Cripping the "Crack Baby" Epidemic: A Feminist Disability Genealogy of Welfare Reform

Abstract:This article revisits the "crack baby epidemic" of the 1980s and 90s through a critical disability lens. It examines how newly available rights-based discourses of disability underwrote the overlapping figures of the "crack baby," the "crack mother," and the "welfare queen" in ways that called up historical narratives of the Black family as fundamentally impaired. This racialization of disability was contrasted by a seemingly incommensurate process, wherein disability was increasingly incorporated into the national tableau of multicultural difference. I argue that in a moment marked by the institutionalization of multicultural neoliberalism, disability held the suggestive power of antiracism, which productively enabled the racial violence of state neglect. It thus presents a feminist disability genealogy that takes account of the history of welfare reform through and against the contemporaneous history of US disability rights and its crucial legislative victories. This draws attention to the racialized and gendered subjects hailed in different relation to the state: the "crack baby" vs. the special needs Child, the "welfare queen" versus the independent, productive disabled citizen. It also highlights the division between deserving and undeserving forms of dependency consolidated in welfare legislation in the 1990s. Ultimately refusing the perpetuation of anti-Black racism through deployments of disability, I perform a coalitional reading that makes feminist sense of the historical relationship between disability and anti-Blackness in this era.