Setting People Free with Donovan X. Ramsey

[00:00:00] I think of all of my storytelling as stories about Black America at the end of America. That's the frame that I use to approach everything because I think that this empire is headed on the layout. What's good?

[00:00:13] I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black and Published, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. Today's guest is Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the book When Crack Was King, a people's history of a misunderstood era.

[00:00:35] The book, which was long listed for a National Book Award, reports the rise and fall of the crack epidemic using historical facts alongside people's memories and lived experiences to illustrate the impact of the drug's devastation.

[00:00:51] Any disaster that happens, be it something like Hurricane Katrina, be it something like COVID, we're going to get hit first and worse. And it was the same way with crack. Giving context to what happened to Black people and the Black community during the

[00:01:12] crack epidemic is part of Donovan's God-given purpose. The spiritual message he says he received about his writing that continues to guide his career. Plus, the three dreams he had and accomplished after he got focused on what he really wanted out of his journalism career.

[00:01:30] And why he says the right substance at the wrong time can make us repeat the drug history we've already lived. That and more is next when Black and Published continues. All right, so let's jump in. Donovan, when did you know that you were a writer?

[00:01:57] Wow, nobody's ever asked me that question. I think I knew I was a writer. It probably took until college, honestly. I thought that because I like to make points and give context to things that I would be a good lawyer.

[00:02:13] You know, and if you are like a bookish Black child, people always want you to be a lawyer. So I thought that's what I wanted to do, but it took until I was in college and I started writing some op-eds for the Maroon Tiger at Morehouse.

[00:02:29] And really everything took off from there. I just fell in love with really being read, being able to put my thoughts out there and get feedback from people. So you live for a byline? I live for a byline. It's such a quick hit of energy.

[00:02:49] You know, it's like you are writing constantly and people are reading constantly and it puts you in conversation in ways other writing sometimes doesn't. Yes, because books are not quick hits. It's not an instant byline and it's not everybody reading at once.

[00:03:07] So then what was the journey into deciding, you know, there's something that I want to say that's going to take more than a 4,000 word investigative piece? It was really the topic. I grew up in a neighborhood and in a community that was hard hit by the

[00:03:25] crack epidemic and lots of the experiences that I had growing up just left me with lots of questions. And I think that's true for anybody that grew up in a neighborhood like mine that there were things that people just didn't talk about.

[00:03:38] My mom's favorite phrase was mind your business. So, you know, walking down the street, you know, we see the guys on the quarter and I start to look a little too hard. She's like, mind your business. And that was how you survive environments like that.

[00:03:52] But as I went into journalism, my first beat was criminal justice. And I just had all of these questions about that period of time with the crack era. And I read Isabelle Wilkerson's The Wormt of Other Suns, which is one of my favorite books.

[00:04:10] And I thought, oh, this is why you write a book. You write a book because there's a topic that people think they understand that they really don't. And you need all the space to bring in all the important elements to make it make sense.

[00:04:27] And I thought, well, I could do this with crack. You know, that this is a topic in an era in American life and black American life that people think they know everything about, that they really know nothing about.

[00:04:39] And in a book is the perfect format for having this conversation. And when did you have that idea? It had been percolating for a while, but I really think somewhere around maybe like 2015. I was a fellow at a place called Demos, which was a progressive think tank.

[00:04:57] And they had the silly incredible program. It was called The Emerging Voices Fellowship. And it was for young journalists and they would give you, as in New York City, it was a $50,000 salary, which was, oh my God. And also healthcare.

[00:05:15] And I had been without healthcare for a really long time. Sign me up. Right, right. And they didn't ask anything of you other than that, you go to their meetings, that you talk to their fellows and experts and that you produce writing, like you produce public work.

[00:05:33] So I had already been freelance writing for a really long time and really, I mean, thugging it out as a freelancer, you know, getting paid $100 here, $100 there for stories. Been there. Done that. You know, right? Yes.

[00:05:48] I thought, wait a minute, so I could keep doing this, but I'll have like a guaranteed 50K and healthcare. And then like the hustler in me is like, oh, I could, I could make a lot out of this.

