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March 20, 2008

Some of that Crazy Black Paranoia

Nicholas Kristof offers an excellent and succinct reaction today to Barack Obama's speech on race in The New York Times ("Obama and Race"). In it, he points out some of what many Americans view as the "absurd" and "shocking" beliefs of some black Americans - beliefs that have left white Americans "thunderstruck" when they hear of them for the first time. These include the beliefs that "the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people" and that "the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods."

These notions sound crazy to a lot of white people. But if you look at the evidence, particularly if you look at it through the eyes of someone who experiences racial discrimination, these beliefs really are not terribly far-fetched. They may even be plausible. I'm not saying I believe them, but I am saying I am not surprised that a significant number of black Americans do.

Wikipedia offers a fairly good overview of the various AIDS conspiracy theories. When prominent scientists and professors are espousing these theories, is it really unreasonable to think ordinary black Americans would believe them and reject the explanations offered by the government? Particularly after our own government allowed more than 500 black men to die of untreated syphilis, all the while believing they were being treated, in the infamous Tuskegee experiment? As for the government intentionally getting black Americans hooked on crack, this, too, is not without evidence. We know that during the Reagan Administration, crack was sold to Los Angeles gangs and the profits were funneled to the Nicaraguan Contras. The U.S. Dept. of Justice offers a fascinating response. Is it really so far a leap for an ordinary black American to take, just a few years after Tuskegee, from knowing crack sales to black people are funding the Contras (an effort supported by the Reagan Administration), to believing it was the CIA that sold those drugs, to believing the white CIA did it on purpose to black people? I think not.

The point I am trying to make here is Black America actually isn't crazy. And the fact that the very forces on the right who want limited government can't understand black people's distrust of government shows more than anything else how myopic a perspective we each have of this entire situation. It is far past time we opened our hearts to our fellow Americans and started listening.

Posted by Becky at March 20, 2008 10:17 AM