Abstract
The United States war on drugs has, for decades now, systematically targeted communities of color. This sustained attack on people of color is accomplished through the use of whiteness. Recently, mainstream news media and elected officials have called for a “gentler war on drugs” to address the opioid epidemic. While some may see this as a welcome change, we take a more critical view. Specifically, we examine the role of White women in two popular television series that feature narratives of addiction as a gendered instance of “white drug exceptionalism.” To do this, we conducted a systematic analysis of a narrative television show, Law & Order, and a reality-based show, Intervention, using nine seasons over the same time period (2000–2010). In the procedural drama Law & Order, White women were featured prominently as part of the carceral state, both as police detectives and as prosecutors. Occasionally, White women are portrayed as victims of drug culture. On the rehabinspired Intervention, the majority of all characters are White, and the audience is invited to view drug use and recovery through a white lens that tells a particular kind of story about addiction. Both the carceral model promoted by Law & Order and the therapeutic model valorized by Intervention rely on particular notions of White womanhood mapped onto neoliberal regimes of citizenship that not only compel us all toward “health” and “sobriety” but also warp our collective imagination, so that we only see some drug users as worthy of a gentleness and compassion.
Introduction
The U.S. has had the largest per capita prison population in the world for several decades now, which has everything to do with harsh drug policies. Among those in federal prisons, about half are there for drug offenses, and in 2007 alone, there were 1,841,200 state and local arrests for drug use violations in the United States (Tonn, 2014). The U.S. Congress seems to have a limitless capacity for locking up people; in 2003 alone, it created, increased, or expanded nearly 40 mandatory minimum sentences (John, 2014). And the more White people were told about the racial disparities in incarceration, the more they reported being afraid of crime and were more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities (Hetey & Eberhardt, 2014).
The burden of overincarceration in the U.S. is not evenly distributed in the population. While Black people constitute only 13% of the U.S. population, they represent 40% of those incarcerated; Latinx people represent 16% of the population and constitute 19% of those incarcerated (Hagler, 2015). Almost every race and gender category is more likely to be incarcerated than White women. Among Black people, 1 in 3 men and 1 in 18 women born in 2001 will go to prison at some point during their lifetimes; among Latinx people, 1 in 6 men and 1 in 45 women will go to prison at some point; among White men, 1 in 17 will go to prison. For White women, the expected rate of incarceration is 1 in 111 (Hagler, 2015). It is crucial to keep in mind the juxtaposition of the gargantuan prison system fueled by relentlessly punitive drug policies in the U.S. and the narratives of addiction crafted for entertainment and the ideological justification for the carceral state. While White women are largely exempt from the harms of the carceral state, they are prominently featured in sympathetic entertainment narratives about addiction as well as agents of the carceral state.
The first decade of the 21st century was a pivotal one for drug policy in the U.S. Some reform efforts gained traction, such as the partial repeal of the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in 2007, the Second Chance Act (supporting prisoner reentry) in 2008, and the Fair Sentencing Act (reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1) in 2010. Even so, punitive approaches to drug policy and the resultant racial disparities persisted, leading some to characterize U.S. drug policy as a racial caste system, or what Michelle Alexander (2012) calls “the new Jim Crow.” However, as the decade came to a close and a new one dawned, the punitive drug policies of the U.S. began to give way to a call for “gentler” policies (Seelye, 2015). In part, the call for this shift toward less punitive approaches to drug use was the result of very deliberate activism directed at policy makers (Stevens, 2010). Yet the traction that such calls were able to achieve relied on the discursive disappearance of Black and Brown drug users, which was replaced with a concern for White, middle-class users (Hansen, 2017; Hansen & Netherland, 2016; Tiger, 2017). It is our argument that the supposed innocence of White women drives much of this sympathetic turn toward drug users as “victims” (rather than “criminals”) and that it is a trope propagated through cultural narratives. In particular, our focus here is on two popular television shows, Law & Order and Intervention, which regularly feature drugs and drug users.
We selected these two shows for their prominence in crafting narratives about contemporary drug problems in the U.S. context, in particular around White women. Law & Order is one of the longest running programs on television and arguably popularized the police procedural genre in North American television. It features White women in a range of roles as victims, cops, and prosecutors. The reality-based television series Intervention uses the tropes of documentary film to tell a particular kind of story about addiction and coerced treatment often involving White women as characters. It is now in its 18th season. Both shows have proven to be enormously popular with audiences in the U.S. Although they represent different genres of programs, both situate narratives about White characters, and in particular White women, at the center of their storytelling about drug use, as they flatten, erase, or caricature the lives of people of color affected by drugs. We contend that to understand the many layers of encoding of meaning that lie at the intersections of race and drugs, we must grapple with popular culture (Hall, 1973). Thus, given the prominence of these shows in the current cultural landscape and their attention to drug use, we selected these two television programs to better understand how White women have come to have a prominent place in narratives about contemporary drug problems.
White Women, Popular Culture, and Addiction in Historical Context
Illicit drug use has long been associated with particular groups of people in ways that stigmatize them while serving political ends. Beginning with the first drug laws in the U.S., which regulated opium smoking in an effort to control Chinese immigrants, American drug policy has been driven by racism and by the desire to protect whiteness in general and White women in particular. Images intended to incite moral panics about Chinese opium dens featured White women, supposedly lured there by Chinese men. In the early 1900s, when the U.S. was debating the Harrison Act that would regulate the use of heroin and coca products for the first time, The New York Times ran a story with a headline referring to a “Negro Cocaine Fiend,” perpetuating racist stereotypes about the hyperviolence associated with Black male drug use. This supposed “fiend” was a threat to one main target: White women. At congressional hearings about the Harrison Act, experts testified that “most of the attacks upon White women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain” (as quoted in Gahlinger, 2003, p. 42). The scientific experts of the day used their credentials in testimony that lent credence to the criminalization and putative violence of Black men, while they simultaneously reinforced the ideas about the innocence of White women.
