Let me read this post to you on the Gospel for the Culture Podcast: Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Opening signature: Welcome to our American Memory Collection, behind the reference desk…your friendly librarian has pulled the following selection: Crack Ain’t Classy but It Is Classed
Tagline: come be in good company while you reconsider.
Whitney said, “I made too much money to ever smoke crack!”
In retrospect, I respect Whitney saying that! She’s basically not denying doing drugs, but she refuses to be cheapened to such a déclassé habit as crack cocaine.
Whitney essentially said…bitch, I make cocaine money, not crack whore coins! 🤣🤣 Like, there is indeed income & social classes of drug use! Her words are now forever a meme, but it also reflects how different drugs have been coded in American culture. I’m saying, I feel like…Whitney was making a sociological point, whether she intended to or not.
Because in the U.S., drugs have long carried class and racial symbolism: Powder cocaine is our wealth, celebrity, Wall Street, and nightlife socialite class. Crack cocaine is the symbol of Black urban neighborhoods and the “War on Drugs.”
Listen: I recognize the subtleties! Because it is different at the end of the day precisely because despite their near-identical chemical similarities, America treats them distinctly! And it’s because of that very truth why the words immediately land their punchlines for us all!!
Every joke got a lil bit of truth to it. Whitney was giving us a very Black-coded “I just think it’s funny how?!” When the shit is funny cause it ain’t, but it is. Funny as in messed up and suspicious, but funny as in go find you somebody else to play with, I ain’t no Black junkie crackhead bitch! And we got the double meaning of it all because of the codes!
Now we’re talking about who gets associated with vice versus who gets associated with demand. In America, drug consumers cross class and racial boundaries, but the criminal narrative does not.
When you hear it as a certain kind of white listener, you get the punchlines from a deep place of irony. Like a sincere, it’s funny but it’s fucked up, but she’s not wrong—because they’re actually aware of the absurdity in how the privilege exists, but also the absurdity in asking someone obviously part of the same group of other indemnified classes, such as entertainers and stars of a certain heightened visibility.
The Sociology of Grace
No shade, but Robert Downey Jr. was absolutely fucking strung out, but now he’s Iron Man and nobody ever brings up his habit, but folks made drugs the totality of Whitney’s legacy. That’s the American systemic coding firing at its finest performance.
What I’m saying here is American culture grants different kinds of redemption to different bodies. I legit had to Google the Robert Downey Jr. addiction years to make sure I wasn’t imagining the memory itself. That’s how much it goes unspoken now!
Because Robert Downey Jr.’s addiction became part of a redemption narrative. While Whitney Houston’s addiction became the dominant narrative. That’s a different cultural script. Whereas both of them possessed immense symbolic capital, it was not remotely treated or redeemed equitably.
In hindsight, I think that Whitney was really checking the fuck out of Diane Sawyer while keeping her best cool.
Whitney clocked the code in the accusation itself! And further knew, by the privilege in which Diane stood by virtue of her white womanhood…it was a leading question, not just a loaded one! The accusation itself was the real poison, not her truth.
Diane wasn’t asking Whitney to educate America about pharmacology. She was inviting Whitney into a social category. She wasn’t seeking information as journalism, but performing power in real prime time. Facts are that Diane occupied a social world in which powder cocaine had long circulated among celebrities, media elites, finance, and affluent professional circles without carrying the same symbolic freight as crack cocaine. She & Whitney led similar lives of influence.
And so I feel Whitney’s response was both a warning shot of bitch, you must’ve forgot who the fuck I am & the ricochet of I’m Whitney THE VOICE motherfucking Houston, find you somebody else to play wit cause you can’t slick a can of oil and baby I’m Exxon petroleum premium unleaded 92!
Welp, like I said, I was only a kid at the time, and the subsequent silence on the topic in my adulthood made me question my own memories. But Robert Downey Jr.’s struggles with addiction were among the most publicized celebrity stories of the late 1990s.
Ol’ boy had multiple drug arrests, highly publicized relapses with several stays in court-ordered treatment, and even did a lil time in jail and prison.
Now he’s fucking Iron Man. He’s an American superhero. And yet, his addiction debt is almost never spoken of. Not that we should ever belabor the past of a recovering addict. We should never deny someone’s recovery because we want to continue to harp on their abuse. If you decide to truly change your life in such a way that you remain in recovery, never in denial, only in recovery, you deserve the dignity of recovery.
Recovery is literally taking back your life from something that you gave yourself to and swallowed you whole in ways you never prepared for or desired, right? When you become an addict, you become a shell of yourself. And so, to recover yourself from that, to recover your soul from addiction, is something worthy of being praised. It really is.
And yet, I can’t help but think about the fact that shit, he’s still Iron Man. That’s his legacy now. An American superhero. But when you mention Whitney, the voice of a generation, we have to always remember or be reminded that it comes with the past. We deny her dignity when we don’t choose to remember who she was at the soul level that she shared with us through song, through authenticity and personhood. She should get the dignity of the legacy that her overall life earned. Not that the worst of her was the last of her.
Rock bottom should not be the memory for somebody when their good truly outweighed their bad, and when their authentic self showed up more than the mask and they fought to recover that version. We should honor that. Whitney died trying. Not perfect, she died trying. And we saw her try more than we saw her fail.
Like Cardi B said once, get knocked down nine, get back up ten. Whitney died before she could get back up, but she damn sure, if she got knocked down eight, she got back up nine. We wanted to see her get to that ten. But the point is, she kept getting up. And that matters. That should be her legacy.
But I’m left asking instead: Who does America permit to become more than the worst thing they’ve ever done?
Even now. A conversation about Whitney still so often detours through Bobby Brown, crack, and her death before it arrives at The Voice, at her artistry, at the astonishing discipline and generosity of her gift.
That’s what I grieve, that we remember her addiction disproportionately to her personhood.
Crackheads became criminals, Coke heads became patients, opioid users became victims of a public health epidemic, and the pharma dealer got rich while the crack dealer got stretched out behind the prison wall that the pharmaceutical family never sees because their crimes are only fined by the dollar, not years of life determined by wardens, COs, or POs!
OxyContin & the Sackler Family Business. The company that developed & marketed Oxy like Pirin tablets—shout out to Agador in The Birdcage, LOL—paid billions in settlements, and the family has agreed to contribute billions more, but individual family members have not received prison sentences comparable to the lengthy incarceration many street-level drug dealers have faced.
Diane wasn’t asking: “What substances have you consumed?” She was asking: “Which American category do you belong in?”
Because drugs ain’t classy, but they are classed. It determines when the dealer is a businessman or a kingpin & when drug distribution is healthcare or organized crime. Class defined when addiction is illness or criminality.
Closing benediction: Thank you for being a friend of my mind & sitting with me today in our place to reconsider.”
Let me read this post to you on the Gospel for the Culture Podcast: Apple Podcasts & Spotify
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