[00:06:00] So, you know, it was a very productive time for me because I was like, I'm up. But one of the real gifts from that opportunity was the director of fellows, Rich Benjamin pulled me aside early on and he said,

[00:06:16] the whole point of this is to change the trajectory of your career and to get you off of the hamster wheel that, that, that a lot of young black writers get put on. And that the money is so you can stop and breathe and say, not just

[00:06:36] what can I do, but what do I actually want to do? So he had me do this thing where he was like, draw out a kidney bean and cut it into three parts and write a really big goal in each of the parts.

[00:06:52] So I wrote get published in the New York Times, meet Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison was still with us and write a book. And that was the first time that I had ever thought about writing a book.

[00:07:03] And once that seed, that little kidney bean had been planted, was off to the racist. And I should say that I did all three of those things that I met Toni Morrison. I wrote for the New York Times and now I've written a book.

[00:07:17] Oh, I love that manifestation and then making it come true. So then knowing that you wanted to write about the crack era being inspired by Isabel Wilkerson and the warmth of other sons. What was the research process like in gathering all of the information

[00:07:34] and the interviews and finding your characters? Because your book is very much written like Isabel Wilkerson's where you have these three characters that you follow and you get their life stories and how they were shaped and impacted by the crack era. And I know that doesn't happen overnight.

[00:07:51] For me, the first thing I had to figure out was where I wanted to tell the story. My original idea was to just do Washington, DC because it was the nation's capital. It was a big crack city.

[00:08:04] DC also led in some of the violence of the crack era in 1990 and 1991. But it's also a small city. So I thought I can wrap my hands around the district and maybe outline like a host of characters whose lives intertwine.

[00:08:20] And that's a great way to tell the story because I knew I wanted to represent different perspectives as well. I started to write about DC and I realized that DC has a specific culture, every city does, a specific culture and that it

[00:08:35] experienced the crack epidemic in a specific way based on that culture. And I knew that people in other places who had gone through the crack epidemic wouldn't identify as closely as I wanted them to if I just focused on DC.

[00:08:50] Luckily, I came across some research from a guy named Roland Fryer, a black economist at Harvard who had tried to measure cracks impact. He created an index, a way of sort of measuring cracks, devastation that included like a number of different measures

[00:09:08] like cocaine related overdoses, drunk buzz, murder rate, a bunch of different things that like altogether that index is how he measured which cities were hardest hit. And I went through that list of the top 20 and I visited in 2018, the 10 hardest hit cities and finding people in those

[00:09:33] cities, one who were open to talking to me because that's the first barrier, right? Is you don't want to ask people questions about often what was the hardest part of their lives. So finding people who were willing to talk to me, finding

[00:09:47] people who were introspective about what they went through and then also finding the right mix because the book includes a woman that was an addict, a guy that was a dealer, guy who was the son of an addict and then a former mayor.

[00:10:04] So it was about making sure that like together that their stories worked. So you said you spent most of 2018 reporting traveling to report the book. So I'm going to assume that you had your book deal then and had done your proposal already.

[00:10:21] So what was that process like to go from 2015 where you have this $50,000 fellowship health insurance, the space to breathe to begin to conceptualize this to putting together the proposal and then getting advanced money to go and actually do the things you said you wanted to do.

[00:10:38] I was very fortunate and really kind of like charmed in my book publishing experience. And I think it was because I had been writing as a journalist for so long and I had had so much success with my journalism.

[00:10:52] That fellowship was a big part of elevating me in terms of the stories that I was able to tell. And then I was able to publish in places that have the prestige that people care about for whatever reason.

[00:11:05] So at the end of the fellowship, I got a job and I got some experience as an editor in complex. Then I got tired of complex job. I was there. I mean, look, I'm going to be honest, right? But like, you know, I had into journalism.