Harry Anslinger, the founding commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, began an anti-drugs crusade in the 1930s that was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to protect White women. In his testimony about the Marijuana Prohibition Act to the U.S. Congress in 1937, Anslinger claimed, There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, swing, result from usage. This marijuana causes White women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. (as quoted in Gerber, 2004, p. 9)
Systematic studies of media consistently find a connection between representations of addiction and narratives about race. People who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups are more often portrayed as “addicts” (Taylor, 2008). Research also finds that Black people are more likely to be portrayed as menacing when compared to the portrayal of White people in news stories involving drug use (Peffley, Shields, & Williams, 1996; Reeves & Campbell, 1994; Reinarman & Levine, 2004; Williams, 1995). Even though someone could be an “addict” and not break any laws, dominant media narratives about “addicts” and “lawbreakers” often regard these two labels as synonymous and thoroughly racialized. In this trajectory, “addicts” always become “lawbreakers,” and they are almost always coded as racial Others (Dixon & Linz, 2000).
Stereotypes of race and addiction have often paired specific racial and ethnic groups with particular substances. For example, Asian Americans, particularly Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s, were configured as “opium fiends” in popular press accounts (Shah, 2001). The portrayal of the “drunk Indian” in Hollywood films configured Native Americans as uniquely vulnerable to alcohol throughout the 1950s and 1970s, a period in which Native Americans were driven even further into government-created poverty and launched a powerful resistance movement (Kilpatrick, 1999). Propaganda campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s warned against the encroaching “Marijuana Menace,” and these efforts were joined with anti-Mexican sentiments (Galliher & Walker, 1978; Himmelstein, 1983; Meier, 1994). The U.S. government contributed to the hysteria, racism, and xenophobia by asserting that marijuana use led to violent crimes, most often by racial and ethnic minority group members; it did this through the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (Himmelstein, 1983; Meier, 1994). The association between Latinx and marijuana is so endemic in U.S. culture that it makes possible cinematic spoofs such as Up In Smoke (1978) in which Cheech Marin plays a weed-addled Latinx character (List, 1992; Sears & Johnston, 2010). Yet missing from this body of research is any mention of White women.
Active drug users are routinely portrayed as risk-taking outsiders who should be actively excluded from society (Becker, 1963; Taylor, 2008). Addiction concepts became part of American culture early in the 19th century, and along with them, addiction tropes became a feature of American storytelling (Room, 2005, p. 229). The persistent metonymy in portrayals of addiction is one of utter degradation, moral failing (Harding, 1986; Sulkunen, 2007), and more recently disease (Reinarman & Levine, 2004). Whether as the result of “moral failure” or “disease,” the audience can expect the “addict” to commit terrible acts because of their substance use. Such a character will betray, steal from, or even kill others while in the grip of addiction. In part, audiences are horrified by such acts because they represent violations of the norms of intimate relationships: They are done to parents, lovers, or children (Room, 2005, p. 229). Several scholars have documented the ways in which understandings of and responses to addiction are critical to reinforcing gender, race, and class norms. Treatment facilities, including drug courts and mandated programs, that advocate an abstinence approach also try to instill values of self-control, character building, and sexual propriety in drug users (Hansen, 2017; Kaye, 2012; McCorkel, 2013; McKim, 2017; Tiger, 2013). In so doing, these forms of treatment also reinforce norms of gender and whiteness and in particular norms of White womanhood.
From the beginning, the widespread use of crack cocaine in the U.S. was strongly associated with Black communities in popular media (Reeves & Campbell, 1994). Black and Latinx people were, and continue to be, the focus of law enforcement efforts and popular culture narratives in the putative “war on drugs” (Alexander, 2010; McWilliams, 1991; Reinarman & Levine, 2004). Yet the enforcement of the “war on drugs” and its representation in popular media stand in stark contrast to the actual rates of substance use; research consistently finds that drug use is fairly evenly distributed across racial groups (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2010). So while drug use is criminalized for those deemed racialized Others, whiteness operates to create exceptions for White users and protect them from state intervention (e.g., Herzberg, 2011; Netherland & Hansen, 2017). White people’s drug use is deemed acceptable (and often legal) because medical experts decide that it falls under the rubric of “medical need” (Herzberg, 2011). Even when white drug use involves illicit drugs, it is often portrayed as a medical, rather than a criminal, problem (Netherland & Hansen, 2016a, 2016b). White women, in particular, have often been at the center of this sheltered “medical” use of drugs. Although White people use drugs at about the same rates as Black and Latinx people, they are less likely to be targeted by law enforcement for it. And, although White women use drugs, they are largely absent from depictions of involvement with illegal drugs in the American media landscape, with the exceptions of the cases we analyze here.
Whiteness and White Women’s Role in the U.S. Drug War
Whiteness is socially constructed and actively maintained. It is not an immutable category; rather, it is accomplished through active efforts of human beings who create and maintain boundaries of who is, and is not, White. For those who exist within the ontological boundaries of whiteness, it can be difficult to see, name, and describe. But for scholars who exist outside those boundaries, from W.E.B. DuBois onward, it is somewhat easier to articulate: “black folks have, from slavery on, shared with one another knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people” (hooks, 1992, p. 338). The aim of studies of whiteness, like this one, is to problematize the ways it has remained unremarked and “normal.” We want to call attention to the representational power of a gendered form of whiteness and how it functions to reinforce a system of domination.
