African American Conspiracy Theories

In recent years, and in particular since the rise of Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, conspiracy theories have risen in prominence within the African American communities, with the language of conspiracy being used as a means to draw attention to the institutional racism that is present within America. Whereas conspiracy theories such as those concerned with events such as the assassination of President Kennedy base their arguments on historical and scientific evidence, African American conspiracies rely on what Peter Knight refers to in his text Conspiracy Cultures as the ‘authority of experience’. The black community’s ongoing narrative of racial injustice and legitimate violence, such as the Jim Crow laws and the atrocities carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, has led to a continuing and irreversible feeling of fragmentation and isolation within American society, resulting in the formation of conspiracies as a way to explain and understand the treatment that they have suffered. Since black communities can no longer be legally ghettoised, rumours have begun to circulate that white society has now turned to other more devious and underhand methods of keeping African Americans displaced, such as the intentional introduction of crack cocaine into their communities, the infection of the ghettoes with viruses such as AIDS, and the deliberate destruction of the levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

This conspiratorial rhetoric has been born out of a culture of dislocation and lack of belonging to which African Americans have been subject to since the time of chattel slavery, an atrocity that dominated over two centuries of American history and, even after the passing of the 13th Amendment in 1865 overturning the legality of slavery, has continued to resonate for African Americans, even in the face of revolutionary actions such as those taken during the Civil Rights Movement. Issues such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where hundreds of African American males were led to believe they were being treated for the disease when in fact they were left untreated, even after a cure had been discovered, have encouraged the permeation of conspiracy theories throughout the African American communities, and have led to conspiratorial rhetoric becoming their natural response to other incidents, such as the theories that pervaded black thought during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The echoes of actual examples of purposeful action taken against African Americans by the white mainstream, such as the enforced segregation of the black community, have led to a belief that anything is possible and anything can be true when considering the treatment of blacks within America; the visions of racial equality and justice that were prevalent during the 1960s have been shattered by the continuing maltreatment that the black community is subjected to, and recent examples such as the chaotic and derisory federal response to Hurricane Katrina have generated even more conspiratorial thought, drawn from the histories of slavery and Tuskegee in order to rationalise the neglect that the poor and the black communities of New Orleans suffered.

It is arguable that the conspiratorial rhetoric that arose during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is an understandable response due to the African American community’s narrative of racial discrimination at the hands of white America. There is a belief within the community that the levees which failed under the weight of Katrina were, in fact, deliberately destroyed in an attempt to flush out the poor, and predominately black, community from the ghettos of the city. Many believe that they heard an explosion when the levees were breached and, due to the treatment of blacks prior to the onslaught of the hurricane, are of the opinion that the levees were bombed by any number of organisations, including the Army Corp of Engineers, secret government agents, the Klan, FEMA operatives, corporate real estate interests, or by many other unnamed forces . Others believe that the levees were intentionally poorly built so as not to withstand the strength of a hurricane such as Katrina. Theories such as these are the result of events such as Tuskegee, and the general oppression that African Americans have been forced to undergo at the hands of white mainstream society. Spike Lee, through interviews with victims of Katrina in his 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts , explores the conspiratorial rhetoric that surrounded the event; Lee’s documentary does little to diffuse the rumours and has arguably been instrumental in the furthering of the conspiracy theories. Many interviewees believe that the aim of the plot was to rid New Orleans of the poor black communities and protect the white, upper income areas from flooding. Whilst there is no evidential proof that anything but the pure strength of the hurricane destroyed the levees, the conspiracy has gained its own force, with many, including Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, publicly backing the claims. This belief in conspiracy, even when there is no real evidence to support the claims, highlights the lack of trust that the African American communities place in their government; due to the treatment they had experienced prior to the hurricane, their instinctive response was to lay blame in the hands of American authority.