Sharpe, Tanya Telfair. <b>BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL: SEX FOR CRACK COCAINE EXCHANGE AND POOR BLACK WOMEN</b>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 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 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, 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 cultural inferiority [11], the framework for class exploitation was validated. Legislative responses have consistently eliminated or scaled-down programs that addressed the needs of a growing underclass.In 1996, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF] replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]. Under the new social program, educational and childcare opportunities for welfare recipients were eliminated as the legislation mandated unpaid labor for women whose youngest child was over age one, after twenty-four months of assistance. In short, legislation insures that the poor remain poor in the United States and cultivates an environment that attitudinally and structurally facilitates poverty.Behind the Eight Ball illuminates the infrastructure of the crack cocaine industry in Atlanta, GA among poor black women. The crack-addicted women trade sex for crack, fall victim to unwanted pregnancies, HIV/AIDS infection, prostitution and violence and disrupt an already distressed, poor community. Sharpe found that sex-for-crack exchange pregnancies were often carried to term because of a deeply held religious belief that babies are gifts from God. Nevertheless, Sharpe relates how an informant was so driven by crack addiction that not even labor served as a deterrent: Using crack cocaine up to the very point of delivery was one of the most startling findings of this research [176].Unplanned, sex-for-crack pregnancies have had a startling long-term impact on extended family networks, often cited as a measure of resilience among African Americans. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.257 | 0.084 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".