We also draw on the concept of the White racial frame (Feagin, 2013). In the U.S., there is a dominant framework from which those in power view North American society. This concept encompasses multiple levels of analysis including racial stereotypes (the cognitive aspect), metaphors and interpretive concepts (the deeper cognitive aspect), images (the visual culture), emotions (feelings), and inclinations to discriminate. This frame buttresses and grows out of the material reality of racial oppression. We rely on the White racial frame to explain how whiteness is operationalized in popular culture and has material consequences through public policy. Within this frame, White women play a particularly important symbolic role in the racist drug war, which is similar to the pattern observed in the U.S. phenomenon of lynching. As Wells-Barnett (1895) documented, the pattern in this form of racial violence was one in which Black men were criminalized and sexualized as a mythological threat to White women. The symbolic defense of White women is not limited to the U.S. context but is also linked to the colonial project.
Cultural representations of White femininity and womanhood have been central to colonialism in the West. A recurring theme is the way violence toward White women became a symbol of insubordination to colonial authority. As Ware (2015) observes, “In any colony, the degree to which White women were protected from the fear of sexual assault was a good indication of the level of security felt by the colonial authorities” (p. 38). In the historical examples of colonialism and lynching, White women occupy a particular position within the racial and gendered social hierarchy that is complicit in these systems of domination. More than individual White women, it is White womanhood that does the symbolic work of justifying colonial oppression and racial violence. When it comes to contemporary drug use in the U.S., the symbolic work of White womanhood continues through carceral feminism, when ideas of gender equality are used to perpetuate racial inequality through the mechanism of the State.
Carceral feminism is the idea that the state should protect women from intimate partner violence and other forms of physical abuse by deploying criminal penalties (Bernstein, 2007, 2010; Sandbeck, 2012). Rooted in liberal feminist notions of the state as an equitable mechanism for the redress of issues thought to affect all women equally, the reality of such policies is increased criminalization, surveillance, policing, and incarceration, and women of color and men of color are often disproportionately subject to the violence of the carceral state (Law, 2014). Further, scholars writing about carceral feminism contend that it only protects some women (White, middle class, and heterosexual) while it simultaneously criminalizes other women (women of color, poor and working class, and queer or gender-non-conforming) by making them more vulnerable to the prison industrial complex (Sandbeck, 2012). And, because of the opportunities for women to attend law school and pursue legal careers, they are often the much more than symbolically involved in the prosecution of the drug war; they are, in fact, the actual prosecutors (Moore, 2008; Pierce, 2003).
Method
We conducted a systematic analysis of a reality-based show, Intervention, and a narrative television show, Law & Order, using samples drawn from nine seasons over the same time period (2000–2010). We deployed a mixed method approach to analyze both programs which enabled us to (1) conduct an in-depth systematic analysis of the drug narratives portrayed in both television programs and (2) capture a sample size that included the race, class, and gender dynamics of drug story lines that indicated potential patterns of the framing of drug narratives in both programs.
As a methodological framework, we adapted Griswold’s (1987) conceptualization of the cultural diamond. In this, Griswold posits that the sociological analysis of any cultural artifact should include four elements: (1) text, (2) production, (3) social context, and (4) audience reception. Here we focus primarily on the text of the shows, their production, and the social context in which they are viewed. For our purposes, audience reception is beyond the scope of the theoretical questions we are asking, the methods we chose, and the space available.
For our analysis of Intervention, we included nine seasons (2000–2010) with a total of 143 episodes and 157 characters. The number of episodes and characters differs because some characters return to the show for “follow-up” episodes, and for these we counted the episode but did not count the character twice. For Law & Order, we examined the text and social context of each episode viewed and analyzed a sample of 10 seasons spanning the same time period (2000–2010) with a total of 31 episodes. Within the 10 seasons examined, we excluded episodes about non-drug-related crimes (e.g., murder where no drugs were involved), and selected for inclusion in the sample all episodes that included any reference to drugs in their story lines, including the mention of recreational and medical drugs.
For the quantitative content analysis, we logged details of each episode we watched including a unique identifier for each episode, the name of the main character, the region, the original broadcast date, substances to which the character is identified as being addicted (both primary and secondary), their race, gender and (when available), the occupation, age, and sexual orientation of the main character. For Intervention, we noted the region within the U.S. where the episode was filmed, but Law & Order is set in New York City, and so all of the story lines took place within the state of New York and most within the five boroughs.
For the qualitative analysis, we watched each episode in our collective sample and took extensive notes on each. For Intervention, we kept notes on what particular characters (including “addicts,” interventionists, and family members) said and did. We logged the title cards (White text on a Black background) used extensively in each episode. Additionally, we noted how the main characters responded to the intervention and what the reported “final” outcomes were for each character. For example, each episode of Intervention ends with an epilogue about where the character is now (e.g., “Vinnie left treatment after 29 days, and his mother flew him home first class”) and recorded each of these. Finally, we noted when there was a relevant subtext to an episode (e.g., as when an episode in Season 2 noted, “The producer tried repeatedly to keep Sylvia from driving,” this later appeared in several mainstream press accounts about the ethics of the show). For Law & Order, we documented characters’ verbal and nonverbal communication, and we also noted how the state and its agents (including prosecutors and detectives) responded to and interacted with characters involved with drugs. We recorded the outcome (when available) for each of the characters directly involved with drugs (for instance, whether a character was incarcerated, sought or offered treatment, or died/was murdered). We also observed how drugs were framed in the narratives relative to character and plot.
