AIDS conspiracies in black America are so entrenched that one researcher, Jacob Heller, found people in focus groups making virtually the same claims in 2012 as were made in 1992. “To find a rumor faithfully repeated after two decades demonstrates remarkable durability,” he wrote. Heller pointed out that even respected celebrities repeated beliefs in conspiracy theories, sometimes intentionally and sometimes perhaps not: comedian Bill Cosby, in 1991, and actor Will Smith, in 1999, both suggested HIV could have been manmade, while Obama’s onetime preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, stated it outright. “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” he roared during a 2003 sermon. “Governments lie!”
Wright repeated those claims in a 2008 appearance at the National Press Club. “Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” (Around then, Wright became such a headache for Obama that the future president denounced his views and cut ties with him. The following year, Wright told an interviewer he hadn’t talked to Obama in some time: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.”)
Beyond medical fears, recent conspiracy theories in black America have focused on the suspicion that the white establishment will cut down any black leader who threatens the status quo. During his confirmation hearings in 1991, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas thus explained accusations of having sexually harassed Anita Hill, a female subordinate. Thomas told then-senator Joe Biden that the whole thing was a setup, testifying that “someone, some interest group came up with this story” to discredit him. Other people called Hill a “pawn” for some shadowy white cabal focused on destroying a black man before he could rise to power. (The fact that Hill herself was black was somehow elided from the discussion.)
Virtually the same narrative played out in 2015, when accusations mounted against Bill Cosby for what ended up as more than sixty allegations of sexual assault. Cosby eventually stood trial for his alleged crimes against a single accuser, Andrea Constand, and, after a mistrial, was found guilty the second time around. But the Cosby truthers—easily findable on YouTube and Twitter—opined that the allegations were revenge for Cosby having tried to buy NBC in the mid-1990s. “The world really fears black power!” one person wrote in a typical tweet. “Like the Bill Cosby shit and him trying to buy NBC then all of a sudden that rape shit came out.” Even Phylicia Rashad, who played Cosby’s wife, Clair Huxtable, got in on it. “What you’re seeing is the destruction of a legacy,” she told Showbiz 411 blogger Roger Friedman in 2015. “And I think it’s orchestrated.” Someone, she added, “is determined to keep Bill Cosby off TV. And it’s worked.”
The assumption that white America will respond violently to black economic power is, of course, rooted in reality. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1900s, a neighborhood called Greenwood became known as the Black Wall Street; it was thriving thanks to the discovery of oil. In 1921, the area’s white occupants decided they could no longer endure the sight of financially independent black people. In a horrifying massacre, they used private planes to firebomb the neighborhood’s buildings, then killed the fleeing residents with machine guns. More than thirty-five city blocks were leveled, eight hundred people were hospitalized, and at least six thousand people were detained. The National Guard declared thirty people dead, but the Red Cross put the real number at more than three hundred. Even today, the incident is often referred to as the Tulsa Race Riots, suggesting an equal fight between two equally culpable sides.
Every shocking incident in the history of black America has thus paved the way for a related conspiracy theory alive today. The very real government violence against black activist groups in the 1960s—such as the killing of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the FBI and Chicago police—implanted fear that the state is not above doing the same thing to contemporary activists. Those concerns were urgently heightened after three Black Lives Matter activists from Ferguson, Missouri, were killed in similar ways: Deandre Joshua was found dead in his car in 2014, as were Darren Seals in 2016 and Edward Crawford in 2017. Both Seals’s and Joshua’s cars had also been lit on fire; local authorities said Crawford’s death looked like either an accident or a suicide.
Missouri state senator Maria Chapelle-Nadal, who represents Ferguson, found the deaths troubling. She addressed Crawford’s death on the Missouri Senate floor: “I found out this morning another young man from my district died in the same fashion as two or three other people who were active in Ferguson,” she said. “The people who were murdered at this point, they were all people who have been seen prominently in the media.” In an interview with The Root, she suggested that local militia groups could have targeted the men. And Root columnist Jason Johnson wrote that, at the very least, the killings needed a more serious investigation than he suspected the Ferguson police had given them.
