Discourses of racialized moral panic in a suburban community: Teenagers, heroin and media in Plano, Texas

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate through ethnography the operation of a contemporary moral panic in the North American suburb of Plano, Texas that occurred from 1997--1999 when a cluster of teenagers died of heroin overdoses in this suburban community. In particular, this dissertation will show that a reliance on race as a mechanism for explaining the presence of heroin in the suburb and the deaths of these teenagers demonstrates the operation of a racialized moral panic. The term "racialized" is utilized as an adjective to embellish the analysis of the evolution of a moral panic within the suburb that continually reflected notions of race throughout its existence. The subjects of this dissertation are the numerous individuals who represent different institutional discourses who participated in various discussions and the creation of strategies that emerged throughout the tenure of the moral panic in the suburb.; In addition to contributing to the literature on race in anthropology, suburban North America, and moral panic analysis; this dissertation methodologically demonstrates the practice of media ethnography through a comprehensive content analysis of several forms of media, and the ethnographic reception and conveyance of that media among individuals within the context of fieldwork. Both the residents of Plano and the media that helped establish the moral panic in Plano relied on a representational history of the suburb that conflates and entangles notions of race, class and space and demarcates the suburb as white.