Findings
Intervention
Intervention premiered on the A&E Network in 2005, and its debut quickly marked a turning point for reality television, with creator Sam Mettler crediting the program with shifting the landscape of reality television by disrupting the overly scripted framework of most reality television (Watkins, 2013). In addition to pioneering a new reality television formula, Intervention solidified its foothold in the reality television market in other ways—the program ran on and off for 13 years, won an Emmy for Outstanding Reality TV Series, has a solid viewership, and has legions of people competing for slots on the show (the show’s tenure peaked at 2.9 million viewers and producers fielded between 300 and 900 requests at any given time; Nededog, 2015; Osgood, 2014). The show’s significance in the American popular culture landscape is also evident in the plethora of accolades bestowed upon it, including five PRISM awards given by the SAMHSA and the Entertainment Industries Council to honor productions that are “not only powerfully entertaining, but realistically show substances abuse and addiction, as well as mental health issues” (Daniels, 2012).
The narratives of addiction that appear on Intervention are crafted through a consistent formula of subject interviews and title cards. As a genre, reality-based shows such as Intervention bear some resemblance to key components of documentary film (Kosovski & Smith, 2011; Murray & Ouellette, 2004). The show uses many of the conventions of documentary films, like handheld cameras and subject interviews interspersed with b-roll of characters involved in their day-to-day lives, which typically means film of the main character scoring, using drugs, and being high. The connection to documentary filmmaking is made explicit at the outset of each episode in which a text announces that the main character has “agreed to be in a documentary about addiction.” This is followed by another title card that lets the audience in on the central ruse of the show, “They do not know they will soon face an intervention.” The collusion between producers and families in this lie raises ethical questions about consent and coercion (Kosvoski & Smith, 2011, p. 856), yet this deception is part of what makes Intervention compelling television. It is consistent with other forms of unscripted programming that rely on the “reveal” to add dramatic tension. With Intervention, the “reveal” is the moment that the main character walks into the room where family and friends have gathered for the surprise intervention. Prior to this filmic moment, the producers craft a particular narrative about what led the main character to the degradation of addiction and ultimately to the redemption of intervention.
The visual story is composed of a subject interview with the main character which always begins with the same opening: “Hi, my name is [Kristen], and I’m addicted to [heroin],” varying only the person’s name and the substance with which they have a complicated history. Each episode follows the same narrative arc: It begins with the present-day desolation of the individual’s life, the pain caused to loved ones recounted through interviews, and a flashback sequence using family photos, through the audience glimpses what their life used to be like, “before addiction.” Typically, this involves stories about what a “good and/or happy kid” they were with “lots of potential” (she was a cheerleader), and that their parents loved them a great deal, with a quick edit to a close-up of one of the parents (usually the mother) crying. The narrative then returns to the present-tense desolation and moves quickly to the dramatic climax of the stages interventions on unsuspecting people, referred to as “addicts” (Daniels, 2012).
The basic premise of the intervention is that people are given a stark choice: go to rehab or lose all connection to the people gathered in the room. That threat is coupled with another: The loss of all material support it is within the power of those in the room to control. For many, this means losing their housing, car, mobile phones, and ongoing financial support. Taken together, the dual threat of the loss of social connection and material resources prove to be powerful mechanisms of social control, and for most, impossible to resist.
White people make up most of the characters featured as “addicts” on Intervention, and the viewing audience is invited to gaze through a white lens that tells a particular kind of story about addiction. Our quantitative analysis found that are 87% of main characters are White, and of those slightly more than half are White women (n = 72: White women; n = 71: White men). However, given that reported rates of drug use for women are lower than for men (5.9% of women report “substance abuse” or “dependence” in national surveys, compared to 11.6% of men), featuring women in equal proportion on the show distorts the reality of gender and drug use patterns. It also gives White women a more central role in narratives of addiction than the epidemiology might suggest.
The overrepresentation of White people, and in particular White women, on the show is rather remarkable given the long history (recounted earlier) of the association between racial and ethnic minority groups and media depictions of drug use. But, it is not accidental. Intervention’s executive producer Dan Partland explains in an interview how stories are crafted for the show: We have a very long list of different elements we try to find in a story. The most important one is, will the story in some way
Take, for example, the episode that features Kristen (Season 2), a 24-year-old White woman from Wisconsin who identifies as “an alcoholic and a heroin addict.” While the specific details of Kristen’s story are unique to her, the show follows a strict formula in which each story is made to fit the broad pattern of her story. The title cards at the beginning of the episode speak to the contrast of squandered potential referring to Kristen as “The Mother” (she has a 6-year-old daughter) and then “The Heroin Addict.” Kristen’s mother, Janet, faces the camera and asks: “What happened to the little girl I knew? She was in the gifted and talented program. She always wanted to do something with art, something creative.” This idealized memory of Kristen as a child described by her mother is intercut with images of a smiling, blonde girl, seemingly carefree, riding her bicycle. This happy childhood was “shattered,” when, at age 13, Kristen’s parents divorced. Every episode of Intervention features an idyllic childhood, shattered by some personal tragedy, often divorce, as central to the eventual addiction; and in the narrative of Intervention, the arrow between personal tragedy and addiction is drawn as if it were direct, unambiguous, and causal (Kosovski & Smith, 2011).
Kristen’s sister, Erin, offers a stark contrast to this lost past with her assessment of Kristen’s present reality: “I don’t know how you can get any worse than an alcoholic, heroin addicted prostitute.” The construction of Kristen’s story from a happy childhood to an adulthood that could not “get any worse” speaks to lost potential. The fact that this is viewed as a tragedy that could not be “any worse” suggests a whiteness in crisis. The social and cultural grandeur that whiteness sets itself up to (not) achieve brings with it a constant anxiety about the inability to achieve those heights (Hughey, 2012). Both the crisis for Kristen’s family and the tragedy within the televisual framework of Intervention are predicated upon the high expectations that go along with being young, gifted, White woman in this society. Kristen is not only wasting her potential, she is wasting her whiteness. The theme of wasted whiteness is not unique to Kristen, but rather a central premise of the show, whose dramatic tension hinges on the lost potential and subsequent redemption of the show’s participants.
