Questions

According to the first episode of the National Public Radio podcast Louder Than a Riot, "All conspiracy theories exist to offer a simple answer to a complicated question." In this particular case, the complicated question is the correlation between music and the carceral state, as Black people in America experience it. And the simple answer?

[Music] industry executives were asked to promote gangster rap in order to drive up the number of inmates and profits for the private prison systems, which funded the business.

The Black community has its share, and likely more, of conspiracies. The first being simple racism. The idea that "a Black person has to do twice as much as a White person to be considered half as good" is common to the point of being ubiquitous in the community. They don't receive as much airtime as QAnon or "Stop the Steal," mainly because they're specific to the Black community, and they don't make themselves public in entertainingly, if disturbingly, public ways. In short, most of the nation can safely ignore them. One of the first ones that I encountered was the idea that the Church's fried chicken chain put chemicals in the food that would sterilize Black people who ate it. I've written about this one before, a couple of years ago. Interestingly, while it most definitely a simple (minded) answer, I'm not sure of the complicated question that it would address. It's not as if there was ever a crisis of sterility in the Black community.

But what often strikes me about these conspiracies is the degree to which there seems to be a concern with secrecy and/or appearances. If the point is to manipulate Black people into committing crimes, so that they can be sent to prison and rented out as cheap labor, why bother with the "manipulate Black people into committing crimes" part? Likewise, if there is some chemical that can somehow only sterilize people of a given ethnic background, why not just put it in the drinking water? Why go through the effort of picking a substandard fast-food restaurant?

Sometimes, the conspiracies make White people seem like Star Wars' Galactic Empire. Unceasingly malevolent, yet hopelessly incompetent. And maybe that's part of the point, rather than answering questions, they simply bolster a person's self-image of a survivor in a hostile world. Or maybe the question is actually a really simple one: "Why do I feel that the world is out to get me?"