In the case of Black Lives Matter, the FBI engaged in a pattern of surveillance. In 2015, the agency used secret spy planes to film a large-scale protest in Baltimore waged in response to the death of a young black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody. The same planes were used to surveil protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the death of Michael Brown, also an African American. Buzzfeed News reported that the FBI deployed secret spy planes some thirty-five hundred times in the second half of 2015. The FBI defended the legality of aerial surveillance, insisting that they weren’t gathering footage of particular peaceful activists, but instead using planes to follow “terrorists, spies and serious criminals,” per a statement by agency deputy director Mark Giuliano.
Sometimes the agency is more pointed: ahead of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, per the Washington Post, at least six Black Lives Matter activists said they were contacted by the FBI and essentially warned not to come to the city to protest. The FBI characterized the calls and in-person visits as “community outreach.” The FBI also directly contacted at least three people involved in the opposition at Standing Rock; all three people, according to reporting from the Guardian, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and would not respond to the agents’ requests to talk, fearing they were trying to build a criminal case. Red Fawn Fallis, a water protector at Standing Rock, was arrested in October 2016 and charged with firing a gun belonging to her romantic partner, who was, as The Intercept reported, an FBI informant. (The informant, Heath Harmon, told investigators he was hired by the FBI to “observe” the Standing Rock movement, though there is no evidence that he induced Fallis to fire his gun; she fired three shots after being tackled and pinned down by law enforcement officers during a protest, hitting no one.)
State conspiracies involving minority communities have not been limited only to surveillance or disinformation. In the mid-twentieth century, respected national health agencies and institutions saw fit to operate and experiment on ordinary citizens who were too ill-informed, powerless, or poor to resist. Their unwitting subjects included convicts, the mentally ill, and even children in orphanages. In each case, the people disproportionately affected were black; nearly as often, they were Latinx or Native American.
One of the best known of these genuine conspiracies against people of color was forced sterilization, which took place in thirty-two states for most of the twentieth century, with funding from the federal government. In 1907, Indiana passed a law making it legal to sterilize the “feeble-minded,” a law that California copied two years later, followed by a cascade of other states in what were usually dubbed “asexualization acts.” This system of eugenics—which Hitler vocally admired and would later copy—targeted other undesirables, too.
Some women unknowingly had their reproductive organs removed during C-sections or were threatened with losing their welfare benefits if they didn’t accept sterilization. Medical students in southern states carried out what became known as “Mississippi appendectomies,” unnecessarily sterilizing mostly black women without their knowledge as a routine part of their training. In California alone, more than twenty thousand people had forced hysterectomies or vasectomies, and the procedure was banned outright only in 1979.
These practices have a long and disturbing half-life. The Urban Indian Health Institute found in 2010 that American Indian and Alaska Native women have higher rates of sterilization than white women, adding that more study would be required to tell them exactly why. The UIHI speculated that it was possible that some of the women surveyed had been “directly affected” by coercive sterilization practices, in which women may have been subject to “harassment or deceit” to get them to agree to the procedure.
The ostensibly voluntary sterilization of prisoners hasn’t ceased altogether, either. In 2017, Tennessee judge Sam Benningfield ignited a firestorm of controversy when it was revealed that he offered to reduce inmates’ sentences by thirty days if they agreed to a vasectomy or a contraceptive implant. (Curiously, he offered just two days’ good time in exchange for taking a class on neonatal development and substance abuse.) The ACLU of Tennessee objected to the practice and pointed out its echoes of the forced sterilization acts of the past; Benningfield responded by saying he hoped to help inmates “get on their feet and make something of themselves.”
Then there was the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of black men with syphilis in rural Alabama were intentionally left untreated to track the progress of the disease. The experiment ran from 1932 to 1972, continuing after syphilis was found to be treatable with penicillin in 1945. The Tuskegee victims didn’t see justice until a 1973 class-action lawsuit and a subsequent out-of-court settlement awarded them $10 million. The federal government was also forced to establish a medical care program for Tuskegee survivors, as well as for their wives, widows, and offspring. Even then, nobody apologized for Tuskegee until President Bill Clinton did so formally in 1997. The notoriety of the program spurred a host of ethical reforms in how researchers are legally required to deal with human subjects.
Among black communities, Tuskegee became a byword for medical experimentation, neglect, and conspiracy—a particular betrayal that stands for the universal experience. It is not surprising that a history of enslavement, lynching, segregation, surveillance—along with unequal access to housing, education, and jobs—has produced a relationship of distrust between black Americans and their government.
To Dr. John L. Jackson, the dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, Uscinski and Parent’s claim that black communities are growing less conspiratorial seemed like wishful thinking. A cultural anthropologist, Jackson has spent a lot of time around conspiracy-leaning black communities across the United States and in Israel (where he studied the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a group of polygamous vegans who have thought deeply about ways to achieve eternal life). Jackson’s rebuttal of Uscinski and Parent’s theory is all of one word: Obama.
“The way African Americans read the eight years of Obama is as this unrelenting and unfair demonization of an otherwise squeaky-clean president,” he says. “It almost feels for a lot of folks like it’s the quintessential example of the impossibility of being accepted. If Obama didn’t have any serious skeletons, yet could be so roundly demonized, the idea is that no one else has a chance.”
The most egregious attack on President Obama was itself a conspiracy theory: birtherism, in which a whole lot of people, including the president who followed him, argued that Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim who had stolen the presidency. It was the most literal (and racist) expression of the idea that an alien force had taken control of the country. Republican congressman Bill Posey even proposed legislation that candidates for president have to include their birth certificate with their filing materials. The birther claims became so loud—due in part to their enthusiastic promotion by Donald Trump—that Obama eventually held a press conference to release his long-form birth certificate.
