Cocaine Alley queens: gender, race and drug use in American Midwestern cities, 1890–1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract From the 1890s to the 1920s across the American Midwest, newspapers reported arrests and altercations in ‘Cocaine Alleys’. Not all of these arrests involved people under the influence of drugs, but the term nevertheless became a non-geographic cultural construct highlighting readers’ fears about racialized drug use. By describing low-income Black women as ‘queens’ central to these spaces, newspapers mingled gender, race, criminality and drug use. The ‘Cocaine Alley Queen’ stereotype applied to Black women obscured the reality of White women’s greater propensity to recreational and medical narcotic addiction. As Black migrants moved from Southern states to Northern Midwestern industrialized cities, this reporting trend appeared in cities with higher Black populations than the state average. Newspapers created an intersectional, geographic identity that collected fears and stereotypes about drug use and Black communities when narcotics were accessible, and reformers sought to discipline Black, urban, female working-class bodies and impose middle-class behaviours on them.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".