[00:11:29] Like I said, I had been on this track to be a lawyer and I met Morehouse and I, you know, I'm starting to write for the paper and I'm falling in love with journalism. And my like senior year, I'm like, I gotta figure out

[00:11:41] what I want to do. So I'm just praying and praying and praying. And one day literally I was like at home brushing my teeth. And I had this very spiritual moment where it was like this knowing like popped up into me that said your

[00:11:58] journalism will help people get free. I'm telling you, Nikisha, that was that was what I heard. We're going to do a little shot right there. Okay. And it was in me, right? I was like, Oh, and I know that it was real.

[00:12:14] And that it wasn't just me because immediately after that, I had this incredible sense of warmth and hope and optimism. Enjoy it. Right? Like, ooh, like this is what I want to feel. You know, like, like this is, it was God.

[00:12:35] Feeling like Moses coming down from the mountain top. Okay. But then here's the thing, but like then immediately after I felt very quickly, this feeling of dread. Because of what was being asked of you yet? Yes.

[00:12:49] And I thought, ooh, but it was clear to me that it was what I needed to do. And I accepted that. But you know, when I got to complex and I was like the editor that wrote about the serious stuff, edited

[00:13:04] the stories about the serious stuff, not the sneakers. And girls and basketball, I was like, I don't think this is the place for me. I don't feel like I'm helping people get free. So then I went to a place called the Marshall Project that

[00:13:17] does all criminal justice reporting. And I became an editor there and it was fine. Right? It was closer to the mission, but it wasn't the right group of people, I should say. We won't dwell. We won't dwell. It's okay. We're not going to throw nobody under the bus.

[00:13:37] You know, I was at complex, the only sort of serious minded journalist in that space. At the Marshall Project, I was the only black editor in that space on a website named for Thurgood Marshall that was dedicated entirely to criminal justice work.

[00:13:53] So all of that propelled me into knowing that I had to write the book, that I had to do my own thing. So I reached out to a friend of mine, Travis Johnson, who's my more house brother, who had been an editor at a few different big houses.

[00:14:11] And Travis, you know, told me what a proposal was and what a proposal looked like. And he had some old proposals that he had liked and thought were really good. And he sent those to me and was like, you know, do it like this.

[00:14:24] So, so I did it like that. And then I reached out to my network, people that I had met through the journalism industry, reached out to all those folks and people read my proposal and they passed it on to people that they knew in publishing and to agents.

[00:14:40] And I was able to get a really great agency, the Wiley Agency, an agent there that I really respected and trusted with the story. And the thing about her name is Christina Moore. She showed up in meetings the way that I showed the meetings.

[00:14:56] And I think that's really important in the book selling process for anybody that's looking for an agent. You want somebody that like believes in your storytelling, but you also want somebody that you feel like would talk about your work in the same way that

[00:15:12] you do when you're not in the room. That's what I liked about Christina. And we got it sold. You know, we went out and we got eight offers. I'm proud to say. And that's a testament, I think, to, of course,

[00:15:25] her work, but also to just the strength of the idea that it was an idea whose time had come, that there had not yet been an authoritative history of the crack epidemic. And I think that as soon as I presented the idea,

[00:15:40] book publishers were like, yes, we need to do this. And that's how I got to one world and to my incredible team there. I love that for you. I also love how this story is like, it's good to know people in high places. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:57] In matter of sadly, you know, like I hate that whole who you know game, but sometimes it's just getting someone to open your email and take it seriously. And so now people are not only opening your emails, they're opening your book.

[00:16:11] So let's get to the reading because I have lots of questions. OK, OK. When crack was king, a people's history of a misunderstood era recontextualizes the history of what happened during the rise and fall of crack cocaine through the people who lived it and were turned into

[00:16:32] characters and caricatures of the worst versions of themselves by the media and politicians, even though the government allowed it to happen and then punish those suffering to survive. Here's Donovan. Let's see. I think I want to read something from the introduction.

[00:16:53] Conversations about crack became more mainstream in years to come. Our national dialogue reached its peak for me in the form of Whitney Houston sitting down for a prime time interview to address rumors of drug use. It's a scene seared into my memory,

[00:17:10] a raspy voice and gaunt Houston sitting opposite Diane Sawyer. The singer is dressed entirely in white and holding a picture of herself that she's been handed by the interviewer. That's not just then Sawyer insists with a squint. Anorexia, Elenia, Houston and Craigelis shakes her head. No way.

