan, you’ve been working on this book for so many years and it really shows the care that you put into it, both in the reporting and the writing. I’m wondering how, or if, this story changed over the years, or how did the reporting inform what you wrote?

Donovan X. Ramsey: The reporting absolutely changed the shape of the book. The original idea that I had was just to write a book about Washington, DC during the crack air. And I thought, you know, DC is a small enough city. I can kind of wrap my arms around it completely. I always wanted to talk to people who experienced the crack epidemic from different perspectives. And I thought, well, how easy if they’re all in one city, like maybe they’ll even know each other. I first did my research before I ever did any interviewing and I was looking at the data of the rise and fall of crack, I saw that it hit different cities at different times, just based on local factors.

And I thought, oh, well that means that every city really had a different experience of the crack epidemic and it wouldn’t do the story justice to just focus on DC. So then in 2018 I traveled to the hardest hit cities for that year and just reported in the field for about a year, and that completely changed the shape of the book. I also had the idea that I would do the 10 hardest hit cities and that each of those cities would have one sort of protagonist. But I really fell in love with the four that I settled on for the book, with Lennie Woodley in South Central Los Angeles. Kurt Schmoke out of Baltimore, Elgin Swift, out of Yonkers, New York, and Shawn McCray out of Newark.

And I just really wanted to get their stories out there and for them to be as fully formed as possible. So it went from 10 cities to just four cities and four characters.

MK: The characters are all so fascinating and so well done. Tell me a little bit about your interview process. How did you get these four different people to open up, or even just remember some of the most traumatic times?

DXR: It started with really being able to share my own upbringing and its connection to the crack era. To be able to get them to open up, I had to open up about my very humble beginnings and the neighborhood that I grew up in and some of the stuff that I saw. And I think that that was a way in because people do not often talk about the crack era, especially if they lived through some of its traumas. So I think that just being able to offer that (Which I usually don’t, as a journalist, talk about myself)  that that was something that helped them appreciate sort of where I was coming from and wanting to write this book.

From there it was just hours and hours of interviewing, sometimes in person, sometimes over the phone, to get their stories. And because the book is told chronologically, I asked them to start from the very beginning, you know, what are your earliest memories? And then we did it over and over again. People have an idea of what their story is, so they might give you the abbreviated version in the first interview. Take you from, I don’t know, 1965 to the present day. And they’re like, well, that’s it. That’s my whole story. And of course, you know, there’s so much else that’s there.

So then it was going back and saying, Hey, you know, when you talked about having trouble in school as a kid, what did you mean by that? And that could be an entire session unto itself. Let alone the stuff I think most closely related to the crack epidemic. In the case of Lennie, somebody who was addicted to crack for decades and who experienced lots of really traumatic events growing up. There are entire swaths of time that are completely lost to her. So interviewing her I think was special because I had to, in some cases, just talk to her about the things that were happening nationally and that would spark memories or I would share with her bits from my reporting and that would spark memories.

MK: You can see that even in the structure of the book, that bringing in current events from the time and various moments in American history guide both the interviews and sets the reader up  for what’s going on. Tell me about the structure a little bit.

DXR: I actually do not read a lot of narrative nonfiction. I am big on poetry. I’m big on biographies and autobiographies and also on fiction. So I tried to not read a ton of it going into this book because I wanted the book to take the shape that I felt like it needed to take and to have the tone that it needed to have.

So, it came about out of this need to tell both the meta history of crack’s rise and fall, but knowing that the public record would not be sufficient. And building what felt like a real history. So knowing that I needed to have the stories of individuals, which is why I call it A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era. This way of mixing both official documented events with memory and how people experienced it. So that’s why those elements are there.

And then I just said, let’s just do it chronologically. You know, that there are lots of ways to structure the story and put it together, but let’s just go from beginning to end. And then the challenge from there was just figuring out how to weave in and out of the personal narratives, that really don’t connect at many moments, but that hopefully, to weave them together in a way that felt natural and seamless and where they could actually interact with each other. Where you chose to go from Lennie to Kurt and Kurt to Elgin and Elgin to Shawn.

MK: I also think that this book is very much a story about the media… the idea that from the very beginning, news coverage was sensationalist.

DXR: I was really disappointed when I looked back at the record and saw just how poor journalism was around the crack era. I mean, I could even say, when it came to something like trying to find an image to put on the cover of the book, I wanted to get to something that represented everyday life during the crack era.

And it was nearly impossible, even with the team of researchers at Random House. All they could find from that era were policing images, images that were sort of staged of people holding crack cocaine, images of so-called crack babies. And I think that that’s so representative of what the coverage was.

It was about these tropes that were easily digestible and also made people really afraid and not necessarily about this event and how it was experienced. It’s a shame because I think that the journalism industry was really, um, I’m trying to think of a nice way to say it, Maris, but you know what? Maybe I don’t have to be nice. I think that journalism failed during the crack era, that there weren’t enough people who were curious and who were thorough in their reporting, and as a result they ended up passing on a lot of misinformation and propaganda, in some cases, from the government. And in other cases, you know,  they created their own misinformation and propaganda. So that’s something that I hope we’re better at today than we were then.

MK: I just made a face.

DXR: I just made a face too.

MK: Yeah. I mean, it’s so resonant today that even just the idea that I have family members who don’t live in New York City and they see news reports and ask me if I’m afraid. And there’s really no way to tell them otherwise.

DXR: Yeah. You know, being from Ohio, and I lived in New York for eight years, and that fear of crime in big cities is still so strong because the messaging is that cities are dangerous places because there are dangerous people there. And you know, the reality of it is that the vast majority of the violence that does happen in big cities is intentional and pointed. You know, they’re people that have relationships to each other. And all of that is sad and meaningful as well, but it’s not the bedlam that it’s positioned to be.

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Recommended Reading:

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson • Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady

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Donovan X. Ramseyis a journalist, author, and voice on issues of race, politics, and patterns of power in America. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, WSJ, Ebony, and Essence. He has been a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, NewsOne, and theGrio and has served as an editor at The Marshall Project and Complex. Ramsey holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Morehouse College.