Those of us born after the 1970s are not given to believing in conspiracy theories. When our uncles said Black folks had bad credit because the White Man would not give us the same access to capital as he would white folks, we rolled our eyes. When our aunties told us that Black unemployment was high because the White Man wanted Black folks to be broke, we changed the subject.
Some were convinced that the American government flooded the Black community with drugs to undermine the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Others said that neighborhoods are segregated because the White Man did not want, as one of my uncles once said, “n****s to live next door.”
Our elders tried to tell us that the White Man was trying to hold us back. We didn’t believe them, but…maybe they were right?
At the time, we thought these conspiracy theories were fantastical. We went to college and looked at our elders skew. We took classes on sociology and psychology and thought we knew better than them. Some of us got business degrees and thought we would be able to fix the levels of unemployment in the Black community singlehandedly. But we now see that our elders were on to something.
It is now no secret that Black folks were redlined and denied credit because of the color of their skin. The government has released records that show that the FBI was involved in undermining Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders. And there has even been a movie made about how the government killed Fred Hampton and singlehandedly dismantled the Black Panther Party.
We have learned that to be Black in America is to be a living, breathing, logical end of a conspiracy. That’s why when I saw this video by Randi Bryant, a Tiktok essayist and DEI specialist who loves all things Black, I could relate. Now, some of us are telling our kids a version of those same theories.
Our elders were incorrect in saying that there was a singular white man behind all of these social ills that befall Black folk, but they were right to think that there was something nefarious going on. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a conspiracy theory is “the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; specifically: a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event.
With that definition in mind, we think this way because our entire existence in this country is the result of a conspiracy.
We were stolen from our homeland, brought to this country in chains, taught that we were intellectually inferior. Damn right we have a reason to believe in conspiracy theories. They are a logical response to the unfathomable institutional oppression we experience daily.
Okay...my bad. Let me stop with all that philosophical jargon. I’ll make it plain: Our elders were right.