[00:17:31] Then Sawyer gets to the reason why she's really there, why we're all watching. She reads from what were made to believe is a headline copied to the sheet of paper in her hand. Whitney dying crack rehab fails. Houston leans in and uses a hand to punctuate the point.

[00:17:48] First of all, let's get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. Okay. We don't do crack. No, do that. Crack is wet. Sawyer continued to ask if Houston indulged in alcohol, marijuana, cocaine or pills.

[00:18:06] And Houston admitted that she done all at times. Crack though? Any question of the pop superstar using that substance was settled by the simple logic that Houston was too wealthy to enjoy something so low class. The singer would divulge years later in an interview with Oprah Winfrey

[00:18:23] that her drug of choice had been marijuana laced with base short for free base. Neither she nor Oprah seemed to wear that free base and crack are different names for the exact same substance, smokable cocaine. I understand now why Houston denied it.

[00:18:39] Crack left a residue on everything you've touched. Anything to be done to a person associated with the evil substance. I surveyed my community and saw its effects in the way my neighborhood was policed. It was as though the police weren't satisfied until everyone I knew had been stopped.

[00:18:55] Question, search detained, find arrested, jailed, inconvenienced, awakened in the middle of the night, humiliated. Some would end up beaten, shot or killed. All of us would be touched. Thank you. How's that? That's good.

[00:19:13] You know, Whitney is for many of us, she's a stand in or the devastation of the crack era because she held within her first of all so much greatness that that is a woman who really had an anointing and whose work I think saved a lot of people.

[00:19:37] So to see somebody so great, one struggle, the way that she did is painful. And to lose her so soon, it feels like we've been robbed of something. And you know, for black folk that survived the crack era, that's a cousin,

[00:19:54] that's an auntie, that's a neighbor, that we know what it's like to see somebody's greatness fade away. And in thinking about that and what you say at the end of the book, the very last

[00:20:07] page you're saying, the book is my earnest effort to make history out of memories. And you do a little bit of comparison with how crack was not treated as a national health crisis or epidemic and how now when we see all of the stories,

[00:20:29] all of the devastation of opioids, the response is different also because the clientele for opioids and the people who are suffering from opioid addiction is different. Are you trying to show the parallels so that we can remember the history

[00:20:49] when it does repeat itself with whatever the new drug is? That's a piece of it. I mean, I think that the main goal of the book is just to serve as a document of the crack epidemic as experienced by the people most affected.

[00:21:07] And you know, I think of all of my storytelling as stories about black America at the end of America. That's the frame that I use to approach everything because I think that this empire is headed on the way out. Okay.

[00:21:24] So every story that I tell, you know, if it's a profile of a famous person, if it's a story about a phenomenon like crack, the effort is I want to tell our stories so that way whatever happens after America, if we become

[00:21:41] something new, if we go somewhere else, that we are able to take these stories with us. And ultimately, I think that telling the truth, documenting people's memories and making history of it, you can't help but then have something that you can compare and contrast. Right?

[00:22:02] So I find that, you know, I don't really write a lot about opioids in the book. I do a little bit in the epilogue of the book, but people are able to learn a lot about the opioid epidemic just from hearing about the crack epidemic.

[00:22:16] And there is something I should say though, that sort of seeing the coverage of the opioid epidemic gave me language and a way of thinking about the crack epidemic that I didn't have before. And that was this language of disaffection where they talked about how,

[00:22:33] you know, it's one thing for an individual to be depressed, but sort of social currents can create a mass depression across a subset of people. And so the term that they use is disaffection. They say people in the Rust Belt and rural America are disaffected, that

[00:22:53] they feel left out, that they feel powerless, that they don't see where their future is. I said, oh, that's what was happening to us. But I didn't have language for how a generation of young black and Latino people could get swept up in something like crack.

