CELEBRATING THE INTERSECTION OF BLACK CULTURE AND CANNABIS
VIPER, TEA AND THE REEFER MAN: THE INTERSECTION OF BLACK HISTORY AND CANNABIS CULTURE
One of the many outcomes of the racially biased War on Drugs and 1970s cannabis prohibition is that mass incarceration, not creative inspiration, is what many people think of when they consider the intersection between Black cultural history and cannabis culture. But Black artistry has long been entwined with cannabis. And it was the rising mainstream popularity of Black culture that some of the racist bureaucrats of the 1930s responded to when developing policies still causing harm to marginalized communities today.
For Black History Month this year, we dig into how Black culture and cannabis culture intersected over a century ago, and changed the world in the process.
BLACK CANNABIS HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES AND BEYOND
To understand why Anslinger saw such a close connection between Black culture and cannabis culture, we need to rewind the clock a lot further—to the 12th century, to be precise. While cannabis cultivation likely originated in what is now western China, it eventually followed other commodities along the Silk Road, reaching commercial centers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. By the 16th and 17th centuries, when European nations began their colonial conquests in earnest, various cannabis products—particularly hashish—could be found around the world.
In India, visiting merchants learned cannabis was called bhang. In southern Africa, the Khoekhoe called it dagga. In Hawaii, it went by pakalōlō. Spanish, Portuguese and British colonists of the day valued fibrous cannabis sativa plants as a key component for the ropes and sails that made maritime exploration possible. But Europeans had long known about the other uses for hemp—a word that comes from the ancient Germanic root for cannabis, hanf—thanks to documents written by early explorers like Marco Polo and ancient Greek medical texts.
Cannabis followed colonial merchants from India and Africa to the Caribbean, along with numerous other commodities, indentured servants and enslaved peoples. As Chris S. Duvall notes in The African Roots of Marijuana, white explorers and merchants writing about their experiences abroad tended to portray their cannabis consumption as “open-minded experimentation, free-thinking expression, or intrepid worldliness.” Unsurprisingly, those same elites cast non-white, non-European cannabis consumption as exotic at best and at worst as immoral, unproductive and detrimental.
THE PROHIBITION ERA AND THE JAZZ AGE
That characterization intensified in the 19th and early 20th centuries as slavery was slowly outlawed, first in Europe and its colonies, and later in the United States. Following the Haitian Revolution of the late 1700s and political upheaval and natural disasters in other Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, the American South saw an influx of free Black immigrants. That Afro-Caribbean diaspora mingled with the culture of Black Americans that developed around the Civil War, especially in Southern cities like New Orleans.
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