Born With a Silver Spoon: Media Depictions of Addiction across Race and Class

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Abstract

When America’s war on drugs was defined by the crack epidemic of the 1980s it was seen largely as a problem of poor, predominantly black urban areas. The response from the public was defined by zero tolerance, but today’s drug crisis is different. While heroin use has increased among all demographic groups in the last decade, it has climbed sharply among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white (Cicero 2014). The growing number of middle-class families who lost someone to heroin are now using their influence to soften the country’s approach to drugs. I speculate that because the affected demographic are more white, more middle class, they are afforded the opportunity to medicalize their addiction, a privilege that has been denied to most blacks. My research examines this disparity by utilizing critical discourse and qualitative content analysis to reveal how news media portrays the problem of addiction in the context of race and class. By drawing from a collection of recent drug related news stories from varying demographic profiles I show how media depictions of addiction are vastly different when race and class are taken into account.

Author

• Kyle Ward Letteney, University of Tennessee