Black History Unfiltered

by Soul on Fire LEAVIE SCOTT

The rumor moved like wildfire because it was designed to. It had the pacing of a ghost story and the precision of a press release. Whispers turned to headlines, headlines turned to hearings, and before long, the lie had grown legs long enough to step into the federal register.

The claim was wild enough to be unforgettable: Black people on cocaine were “bulletproof.” Not invincible in the comic-book sense, but dangerous in a way that demanded bigger guns, harsher laws, and new language to explain why fear felt so justified. It sounded like madness—because it was. And yet, it worked.

The story didn’t start in a lab. It didn’t emerge from peer-reviewed science or patient case studies. It started in the same place so many policy panics begin in America: the intersection of racial anxiety and political opportunity. Newspapers found it delicious. Policymakers found it useful. Law enforcement found it convenient. And the public, conditioned by an old and familiar script, found it believable.

They called Black men “cocaine fiends,” as if the drug created not a medical dependency but a new species—less human, more threat. They printed claims that bullets bounced off brown skin when “stimulated,” that morality melted under the drug’s heat, that Black bodies transformed into something a good community could not survive without stronger chains and thicker gates.

It was never about health. It was about control—about building a legal fortress around a racial imagination that required Blackness to be the danger and whiteness to be the authority.

The absurdity of the “bulletproof” myth was part of its power. The more impossible it sounded, the more it invited panic. Panic is a useful solvent; it dissolves nuance. In panic, a complex social question—poverty, labor exploitation, segregation, inequality—shrinks into a single, satisfying answer: punish.

That punishment arrived dressed as policy.

The Act That Wore a Lab Coat

By December 17, 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, a law marketed as an orderly system of registration and taxation around certain drugs. But like so many “neutral” structures in American history, the law was neutral in language and unequal in practice. It bestowed new authority on the federal government, widened the net of criminalization, and made medical care less accessible for people the system already refused to see.

And while the Act did not say “Black” or “white,” everyone in power knew who it positioned for surveillance, arrest, and moral condemnation. The panic had done its job. Legislators could claim a duty to protect society, to protect women, to protect order—all the while protecting the lie that framed Black communities as uniquely dangerous when touched by substances that whiteness could sample in parlors and pharmacies without stigma.

Consider the hypocrisy: while lawmakers thundered about cocaine’s dangers in Black hands, Coca‑Cola—named for coca and once flavored with its derivatives—continued cultivating a white consumer base without the same criminal shadows attached. One set of users got marketing. Another got mugshots. If you want to understand the drug war, start there.

The Machine of Mythmaking

How do you get a nation to believe something as ridiculous as “bullets don’t stop them”? You tell the story enough times, with enough costume changes, until it feels like memory. A sheriff says it. A doctor repeats it. A newspaper prints it. A politician campaigns on it. Soon, no one can tell you where it started; they can only tell you they’ve “heard it everywhere.”

It helps if the lie fits neatly into an older fear—the fear of Black autonomy, of Black mobility, of Black success. In the early 20th century, the South trembled at the thought of Black men no longer bound to fields and contracts, no longer tethered to plantation wage systems dressed up as “employment.” Migration was shifting demographics. Education was opening doors. Black newspapers were thriving. Churches were building institutions. When progress cannot be reversed outright, it can be reframed as peril.

So the lie treated Black modernization as a public health threat. It pathologized Black movement as criminal. It packaged that pathology in the white coat of a “medical authority” and the badge of a “public safety concern.” Policymakers didn’t need the myth to be true; they needed it to be useful.

The Script Returns—Again and Again

History rarely repeats with identical lines, but the stage directions are familiar.

In the 1930s, marijuana became “marihuana,” and headlines described “reefer madness” infecting jazz clubs, Mexican immigrants, and Black neighborhoods. In the 1980s, crack cocaine—chemically similar to powder cocaine—brought catastrophic sentencing disparities, not because science demanded it, but because panic paid political dividends. The neighborhoods already starved of investment, housing, and adequate healthcare were given police budgets instead.

At each turn, media found an image easy to sensationalize: a lurid headline, a mugshot that did the work of a thousand op-eds, a film reel spliced to show a sequence that looked like truth even when it wasn’t. Policy followed the image. Funding followed the policy. And families followed their loved ones into courtrooms designed to be final.

The Cost You Can’t Print on a Headline

What are the “costs” of a lie like bulletproof Blackness? You can count some in numbers—arrests made, years served, livelihoods destroyed. But the larger cost is spiritual: the way a nation’s imagination gets trained to see Black life as perpetual crisis. The way teachers read risk in a child’s posture. The way employers interpret confidence as threat. The way a traffic stop becomes a test of survival. The way a Black person’s pain is medically under‑treated because the lie teaches that Black bodies feel pain differently—less intensely, less urgently, more resilient than they should.

You cannot pass a law to repair that imagination quickly. You need new stories—true ones, told often, with the patience of people who understand how long the old story has been at work.

Witness Versus Spectacle

A spectacle is designed to stun you into passivity. A witness is designed to call you into responsibility. Spectacles are quick. Witness is slow. The drug war has always preferred spectacle—baggies on a table, a line of men in cuffs, a press conference where everyone looks serious while saying nothing about the root.

Witness does the harder work: asking what kind of country invents a myth about bulletproof Blackness and then uses that myth to build a legal system. Asking who benefited financially from enforcement. Asking what happened to public health when fear became policy. Asking why treatment programs bloomed in suburbs while prisons bloomed in cities. Asking how long we will keep paying interest on a lie.

Breaking the Spell

So what do we do with this knowledge? First, we name the lie. We say clearly that Black criminalization has never been a side effect of drug policy; it has been a feature of it. We teach that science was invoked to justify policy, not to guide it. We remember that every panic leaves a paper trail of “experts” who, later, will say they were misunderstood.

Then we build. We build curricula that teach students to recognize moral panics when they appear in new outfits. We build advocacy that pushes for equitable sentencing, record expungement, and public health responses grounded in care rather than cages. We build local networks that turn neighbors into witnesses—people who know the names and stories behind the statistics. We build the kind of political literacy that makes it harder to sell us the next version of the same old hysteria.

And we tell our own stories—loudly, beautifully, relentlessly—because whoever tells the story first often gets to write the law that follows.

The Last Word

Black communities have never been bulletproof. They have been resilient in ways that make myths jealous. They have loved, taught, worked, prayed, marched, and rebuilt in the aftermath of policies justified by panic. They have turned funerals into movements and court dates into coalitions. They have refused to become the caricatures designed to manage them.

The drug war was not born from careful medicine. It was built from fear, profit, and control, and baptized with headlines crafted to make those forces feel like common sense. But common sense is not the same as truth. Truth is slower, sturdier, and less glamorous. Truth will sit with the facts long enough to notice the pattern. Truth will tell you that when a nation claims it must cage a people to save itself, what it is really saving is a hierarchy.

This is the history they didn’t teach us.

And this is the history we are teaching ourselves—Black History Unfiltered.

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