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Sharpe, Tanya Telfair. BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL: SEX FOR CRACK COCAINE EXCHANGE AND POOR BLACK WOMEN. Binghamton, New York: The Haworth Press, 2005. $24.95.
Summer 1992, Tanya Telfair Sharpe first interviewed female users of heroin, cocaine powder and crack cocaine. Sharpe notes: "it became immediately apparent the poor black female crack users experienced the worst forms of social degradation and received the fewest opportunities for help" [I]. Her critical text, Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women, illuminates tragic human decay and family disruption among poor black women, and identifies policies of race, class and gender that effectively created the separate, isolated ethnic neighborhoods that have become ideal breeding grounds for the contemporary, "cottage industry" of crack cocaine.
In the world Sharpe describes, crack-induced paranoia, desperation and urgency take precedence over bathing, eating, sleeping, safe sex and childcare. This "cottage industry" of crack cocaine, Sharpe notes, exists in the shadows of mainstream U.S. culture, that has affirmed skin color [i.e. race] as a marker of social, intellectual and emotional capability. Consequently, in the seventies and eighties, when scholars like Charles Murray [1984] and others emphasized that the problems of the poor in the U.S. were due to "intellectual and...