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Netflix’s Crack Documentary Puts a Face on the Destruction of Black Neighborhoods
Stanley Nelson tells a story that still lives in all of us
My family is full of storytellers.
Many of us come from families where the yarn of our existence isn’t noted down in some book somewhere. It’s messier. It slips off the tongues of those closest to us, vague in the way of memory. The stories of people we may have never met become real to us.
My aunt Cookie used to tell the story about the night her car died in Williamsburg’s industrial district; it’s one of my favorites. The walk, just a handful of blocks to her apartment on Wyckoff Avenue, became an interminable journey. The neighborhood wasn’t the gentrified area we know of today, where thrift stores and boutique cafés line the streets beneath million-dollar lofts. This was the New York of the late ’80s, during the height of the crack era — a place where, to hear her tell it, death and addiction ran rampant. It’s the New York depicted in the new Netflix documentary Crack: Cocaine, Corruption, & Conspiracy.
Nelson skillfully reconciles the data with the Black and Brown experience. In doing so, he connects the dots of an important sociocultural event…
