cannabiscomrade:

cannabiscomrade:

hey if you’re not a drug addict stop referring to people as junkies and methheads and crackheads and tweakers and whatever other derogatory term you can come up with to demonize someone’s addiction

I made this post 4 years ago, and it’s getting traction again, so it’s been brought back to my attention. In those 4 years, I’ve learned more about the term “crackhead”, and how it is heavily racialized and used most often by (non-black) people as an anti-black term. Because I made this post originally with only ableism in mind, I wanted to bring more information forward on what I know now. 

Maybe You Shouldn’t Say Crackhead So Much

“Crackhead” Is an Anti-Black Perjorative, Period

The word “crackhead” was formally coined in June 1986, a few months before Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, enacting harsher punishments for crack-related offenses. And, to be clear, blackness was conflated with “crackheads” from the term’s inception. The originating source, a June 2, 1986 Time article titled “Crack: A cheap and deadly cocaine is a fast-spreading menace,” stated that “more than half the nation’s so-called crackheads are black.”