While the show is framed explicitly around the issue of drug addiction, episodes like this one also implicitly convey the producers’ views about sex work by White women. While Kristen explains her involvement in sex work as one rooted in the political economy of low wage labor (“I work one shift and paid my rent; I couldn’t go back to a job where I make six dollars an hour”), the producers frame it as a moral failure. Toward the end of the episode, as Kristen is seen checking into a residential treatment facility, they include an interview with her doctor at the recovery center who conveys the central message of the episode: “I think the biggest challenge with Kristen is that she’s gone down to such a low level, morally.”
This reference to Kristen’s “low level, morally” is a rhetorical move that suggests that the producers and her treatment doctor expect a “higher level” for her “morally.” As if to reinforce Kristen’s moral failure (as a White woman and as a “healthy” citizen), the producers of the show choose to include part of her farewell speech as she graduates from rehab after 120 days. Kristen says to one of her counselors: I remember when you said the only hope you had for me was that I could become a
Whiteness obfuscates itself and its relationship to the particular traits it is said to embody, including temperance, rationality, bodily restraint, and industriousness (Dyer, 1988, p. 3). For the White people cast on Intervention as “addicts,” the narrative of their addiction blurs the focus on their whiteness by sharpening the attention to their three-dimensional individuality. Rather than viewing their story of addiction as somehow typical of all White people, the audience is invited to see the characters on Intervention as individual victims of a personal tragedy that has led them to addiction. With their whiteness unremarked upon, the White racial frame of the show’s production invites viewers to see the characters not as stand-ins for an entire race but rather as individuals struggling with bodily restraint in order to achieve the goal of temperance through their own industriousness. The audience is invited to cheer them on and hope that they succeed, and in that, the viewer becomes complicit in the racial project of the show.
The counselors on Intervention often refer to going to rehab as the “gift of treatment,” and it is a peculiarly American kind of luxury item. The rehab facilities that people are whisked away to at the end of each episode are exclusive facilities more like a resort or a country club than they are to the treatment options available to most people in the U.S., and they help subsidize the show by buying advertisements on it. The producers of Intervention claim success rates that any conventional treatment facility would envy. According to their marketing materials, “98% enter treatment, 55% remain clean and sober,” without any additional sources to substantiate these claims. And, journalists repeat the PR claims of the show’s success rate without any kind of fact-checking (Nededog, 2015).
Despite the unrealistic vision of rehab on Intervention and the inflated claims of its success rate, the show’s narrative has permeated North American popular culture as the only effective and lifesaving solution to problem drug use. Now, when celebrities die of drug-related causes, one of the first questions asked is: Was there an intervention planned? Implied in this question is the kind of intervention depicted on the show. In no small way, White women like Kristen are at the symbolic heart of this narrative. Within the frame of the show, they can, and should, be redeemed (not incarcerated), their lives must be salvaged because they have so much unrealized potential. It is a constellations of assumptions that rely on gender and whiteness.
Law & Order
If Intervention has permeated American popular culture, then Law & Order has supersaturated it. It is almost impossible to turn on a television in the U.S. and not encounter some version of this show. Law & Order is a police procedural and legal drama, set in New York City, that centers on the role of the criminal justice system, the state, and its arms as valiantly protecting the public. Law & Order ran for 20 seasons from 1990 to 2010, making it the longest running crime drama on American prime-time television, and it has generated five spin-off series. Creator Dick Wolf credits the show’s rise to prominence to the quality of writing with story lines “ripped from the headlines” (Lambe, 2014).
Each episode of Law & Order begins with the distinctive theme song and a voice-over that intones, “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups—the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecutors the offenders. These are their stories.” Law & Order is centrally about power—the power of the state to control, regulate, and punish crime. And it is wildly popular. In 2004, the series aired its 15th season to over 15 million viewers, although its ratings began to dip by 2010 resulting in the show’s cancellation (Fox News, 2004). But the original continues in reruns and through streaming services, and at least one spin-off is still in production. Dick Wolf makes light of the show’s social significance pointing to its late night time slot that means “half the audience has fallen asleep and can’t remember: How does this end?” (National Public Radio, 2012). The story lines focus most centrally on murder (the featured cops are homicide detectives), with the occasional subplot involving robbery, kidnapping, and white-collar crime.
For our analysis, we selected the subset of episodes (N = 31) that included drug-related story lines. As with Intervention, the characters in the drug-related episodes of Law & Order are predominantly White and White women are disproportionately represented. Within the time frame we analyzed (2000–2010), 71% of the characters involved with drugs were White, while story lines involving Black characters comprised 18% and Latinx characters constituted 11%. In terms of gender in the drug-involved episodes, 62% of the characters were women and 38% were men. And, similar to Intervention, we found that in story lines about drug use, White women’s stories were overrepresented, featured in 21 of the 31 episodes (68%).
There is a distinct pattern of difference in the way White characters and people of color, both Black and Latinx, are depicted on Law & Order. Throughout the episodes we viewed in our sample, people of color and more specifically, men of color, were always touched and handled by the detectives both inside the precinct and beyond. In one episode, the detectives accost “Prim,” a Latinx man, in his neighborhood and push him against a wall (Season 16, Episode 19). When Prim asks why he is being targeted, the detective’s response is “because you look guilty.” In contrast, White characters were almost never physically touched by detectives regardless of their suspected crime.