[00:23:10] But now I know, and that's the language that I can use. So I intentionally use the language of disaffection in writing about how black folks were feeling and how we got to the crack epidemic. Because I think it's important to steal that language, to borrow that

[00:23:27] language that was never meant for us to say, we are people too capable of the same feelings. And I think maybe that's one of the reasons why when people read the book and they see me describing the sort of human toll of the

[00:23:41] crack epidemic, they're able to say, oh, I can make these comparisons to opioids because we're using the same terms. What I realized in listening to you talk about the book and the crack epidemic as a whole, and you touch on it a bit in the book, but

[00:23:59] really how many forms of media broadcast what was happening in cities with a flippancy that is no longer used. You talked about using the language of disaffection, I'm thinking more specifically, basically you humanized an era where people refused to

[00:24:23] see humanity and thinking about coverage of the crack epidemic, the newspaper articles, the war on drugs, the coverage on television in the evening, the videos that were shot in the Bronx and in New York from the early days of hip hop or when West Coast hip hop got

[00:24:40] really big and then we're seeing the crack epidemic there and the battering rams and the police raids and the movies that are rendering it and Boys in the Hood and New Jack City and all of this stuff. Pop culture showed America who it was during the crack epidemic.

[00:24:58] And I feel like for that reflection, many black communities have not and maybe never will recover because we are constantly holding up a mirror to say this is what is happening to us and nobody cares unless you can spin it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:20] I mean, you just put it in language really better than I could. You know, we are and this has been my sort of struggle with journalism because again, I have that thing in my ear saying that I need to write to help people get free, but the

[00:25:37] industry as it operates really treats black people like the weather, like, you know, things that happen to black people just happen. And it's as though our lives don't have meaning and don't have context like everybody else's. So something like the crack epidemic happens and it's stories

[00:25:58] about here's a bad thing happening to black people. And that's where it stops. And journalists didn't get around to the questions of well, why or how and how does this feel to have this happen to you? You know, the kinds of questions

[00:26:13] that you ask when you're dealing with people and we see that care and that time put into other communities. And it makes you feel misunderstood. It makes you feel maligned. And it's why I dedicate the book to the misunderstood and to the

[00:26:29] maligned, because that is a part of how we have been positioned in the history. You know, black people in America, we experience the highest highs and the lowest lows that if you want to understand the American story

[00:26:44] that you got to look at the black American story, and that all of America, everything that's ever happened is in our story. So I can't help but find the humanity in black folks when I tell our stories. But I can't help but to look for the

[00:27:03] moments of humor and tragedy. And these are the stories that I think are the most important to tell. And now that I have been able to write a book like this, it's really hard about my journalism. That's what I think that that

[00:27:19] little voice was telling me is that it's not about setting people free from incarceration, or from, you know, the criminal justice system. That's that's what I thought, girl, that you're on. But it's about setting us free from false

[00:27:34] narratives in the mythology, and really just to be frank, the lies that are told about us as a people so we can operate in truth. So the reason why this is a people's history is because I understood that it's not enough just to write about

[00:27:50] cracks, rise and fall without telling the story of how people's lives were impacted and how they experienced it. That memory is as important as history. So the book is written in the way that it is where there's sort of this

[00:28:07] meta history of cracks, rise and fall. And I tell that story as a matter of due diligence as a journalist. But I give the people with the book their space to not be in conflict with the history, but to just tell their stories and

[00:28:24] then to present it at the same level as as everything else, because it matters just as much as everything else. It does. And talking about, you know, the linear history, you start in the before times, the way before times, and

[00:28:40] the days of slavery and reconstruction, where cocaine is just everywhere. And owners are given their enslaved people cocaine to make them excited to work harder and work faster and better and be more productive. And then yeah, it's, it's just everywhere in the failure of the federal

[00:29:04] government and local governments to ever recognize that cocaine was a drug to be regulated until it began to become popular among the wrong kind of people and people aren't recognizing it until it impacts the community and you even address the conspiracy theory. So for once and for all,

[00:29:27] can you go through the whole scenario of why it was not a plot of the government of the CIA to flood the black community with crack, even though that is a widely held belief in the whole Iran contra the things your floor. Yeah.

