Sixteen miles: New users, stock dealers, and racialization in small cities

ABSTRACT This study examines how proximate small cities in the United States that have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, disproportionately high rates of opioid overdose, but different racial demographics, narrate local experiences of the opioid epidemic. Using critical discourse analysis, we analyzed 251 local news articles from Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. This comparative study highlights the racialization of space and the racializing power of space in two small city newspapers: the Eagle Tribune and the Lowell Sun. We demonstrate how (White) criminality is made sympathetic through White death, and how space is employed as a multi-valiant mechanism of colorblind racialization. We theorize the construction of a distorted and racialized “supply chain,” featuring narratives of “stock dealers” from “source cities” moving drugs into predominately White “receiver cities” populated by vulnerable “new users,” employing and producing space as a racialized frame. Ultimately, we map how familiar racialization and novel decriminalization is produced in/by local news media.