White women involved with drug use on Law & Order are portrayed as “sick” and in need of care rather than as criminals in need of punishment. Typical of the way White women involved with drugs are portrayed is the character “Celia.” In the episode, it is revealed that Celia lost her son because of her “US$200 a day” heroin addiction and her son’s malnourished and neglected state. Later, Celia is arrested while kidnapping her biological child from his adoptive parents. The detectives locate her on a bus trying to flee in their attempt to arrest her she is offered a choice by the detective—would she like them to physically remove her from the bus, or would she like to exit on her own accord? Celia exercises the choice most convenient for her—electing to exit the bus with the detectives—and this is when they genteelly escort her. As she is being arrested, rather than being thrown against a wall, or the hood of a car, or to the ground as is typical when the suspect is a person of color, a detective helps her on with her coat and another extends a hand to escort her off the bus, and she maintains a modicum of agency over her own decision-making when offered a choice regarding how she would like to be arrested (Season 11, Episode 13). Throughout the episode, the character is treated with care, dignity, and respect, signaling that she is more than merely an “addict.” When she tells the detectives her story, she says, “I know, I was sick—I was so strung out, I would have signed anything.” Her drug use is not criminalized but treated as a sickness. In contrast, when White men were involved in taking, selling, or distributing drugs in our sample of episodes, the men were involved in a “big pharma” scandal as a salesperson or physician, or they were in a secondary story line to the main narrative. Gender and social class intersect in interesting ways here. In the case of Celia, she is depicted as working class—she works as a waitress—and with a previous heroin addiction. Despite her working-class background—or perhaps because of it—she is treated with benevolent paternalism by the state and its agents. For instance, when her case reaches the prosecutors, they speak to her in soothing tones, drawing on the fact that she has a child and appealing to her “maternal instinct” to give up her son for adoption and accept a plea deal with community service rather than prison. Following her son’s placement with adoptive parents, Celia goes to rehab and works waiting tables, both of which are used by detectives as evidence that Celia is worthy of redemption. Celia’s redemption comes through sobriety and gainful (if low-waged) employment; she becomes, like the redeemed characters in Intervention, a “productive member of society.” Throughout, the character of Celia is depicted as a rational caring mother whose drug use is an illness. In this episode, the character’s whiteness and gender are used to make her drug use part of a tragic story line and her ultimate redemption the goal that detectives and prosecutors are working to realize. Celia’s story is typical of other episodes in Law & Order about White female drug use wherein characters are afforded three-dimensional lives protraying their humanity and redemptive potential even when they use drugs and break the law.
Even when White women on Law & Order are portrayed as involved with drugs less as illness and more as bad behavior, this too is easily excused within the White racial frame of the show. For instance, one episode revolves around a character named “Caryn,” who is written as an upper-middle-class White woman, described as “pretty and blond,” who becomes involved in smuggling cocaine (Season 11, Episode 18). The detectives initially question her at home rather than in an interrogation room at the police precinct, suggesting that they assume she is innocent and the questioning is but a mere formality. As the plot unfolds, Caryn confesses that not only did she smuggle drugs, she is also an addict, a revelation that elicits empathy from the detectives. Throughout the episode, the prosecutors and detectives discuss how to minimize the criminal justice consequences for her because she’s a “first timer” who just wanted a thrill. Rather than prosecute her, she is placed in a witness protection program that will effectively hide her and give her a new identity in order to shield her from retaliation by the drug cartels for which she worked. Thus, White, blond Caryn is configured as a passive victim of the cartels rather than an active agent of a dangerous criminal enterprise. Caryn’s whiteness, her gender, and her social class matter in critical ways here. Caryn has upper-middle-class capital and leverages her class to (out)maneuver the legal process and carceral state. As an upper-middle-class White woman, she is positioned as the paragon of White womanhood. Despite smuggling cocaine on a military flight because the luggage would not be searched, Caryn’s actions are not positioned as egregiously criminal within the episode. Instead, her actions are considered within the context of their potential impact on her husband and his career as an army ranger (or representative of the state). Her husband comes to her aid during her questioning, and his White masculinity, social class status, and occupational prestige as an army ranger further insulate Caryn and position her adjacent to the state vis-à-vis her husband and, further, as an innocent woman who just sought a thrill to escape the mundanity of wifedom. Here, Caryn is emblematic of the historical and contemporary trope of upper-middle-class White womanhood a la the second wave of feminism; in contrast, women of color have never been positioned as innocent, as desirable as spouses, or restricted to the domestic sphere because they engaged both public and private spaces with their labor. Within the frame of Law & Order, Caryn’s whiteness and her gender make her worthy of protection by and from the state, and in so doing, the show reinforces White womanhood as innocent and virtuous.