[00:29:48] You know, cocaine had been flooded into the United States for a very long time as you described, but really reached its height in the 70s and early 80s. And that's how we connect the stories of people like Pablo Escobar in Columbia, who's processing cocaine from South America and

[00:30:08] making millions of dollars really like a day as he's shipping large quantities into the United States. The federal government knew that and the federal government made a choice to not do what's called interdiction, which is to stem the flow of illegal substances into the United States,

[00:30:28] that the policy became to criminalize and to police possession of cocaine, but not to actually stop the flow of the drug. And that's a choice, right? You know that like it's not a conspiracy, but it is a choice that ultimately hurts

[00:30:46] people on the receiving end. At the same time, you see the rise of communism in South and Central American countries. And that's something that the United States wants to stop. They're like, we don't want communist governments around

[00:31:01] the world because you want the world to be open to capitalism. And that's something that we've been fighting since the Cold War with Russia and with Cuba. So in the 80s under Reagan, right? Like he's still a Cold War or he's trying to stop

[00:31:15] communism. So you have countries like Nicaragua that have elected communist governments. And we want to disrupt that in the same way that we've disrupted that in other parts of the world. So they want to fund these contras in Nicaragua, these are rebels that are basically former people of

[00:31:36] the capitalist government, right? People that we had done business with that are out of power that want to take on the elected communist government. So they try to send money, send arms, Congress says no, you can't do that. They're like,

[00:31:53] we're not getting into a war in Nicaragua. That's none of our business. So the Reagan administration decides that they will just ship weapons over there covertly. And they get caught doing this, right? That like one of the plane crashes and it

[00:32:07] becomes a big story that they are illegally and secretly supporting a war in another country. Not just that, but it starts to come to the public's attention little by little through other stories and scandals that they are also allowing these Nicaraguan rebels to traffic cocaine into the

[00:32:29] United States, if they're funding their operation through drug trafficking. And this is known to agencies in the federal government, CIA, FBI, that there are stories of these, you know, Nicaraguan drug drug traffickers getting caught. And they say, Oh, no, wait a minute, let me give

[00:32:46] you this business card of my connect like my person in the government that said that I can do this essentially. That is not a conspiracy to disrupt Black America with with crack cocaine. What that is is blatant disregard for the consequences of

[00:33:06] activity like that, knowing that Black Americans are being hit hardest by this influx of drugs and turning a blind eye to what is a legal activity that then you criminalize on the other. That's not a conspiracy in the sense that we think of it.

[00:33:25] What it is, is the way that I try to write about it is this racism in this country was designed to put Black people closest to harm and to put white people closest to safety really closest to comfort like safety is the bare minimum,

[00:33:42] you won't be safe if you like, but you also want to be comfortable. And when you get uncomfortable, you start to say, Oh, I feel unsafe. Right? When you when you lose the comfort. But that's the way that race has been set up. That's what it

[00:33:58] means to be Black in this country is it means to be closest to harm. So because we are closest to harm any disaster that happens, be it something like Hurricane Katrina, be it something like COVID, right? We're going to get hit first and

[00:34:17] worse. And it was the same way with crack that crack was a man made disaster that hit us first and worst. And just like with Katrina, just like with COVID, just like with other disasters, it was the response from the government that

[00:34:35] damned us ultimately. And that response is intentional. And people should be accountable for how they responded to a disaster like that that was decimating us. Coming out of the decades long movement for civil rights for Black people, and then all of the death of the 60s, Medgar,

[00:34:58] Malcolm, Martin, Bobby Kennedy, and so many more that by the time you get to the 70s where cocaine is really big, and early 80s where now crack is hitting the scene, it was like a joyful response of relief to all of the pain and desperation

[00:35:19] that Black people had come through. And the PTSD they may have been still feeling. And I wonder now in 2023, out of the devastation of COVID, and the racial reckoning that wasn't let's just call a thing a thing, like we marched for like

[00:35:36] six months and then we went back to police brutality and killings is normal. That I wonder, out of that, do you fear something similar can happen or even is happening, especially with fentanyl again? I do. I do. That was one of the scary things from reporting

[00:35:56] the book was to see that crack happened because people just needed to feel good and needed a way to make money. You know, cocaine is a stimulant when people get high on coke, they feel like they can do anything. They have energy.