“It is possible to believe that Crawford’s death was just an accident,” Johnson wrote. “It is possible to believe that he decided to take his own life in full view of other people in the car.” (According to a police statement, two witnesses who were in the car with him told police that Crawford was “distraught over personal matters relating to witnesses,” rummaged in the backseat, and shot himself in the head in front of them.) “It is also possible,” Johnson wrote, “in a town where police claimed that 19-year-old Michael Brown punched out a cop and then charged into a hail of bullets from 30 feet away in broad daylight, that police could be completely lying to cover up some more nefarious cause of death.” He added, “There is a long history in America of the police jumping to the conclusion that everything, from shootings to hangings of black people, is a suicide so as not to tug too hard on the strings of violent white supremacy that hold communities together.”
Conspiratorial thinking also furnished an explanation for killings in Flint, Michigan, where a mostly black populace was exposed to staggering levels of lead in their drinking water beginning in 2014, when the city started sourcing its water from the Flint River without properly treating it. City and state officials denied there was a problem well after Flint residents began to notice that their water smelled, tasted, and looked peculiar. “This is not an emergency,” read a notice from the city sent to residents in July 2015. “If a situation arises where the water is no longer safe to drink, you will be notified within 24 hours.”
It took until December 2015—after a battery of tests from independent organizations showed high lead levels in the water and in children’s blood—for the governor of Michigan to declare a state of emergency, followed by the federal government. In response, residents began suing the city and the state. One of the first was nineteen-year-old Sasha Avonna Bell, who claimed her toddler had contracted lead poisoning. In April 2016, Bell was found shot to death in her home, along with a friend, Sacorya Renee Reed. This came just three days after a Flint water treatment plant foreman named Matthew McFarland was found dead in his own home by a friend.
Natural News, the conspiracy-oriented, increasingly unhinged “natural health” site edited by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, baldly called both deaths a cover-up, indicating that the FBI had killed people to conceal the extent of the water crisis. Adams added, “For those who wonder why, as the editor of Natural News, I carry a loaded weapon with me at all times, consider how often whistleblowers who threaten to expose government conspiracy crimes end up dead.”
But even mainstream outlets like BET struck a conspiratorial note, running with the headline “Something Terrible Happened to the First Person to Sue Flint Over Water,” and saying that Bell’s death was “raising concerns.” Buried in the piece, one sentence noted that “a suspect” had been arrested, namely Bell’s ex-boyfriend Malek Thornton. Thornton pleaded guilty in October 2017 and agreed to testify against a co-defendant, Toron Fisher, who he said came with him to the apartment. McFarland, the water treatment foreman, was later found to have died from drug intoxication combined with hypertension; Natural News didn’t bother to cover those developments other than to call Thornton “obviously a patsy in all this.”
In fact, if you’re not looking for strict accuracy, the best, deepest, weirdest discussion of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in black America is just inches away, with the turn of a radio dial or down a YouTube rabbit hole. Conspiracy theories are prevalent in hip-hop, which makes sense: the genre has functioned as a voice, mirror, and social conscience for African Americans for decades. In 1998, in his song “Channel Zero,” the rapper Canibus gave a breakneck recitation of fifty years of conspiracy theories. The song manages to touch on mind control, brain implants, and all of our presidents being Masons, as well as containing one of the most incredible rhyming couplets in the history of rap and conspiracy writing:
Responsible for launderin’ trillions of dollars from the nation
for the construction of underground military installations
Abductions and cattle mutilations
Experiments on human patients
Can take place in several subterranean bases …
Elsewhere in hip-hop, Chris Brown speculated that Ebola might be used as a biological weapon; in the song “Heard ’Em Say,” Kanye West claims that the government “administered AIDS”; and Snoop Dogg made a video decrying flu shots. “Fuck that, I’m not getting no flu shots ’cause it’s flu season,” he declared, adding that he’d be sticking with honey, oranges, and lemons. “I think they’re shooting some control in you, some shit to take control of you,” he added. “When they have your mind, body, and soul, they going to slow you down a bit. I don’t trust it. I’m cool.” Another rapper, TI, joined the Nation of Islam and began toting Tony Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s anti-vaccine spokesperson, around with him to radio interviews.