White women portrayed as suspects on Law & Order always have the capacity for redemption, no matter how mired in drug addiction they might be. They could redeem themselves from their descent into illicit drug use through family, therapy, or community service because their drug use was seen as a minor character flaw not central to their identity. For instance, one episode features a story line involving affluent students at an elite prep school on Manhattan’s Park Avenue (Season 15, Episode 10). “Maria,” the lone student of color in the group, portrayed as a scholarship student from Washington Heights, a neighborhood comprised mostly of people of color, is only able to attend the school with financial assistance. When one of the young White girls, “Sabina,” is recovering from a drug overdose, one of the detectives expresses surprise at her drug use, commenting, “Smart girl such as yourself, going to Princeton and all.” Sabina replies that she “made a mistake,” and the detective tells her to stay in school and get herself some drug counseling. In contrast, the detectives never make similar comments to Maria even though she’s attending the same school and similarly drug involved. Sabina, the young White girl, is seen as full of potential (“going to Princeton and all”), and her drug use is a minor detour from her path to the Ivy League, if only she can get help for her “mistake.” Sabina’s whiteness and social class is juxtaposed next to Maria’s Otherness throughout the episode, with Sabina’s mother commenting that scholarship students are from “a different world with different norms” and later saying that Maria is “from that neighborhood. She must have taken them to that awful place.” Sabina, as an affluent White girl, is never held accountable for her own actions—instead, her drug use gets attributed to her proximity to her working-class Latinx peer. Furthermore, Washington Heights gets derisively labeled as “that neighborhood” implying that it is not as “good” as the affluent White neighborhood of Park Avenue (here problematically equating whiteness with goodness, despite three of the girls involved with drug use being White and only one being Latinx). This all works to reify the presumed innocence of White women while further propagating harmful tropes about people of color, criminality, and drug usage while also holding people of color accountable for the criminality of White people. Once again, whiteness and gender work together in such a way to make her addiction a tragedy that requires empathy rather than a punitive, carceral response.
The fictional characters Celia, Caryn, and Sabina on Law & Order represent recurring themes about the role of White women on the show and are very much like the nonfictional characters on Intervention: White women involved in drug use who are afforded a sympathetic, three-dimensional telling of their stories that makes their addiction a tragedy of wasted whiteness and defiled womanhood. Drug involvement for these White women characters moves them into a temporary, contingent spoiled identity (Goffman, 2009). This portrayal of White women exists in stark contrast to both narratives that involve people of color, in which drug addiction is framed as the inevitable result of an ontological criminality, and to the lived reality of the carceral state in the U.S., which overwhelmingly targets Black and Latinx people while it largely exempts White women.
However, we found a striking turn in this general pattern to the portrayal of White women in the Law & Order episodes. This show also regularly features White women in prominent roles as agents of the carceral state, arresting, and prosecuting people of color. Each episode features two detectives and two prosecutors; many episodes also include the interim or permanent district attorney. Although there have been many cast changes throughout the long run of the show, the role of White women as agents of the state remained rather consistent. While White women were very rarely cast in the role of detectives most consistently in the first 10 seasons, White women were cast in one of the recurring roles of prosecutor. In several of the spin-off series, such as Law & Order: SVU, women are featured in recurring roles as detectives and prosecutors. For this, Law & Order is touted by some fans as “dismantling gender stereotypes.” One described the show as portraying women as “strong-willed and hardworking alongside their male counterparts” (Hussain, 2016). But, rather than dismantling gender stereotypes, Law & Order uses the patina of gender equality in order to reinforce the racial order. By creating recurring White women characters who are agents of the carceral state, Law & Order returns to an older narrative about drugs in which racialized Others are the primary users and dealers of drugs and thus a threat to society.
In this return to that older narrative in this quasi-gender-equal frame, White women become the embodiment of carceral feminism. For example, a character named “Nora,” an interim district attorney played by a White actress, refers to a potential suspect as a “ghetto kid turned pro,” reifying the stereotype that Black men can only be successful through sports and entertainment. Later in the same episode, she says that the young man embraced the “thug life image,” a comment associating him with criminality, even though he is a successful professional athlete. Her character in this episode is both a symbol of (White) women’s gender advances and an agent of the carceral state who is adjudicating this young, Black man’s fate. The not-so-subtle racism of her remarks is never challenged within the show but is portrayed as just part of the gritty knowledge required of those who work within the criminal justice system.
Throughout the run of Law & Order, there were a succession of prosecutors played by White women: Claire Kincaid (played by Jill Hennessy), Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), Abigail “Abby” Carmichael (Angie Harmon), Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm), and Alexandra Borgia (Annie Parisse). Each played the “second chair” (always female) role to the male lead Jack McCoy (Sam Waterson). Because McCoy remains the same over the run of the show but the women change regularly, it makes the women seem interchangeable. Throughout Law & Order, White women are props, offering support but little challenge to McCoy, and softening the rough edges of the image of the carceral state by giving it the hue of gender equality. However, when they are given more lines to develop their characters more fully, it is often to push for even harsher state responses. For example, in one episode Abby Carmichael pushes for a more punitive sentence for a Black man who has killed a White woman. In another, Serena Southerlyn suggests that the “hollow formality” of advising someone of their civil rights is not necessary for “illegal immigrants.” Alexandra Borgia promises a victim’s mother that the sentence will be “extremely harsh.” The characters these women play are acolytes to the carceral state, yet they nevertheless yield immense power over defendants, most of whom are Black or Latinx. When Alexandra is killed by a suspect she is investigating, McCoy is enraged, conducts an illegal prosecution to convict him, and secures life sentences. In death, Alexandra slips back into the passive, White woman who must be avenged, and McCoy takes up the mantle of White male protector through the carceral state.
Therapeutic and Carceral Agency
In the narratives of Intervention and Law & Order, we found that White women were afforded different types of agency when it came to drugs and drug-related issues. On Intervention, White women are assumed to have therapeutic agency. Even as they might be portrayed as passive victims of their drug addiction, most often as a result of an earlier personal tragedy, such as divorced parents, they still were assumed to have full agency when it came to their recovery. People on the show, such as Kristen, may not be capable of getting themselves into treatment (hence the need for the intervention), but once in treatment, the norms of an abstinence approach to recovery rely on the agency of the individual. The drug addiction of Kristen, like that of the other White women on Intervention, is wholly within the power of their individual agency to overcome. Similarly, on Law & Order, the White women characters are assumed to have a powerful, individual agency at their disposal that will enable them to master their addiction. Caryn, the cocaine-smuggling character, is given a second chance with the underlying assumption that she will not only be able to kick her drug habit but she will also be able to extricate herself from her obligations to the drug cartel. Even the teenaged Sabina is admonished to “clean yourself up,” so she can proceed to college in the Ivy League. In both Intervention and Law & Order, this kind of therapeutic agency over addiction draws on an individualized notion of the self, devoid of the need for community, and rooted in whiteness.