[00:36:09] They're excited. People chose that drug in that moment for that reason. When I look at what's happening with us in this country today, again, I think Black folks are tired that we had a lot of promise under the Obama era. Right?

[00:36:24] That was a big moment for us. And then we immediately see the setback disaster after disaster in something like COVID, in seeing what's happening with income inequality and inflation. You know, it's harder and harder to pay your rent. It's harder and harder to buy groceries. And people are

[00:36:44] looking to drugs again. The opioid epidemic is something that hadn't really affected us in its earliest waves, which included prescription pills like oxy because we were getting prescribed meds, right? Like doctors don't don't think of Black folks feel pain. Once the prescription phase was

[00:37:03] over, opioid epidemic entered the phase of street drugs like heroin. So the people that can no longer get the pills, you know, started looking for heroin to get that high. And we still have an aversion to hard drugs like heroin from the

[00:37:20] crack era. But now what we're seeing is Black and Latino men are leading in overdose deaths because of fentanyl. So that's the new phase. And the thing about fentanyl is that it actually gets around our fear of hard drugs that we really develop during the crack era, because

[00:37:41] fentanyl is being laced into other substances. It's a cheap synthetic drug. So you can put it in just about anything. So people think that they're taking something like molly. People think that maybe they're doing a line of cocaine, and they're really doing opioids. And that's why

[00:38:00] you're seeing this huge spike of fentanyl related overdoses in the community. And I'm scared about it. I got to be honest, right? Because I don't see the world getting any better. And people want to feel good, and people need to make money. And

[00:38:16] what I think the book showed me is that all that it takes is the right substance at the wrong time. Thank you. I know we started talking about Whitney. And as we finish, all I can think about is Prince.

[00:38:30] Absolutely. Right? That like somebody else who we love has gone too soon, who died trying to alleviate pain. And again, when we talk about these substances that we think of them as you know, crack or fentanyl. And I don't think

[00:38:49] that we think enough about what these substances are making people feel. And if we think about what it is the substances are making people feel, then we get a little insight into what people want and what they actually are feeling. I think

[00:39:04] a lot of us are tired. We want to check out that we want to feel good. And I just want us to just resist that urge to look to substances to alleviate what's happening in our bodies and in our minds, right? That like we have to

[00:39:21] deal with reality as it is. And if we can resist that, I know that we'll get to the other side of whatever's happening in the world right now, because we always have. That's the story of black folks from our very beginning in this

[00:39:37] country. And I'm always hopeful for the future of our survival, because we've survived really the worst stuff. Like all of these things meant to kill us have not. And that makes us some of the strongest people in the world. So you

[00:39:53] know, then we survived the crack epidemic and I want us to come out of that stronger with some appreciation for how we survived it. So we, you know, survive the next thing whatever that may be. Amen. You say that I just think of the old folks

[00:40:09] saying you know, and this too, shout past. Absolutely. I want to go to a speed round and a game before I let you go for the afternoon. What is your favorite book? Song of Solomon by Tony Morrison. I'm a huge Tony Morrison fanboy. Your favorite author? Tony Morrison.

[00:40:26] I figured. What is your favorite hip hop song? You know what? The first thing that came to mind was Keep Your Head Up by Tupac. What do you think is the best book to movie adaptation or book to TV series adaptation? I say the color purple.

[00:40:44] If money were no object, where would you go? Where would you live and what would you do? I would have a farm slash artist residency along a large body of water, preferably a river. And I would welcome people to this building that would hopefully feel like

[00:41:04] home and I would make them food and I would give them all the support that they need to create that we don't, as black folks always have because of resources. I would like to be a caretaker in that way.

[00:41:22] I love that. And whenever you do it, I'm coming. Name three things on your bucket list. I want to make a movie. I want to buy my mama a house, maybe that farm. She has a wonderful green thumb.

