Pushers,Victims,and the Lost Innocence of White Suburbia

Abstract

This case study of Los Angeles County portrays the war on drugs during the 1950s as a racial and spatial project that combined tough mandatory-minimum sentences for urban “pushers” and Mexican American “gangsters” with discretionary loopholes for white suburban “victims” of the heroin and marijuana markets. State institutions, media scripts, and white middle-class organizations constructed illegal drug use as a suburban crisis through a racialized pusher–victim discourse that collectively criminalized minority youth while decriminalizing white teenage lawbreakers. The escalation of California’s antinarcotics crusade during the postwar decades illuminates the deep historical roots, thoroughly bipartisan policies, and grassroots suburban politics that shaped the rise of mass incarceration and the continuing racial and spatial inequalities of drug war enforcement in modern America.