White women on Law & Order were afforded an additional kind of agency as part of the carceral state. In their roles as police detectives, as prosecutors, and as district attorneys, White women wield the power of the state in the service of the drug war. In particular, the series of White women prosecutors served as handmaidens to the carceral state, sometimes stepping out of their secondary role and into the lead when they called for harsher punishment for those under their power. Thus, within Law & Order, White women’s carceral agency puts them on more equal footing with White men, and in so doing, gives them power over people of color, including men and women.
Both the therapeutic model valorized by Intervention and the carceral model promoted by Law & Order rely on neoliberal regimes of citizenship that compel us all to be “healthy,” “sober,” and “law-abiding” (Metzl & Kirkland, 2010). Alongside these neoliberal regimes are particular notions of White womanhood. This ideal of White womanhood demands physical attractiveness, (hetero)sexual propriety, bodily restraint, wifely loyalty, and motherly responsibility to, and sacrificed for, (required) biological offspring. These demands are mapped on top of what is required to be considered a good, productive, neoliberal citizen. In turn, these complicated ideologies justify the way contemporary drug problems are addressed in the U.S., from news articles to policy decisions.
Conclusion
In the U.S., there has been much research and analysis documenting the myriad ways racism operates through drug policy, but there has been relatively less attention to the way that whiteness makes this possible and almost no focus on the symbolic role of White womanhood (for recent exceptions, see Hansen, 2017; Knight, 2017; Laguna, 2018; McCorkel, 2017). Our analysis of Intervention and Law & Order provides one such examination of the ways whiteness and gender reshape the dominant narratives of addiction, which are typically used to demonize racialized Others. For many decades, popular culture representations of drug use in the U.S. have been associated with people of color and with criminality. White drug use, in contrast, has been largely portrayed as exceptional. Historically, White women’s drug use has been attributed to the criminal influence of men of color. Policy makers, such as Anslinger in the 1930s, used narratives about White women to justify punitive approaches to drug use.
Our analysis reveals that, in both Intervention and Law & Order, producers create narratives of white drug users who are fully human and deserving of empathy. In these shows, drug addiction involving White people is not a crime but a misfortune. White women involved with drugs are also portrayed as having failed the standards of White femininity, and thus, the social order. Therefore, they can and must be redeemed to restore the social order, and with it, White dominance. They must also reclaim their class status by overcoming poverty or morally suspect sex work and returning to their roles as “productive” citizens. Meanwhile, in the era of a modicum of gender equality, White women are also depicted as participants in the carceral state. In these roles, White women are actively involved in the state apparatus that works to demonize and criminalize drug users of color.
These representations both reflect and reinforce what is happening in the policy arena in the U.S. The New York Times headline calling for a “gentler drug war” (Seelye, 2015) is just one of the many press accounts both documenting and justifying a turn in the policy and rhetoric deployed when widespread drug use and overdose is perceived to affect predominantly White communities. Indeed, the way the current opioid crisis in the U.S. has been racialized as White and gendered female by the media is a necessary precursor for the “gentler” approach to treatment and harm reduction in contrast to the punitive, law enforcement responses when a drug epidemic is located in communities of color.
Our findings from these popular U.S. television shows are consistent with previous studies about whiteness and drugs. For example, one analysis of news stories found systemic biases in the portrayal of stories from White suburban communities and those from predominantly Black and Latinx communities (Netherland & Hansen, 2016a, 2016b). Stories about Whites involved a sympathetic backstory, a blameless victim, and policy responses that were oriented toward treatment and harm reduction. In contrast, stories about Black and Latinx people were almost exclusively arrest reports with little or no humanizing content, reinforcing the associations between people of color, drugs, and criminality.
As with colonialism and lynching, in the drug war, White womanhood is central to the symbolic rendering of what is being protected. Hansen argues that the anxiety triggered by opioid overdose deaths and the declining life expectancy for middle age Whites is rooted in concerns about the social reproduction of White privilege and the White nuclear family (Hansen, 2017). The soaring death rates, along with the media focus on White female heroin users, have called White womanhood and family life into question. Cultural representations, such as those on Intervention and Law & Order, work to reassure the viewer that White womanhood and, thus, the White-dominant social order in the U.S. can be redeemed and restored.
When Whites, especially White women, use drugs, a policy paradox emerges that must be resolved. The draconian war on drugs, which is central to maintaining control over people of color, cannot be applied to them. Hence, they must be portrayed as a different kind of drug user—one who is blameless and capable of redemption. For this kind of drug user, the response is not handcuffs and cages but sympathy and support (Hansen, 2017). This is consistent with what we found in the cultural narratives of drug addiction in involving White women.
In order to fully understand contemporary drug problems and the policies that seek to address them, we need to make visible how whiteness, gender, and class operate to maintain social hierarchies. We must also hold producers, networks, and advertisers accountable for portrayals that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes, as well as narratives that suggest White women’s lives are worthier of protection. Similarly, we need to expose the ways in which our drug policies, which are often presented as race-neutral, have produced gross racial disparities. Rather than color-blind or White-women-only approaches, we need deliberate attention on whiteness and gender in cultural representations of addiction and in drug policy.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.