Birtherism wasn’t the only conspiracy theory surrounding Obama’s presidency. At his inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts bungled a few words of the oath of office, which prompted claims that Obama wasn’t really president. (Roberts and Obama quickly staged a do-over, just to be on the safe side.)
Beyond the treatment of Obama, Jackson argues that even non-conspiracist black Americans are still aware of the outlines of the most popular suspicions. “There’s two or three degrees of separation between a non-conspiracy theorist and conspiracy theorist in black America,” he says. “Folks will at least be cognizant of what the claims are. Folks are trafficking in the discourse and know it enough.” And, he adds, “There are moments, even fleetingly, when something happens in the news or an inexplicable occurrence and they’re willing to give a head-nod” to some conspiratorial ideas.
The reasons are fairly obvious. “Folks can draw on some pretty significant historical precedents for racialized conspiracies,” Jackson noted. Being black in this country comes with a “cultural sensibility that says you have to be cautious.” Those precedents explain “all the deep-seated distrust of the medical establishment and criminal justice system. There are ways that folks don’t believe that mainstream American society has the best interest of black people at heart. That’s not a cockamamie thing.” In an interview with Vice, rapper Bun B echoed Jackson’s view, saying that conspiracy thinking is the result of questioning American history. “If you think of ten things that seem strange and then find evidence for four of them, you start to question the other six,” he said. “When people say, ‘This is a result of systematic oppression of entire races of people’ and then you look at the Tuskegee experiments, you look at Guantanamo Bay, it does give you pause about blindly assuming certain things.”
Some groups seek to take advantage of that suspicion, like the Moorish Nation or the Washitaw Nation based in Louisiana, which claims Native American origins and tries to gain tribal rights, usually without success. Most notably there’s the Nation of Islam, the black separatist group. In the 1950s and 1960s, its leader, Elijah Muhammad, warned repeatedly against vaccines and other forms of mainstream medical care like birth control, which he called a depopulation scheme and a “death plan.” To this day, NOI members are instructed to give their doctors an exemption letter to keep them from mandatory vaccines.
The distrust of vaccines has continued and expanded. In 2015, the NOI teamed up with the larger, mostly white anti-vaccine movement to encourage black families to refuse to vaccinate their children. One California NOI leader, Tony Muhammad, was convinced there is a CDC cover-up of the vaccine-autism connection after meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Vaccines are a depopulation scheme, he believes, both in the United States and in African countries. “We are a target,” he told me. “The world can go to hell. Black people are a target and it’s a shame nobody wants to admit it.”
Muhammad’s specific claims—that Bill Gates is funding the depopulation effort in Africa through his foundation’s vaccine work there—are not remotely true, but his underlying logic was tough to argue with. “We have a reason to be suspicious,” he said. “Until that situation is handled, I don’t trust the government. I don’t trust pharmaceutical companies to do their own studies, just like I don’t trust police departments to do their own internal investigations.… It’s all the same.”
Others against vaccines—like white conspiracist Mike Adams, the self-appointed Health Ranger—repeat the claims about vaccines and public-health programs in Africa to amplify their U.S. campaign, in the process reinforcing the idea that black people have been targeted for death. In November 2017, Adams sent out an email blast claiming that a recent plague outbreak in ten East African countries was not what it seemed. “Evidence is mounting that the plague outbreak in Africa may be a weaponized depopulation program,” Adams wrote. “Globalists everywhere are freaking out over the population explosion across Africa, with over 3 million new African babies born each month. Those same globalists are now calling for urgent action to reduce the population across Africa. The plague, it turns out, is the easiest way for them to accomplish that.”
Besides vaccines, AIDS conspiracism has also taken deep root in black America. The most common theory is that the CIA created HIV and AIDS in a lab to wipe out black and gay people. (The agency has also been repeatedly accused of dumping heroin and crack in black neighborhoods to prompt addiction and ensnarement in the criminal justice system.) The CIA-AIDS narrative was furthered by a KGB disinformation campaign in the 1980s, Operation INFEKTION, part of the KGB’s so-called active measures of disinformation. KGB agents spread the rumor that AIDS was created as a biological weapon in a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The allegations first appeared in a pro-Soviet newspaper in India in 1983, and spread all over the world by 1987; an even more pernicious version of the lie alleged that the virus was spread through “AIDS-oiled condoms,” potentially discouraging people from using methods of safer sex. In 1992, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Yevgeny Primakov, acknowledged the KGB had created and advanced those rumors.
The belief that AIDS was created to destroy black communities became widespread in various African countries, too: Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe once described AIDS as a “white man’s plot.” In 2004, Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan biologist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, called AIDS a biological weapon created to “wipe out the black race.” The disease is “not a curse from God to Africans or the black people,” she told a group in Nyeri, Kenya. “It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did” it.
Once again, actual historical conspiracies lend credibility to claims that would otherwise be considered outrageous. “The conspiracy about AIDS is no more or less unbelievable than the Tuskegee experiment,” Michael Harriot, a journalist for The Root, pointed out to me.
In 2005, a study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes found that 53 percent of African Americans surveyed said they believed the government was withholding a cure for AIDS from poor people; 27 percent thought AIDS was produced in a government lab; 48 percent called HIV a “man-made virus.” However, more intentional conspiracy theories were less common: just 15 percent called AIDS a form of genocide against black people, and only 16 percent said the government created AIDS to control the black population.
But AIDS conspiracy theories are particularly dangerous in that they can lead directly to unsafe sex. The 2005 study found that black men who held conspiratorial beliefs about AIDS were less likely to use safer sex practices. The more a man supported one of these theories, the less likely he was to use a condom. (Women didn’t show that tendency.) The researchers also suggested that for men who didn’t particularly want to wear a condom in the first place, the conspiracy theories helped serve as justification for declining to slip one on.