Fire and Knowledge

By the 1980s, virtually every facet of life was improving for black Americans, and the progress showed no sign of stopping.

Then came crack.

While crack use was hardly a black-only phenomenon, it hit black neighborhoods much harder than most…. After decades of decline, the black infant mortality rate began to soar in the 1980s, as did the rate of low-birthweight babies and parent abandonment. The gap between black and white schoolchildren widened. The number of blacks sent to prison tripled. Crack was so dramatically destructive that if its effect is averaged for all black Americans, not just crack users and families, you will see that the group’s postwar progress was not only stopped cold but was often knocked as much as ten years backward. Black Americans were hurt more by crack cocaine than by any other single cause since Jim Crow.

—Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics (William Morrow: 2006), p. 113.