Rap, according to John L. Jackson, is “a medium that can carry conspiracy because it’s operating on multiple levels.” Although Chuck D of Public Enemy called hip-hop “the black CNN,” Jackson cautioned that the lyrics are usually more nuanced than a rookie listener understands. “It’s a way to talk about the real world and experiences that don’t get thematized,” he says, meaning experiences that aren’t often reflected in popular culture or dialogue. “But what that obscures is that hip-hop is also a genre where there’s a surface meaning that can be sometimes easy to grasp, and—because of the dense use of metaphor and how they use vernacular—there can be latent levels of meaning, and if you listen as a casual fan you won’t catch it at all. Embedded all the time is stuff you don’t know unless you’re very initiated.”
The overriding message is that no one could possibly tell black Americans they don’t have the right to reasonable suspicion of the government. (“A right to be hostile,” too, as Public Enemy put it.) Although the distrust can have grave consequences (as with the rejection of AIDS and vaccines), black Americans and other disenfranchised groups see no reason to let their guard down. “A weird thing about being black is some of it is true and some of it is not,” Michael Harriot told me reflectively. “But,” he said, “none of it is crazy.”
In a new wrinkle, we have seen evidence that foreign powers have harnessed this interplay of truth and suspicion among minorities to exploit for their own ends. In a series of stories, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, and Buzzfeed News revealed that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm, set up fake black and Native activist groups online as part of an apparent effort to stoke division and distrust of the government and each other. During the 2016 elections, Buzzfeed found, the agency backed a website called BlackMattersUS, which positioned itself as a social-justice news site focused “mostly on racism and police brutality.”
The New York Times reported that a number of Russian-backed Facebook pages were dedicated to stoking every minority-related divide in the country. The pages, which used locally produced articles and news segments, focused on black issues or spread anti-Muslim fake stories, such as one that claimed Muslim immigrants in Michigan were living high on the hog on welfare, providing lavishly for themselves and their multiple wives.
The pages had names like Blacktivist and Being Patriotic, and they paid Facebook to sponsor posts, blasting them directly into the newsfeeds of people who were likely to be most receptive to them. Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told the Times that the practice amounted to “cultural hacking.”
The existence of such fake sites confirms one distressing, permanent point: actual government conspiracies have generated a long afterlife. They linger in the collective memory, give rise to new conspiracy theories, and lay out a detailed, easy-to-follow playbook for fomenting further division and distrust.
The federal government has done little to dispel that distrust. In the Trump administration, with Nazi-affiliated and white supremacist groups indisputably on the rise, the Department of Homeland Security gutted funding for Countering Violent Extremism, an Obama-era program that devoted resources to organizations that fight white supremacist groups and help former members leave the movement. At the same time, the FBI has poured more resources into following those whom they label “black identity extremists.”
A leaked memo from the agency written in August 2017 warned that such people might be angry about police officers killing African Americans. “Police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement,” the memo claimed. “And will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” The memo never clearly defined the meaning of “black identity extremism.” Judging by the examples it cited, the category is an unholy mix of lawful protest against police violence, violent acts against police committed by members of such groups as the Moorish Nation, and lone wolves like Micah Johnson, an Army Reserve soldier who returned from Afghanistan and in 2016 killed five police officers in an ambush in Dallas. The FBI claimed that BIEs “proactively target police” and justify their actions with what the agency called “perceived injustices against African Americans, and in some cases, their identified affiliations with violent extremist groups.”
In November 2017, in response to questioning from members of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wouldn’t say whether he considers Black Lives Matter an extremist group. “I’m not able to comment on that,” he told Karen Bass, a black Democratic congresswoman from California. But, he added, “I’m aware that there are groups that do have an extraordinary commitment to their racial identity, and some have even transformed themselves into violent activists.”
Bass asked whether the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis would be identified as “white identity extremists.” Sessions attempted to avoid answering. “I didn’t follow that question,” he responded. Eventually, after a pained few minutes, he admitted the FBI hadn’t produced a report on any white extremist groups.
When Foreign Policy published the leaked memo, one former FBI agent, Michael German—putting wind in the sails of conspiracy theorists everywhere—said plainly that the agency had identified a movement that wasn’t real to justify ramping up enforcement activities.
“Basically,” he said, “it’s black people who scare them.”