[00:41:38] And I really want to write liner notes for an artist. When I was a kid, I grew up and I always read the liner note in like a little CD pack. And I would love to collaborate with the musician on some liner notes. Yes, that is awesome.

[00:41:55] What brings you joy? Water. I really like swimming. It just relaxes my nervous system and I feel like a child in the water. I like sweets. Don't we all? Don't we all cheesecake especially like I'm a huge cheesecake person. And I feel my most comfortable at a cookout.

[00:42:19] Like first day of summer is just warm enough to pull out the grill. You get your people over. They all get tipsy. You might break out a pack of cards, but y'all eat. Y'all just have a good time. That is that is heaven for me.

[00:42:34] And what brings you peace? Being understood are really being heard. You can't guarantee that people will understand you and nobody I don't think can ever understand anybody else completely. But there's something about somebody sitting across from you and taking you seriously.

[00:42:52] That is the most peaceful thing in the world. So our game is called rewriting the classics. Classic is however you define it. Name one book you wish you would have written. I wish I had written the warmth of other sons.

[00:43:08] Name one book where you want to change the ending and how would you do it? I wish I could change the ending to Sula. I don't want Sula to die. I would love to see her and now get old.

[00:43:21] And I want to see them continue to work through their friendship and fight and love on each other well into their own age. Because I don't think Sula has to die. And I think that there are so many stories that

[00:43:35] could have been told if Sula had continued on. Name a book that you think is overrated and why? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. A lot of these books that are seen as classics are just really the best things that white people can do.

[00:43:53] And something being like the best writer that a white person can do does not make it the best that anybody can do. And Huckleberry Finn is supposed to be this incredible American story of adventure that takes you through all of these different scenarios that teach you

[00:44:11] something about the nature of American life and the American spirit. And we don't get to the depth of it because the only black character in it is named Nigger Jim. So it's going to fall flat for me every time.

[00:44:25] And then you make middle schoolers read this in like classrooms where there are only a few black kids and they got it, you know, every time I say Nigger Jim, we all looking at the black kid the fuck. Sorry. I don't know. You're fine. You get it.

[00:44:41] What in the world that like this is what we consider an American classic. I just heard that the novelist Percival Everett is publishing a novel next year called Jane. And it is the story of Huck Finn's adventure, but told from the perspective of the enslaved man.

[00:44:59] Oh, that's going to be good. Yeah. So so thank God he's rewriting the classics, but I mean, come on, we can do better than that. Yes. And so my final question for you today. When you are dead and gone and among the ancestors,

[00:45:16] what would you like someone to write about the legacy of words and work that you've left behind? I would hope that people write that I did my best, that I created new language in new ways of thinking about things, that the

[00:45:37] language that I created allowed for new ways of thinking. I would want people to say that I uplifted the ways that black people think and speak and that I transformed journalism in a way that made room for black storytellers, for the

[00:45:59] ways that we tell stories again for the language that we use. I want people to say that my work was a vessel or truth about black people. Big thank you to Donovan X Ramsey for being here today on Black and Published.

[00:46:15] Make sure you check out Donovan's book When Crack was King, a people's history of a misunderstood era, out now from one world. And if you're not following Donovan, check him out on the socials. He's at Donovan X Ramsey on Instagram and Twitter. That's our show for the week.

[00:46:37] If you'd like this episode and want more black and published, head to our Instagram page. It's at black and published. And that's B L K and published there. I've posted a bonus clip from my interview with Donovan about the parallels between his

[00:46:56] book and the warmth of other sons were the same cities black people fled to escape Jim Crow were the same ones devastated by the crack era. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I'll highlight y'all next week when our

[00:47:12] guests will be Anissa Gray, author of the novel Life and Other Love Songs. I think we all have our own sort of private soundtracks for our lives. The ups and the downs, songs that mean something to us to speak to us.

[00:47:27] And so that's what I was thinking about when that title immediately clicked with me how music is such a part of our lives. And in a lot of ways it tells our life stories from the beginning to the end and most of our love, which is at

[00:47:43] the heart of this story. That's next week on black and published. I'll talk to you then. Peace.