My grandmother was one of the biggest conspiracy theorists I knew. She knew which neighborhoods had been experimented on, which communities had been bombed, where more refineries were being developed to make us sicker and who was surveilling us.
She was convinced microwaves were marketed to Black folks to leak radiation into our households and brains. She wouldn’t let us put cell phones up to our ears or heat up T.V. dinners. We were not allowed to sit close to the television for fear that it would damage our vision. Her cellphone was always on speaker and she never revealed personal information while talking on it because it might be tapped.
We prepared for Y2K by gathering gallon jugs of water, cups of noodles, canned foods, flour, rice, candles, first aid kits, disaster bags and fire wood. At one point, we weren’t allowed to drink from our kitchen faucet because she didn’t trust the water company, EBMUD, to provide safe and sanitary drinking water.
We practiced our fishing skills at a creek near her house by catching crawdads with chicken bones and hot dogs. We tied thread around short sticks and played a game where we’d measure how many crawdads we could catch in thirty minutes. The trick was to keep our sticks as still as possible until we saw a couple of air bubbles and then wiggle the thread around a bit. Once we felt a tug, we’d pull the stick out and empty the crawdads into a white bin. Still, my grandmother wouldn’t allow us to eat them because she didn’t know what they did with the water. This was practice. We had food in the house.
Though I loved her, there were times when I didn’t believe the things my grandmother said. Like when I’d leave a water bottle in her car overnight and couldn’t drink it the next day because it’d “give” me cancer. Or when she would tell us stories about how the government brought HIV/ AIDS into our communities to kill us off. Or how 9/11 was a setup orchestrated by the US government to get Black and Brown folks to kill each other.
But she was right about a lot of things, including the fact that you shouldn’t drink water left in a car overnight. And that the items in grocery stores that claimed the proceeds would go to cancer research actually caused cancer. And that on a global scale, water has been poisoned and then bottled back up to us for a price.
Though my grandmother didn’t use terms like environmental racism and climate justice, she was describing real conditions that we face today.
When the Flint water system was switched to pull from the Flint River, residents reported issues with water quality. After several investigations, it was determined that the water wasn’t treated with an anti-corrosive agent and was leaking lead. The number of Flint’s special needs students has increased by 56% since the water crisis began.
Growing up, word on the street was that the government stole Black folks’ organs and sold them on the black market to whomever could afford them. When I checked the box on my ID application to become an organ donor, some of my family members were upset. They warned that if we were cremated, no one would be able to tell which parts of us were taken. And of course the state would kill me in order to take my organs and give them to a little white boy in an effort to prolong his life because his was more valuable than mine.
I had a vision of a white boy in a blue hospital bed wearing yellow, red and green dinosaur pajamas and no socks. The boy had been in a car accident and both of his parents had died. I saw my body lying in a shared hospital room with an IV trailing down my arm and a large glass spiral of regret oozing out of my kidney from being kept alive for only as long as it took for them to take everything from me.
The skepticism of being an organ donor might seem conspiratorial, but there’s a long history of Black folks’ organs being harvested dating back to slavery. Black children especially have experienced the brunt of this terror. Our paranoia is not a delusion.
White economies have a monopoly and investment in safeguarding who gets to determine what is fact. Anything that diverts from that representation is automatically labelled fiction, hearsay and exaggeration.
When my grandmother passed away, I experienced a tightening in my throat that wouldn’t go away. After six months of feeling like something was blocking my air passages, I went into Kaiser to get some answers. The nurse called me into the back, took my weight and blood pressure and said the doctor would see me soon. When the doctor came into the examination room, I was sitting in a chair, rocking and chanting to myself: “You’re okay. You’re going to be fine. You won’t die here.”
The white doctor introduced herself, looked down my throat, told me to take a deep breath and stuck a black tube with a camera on the end down my left nostril. I hadn’t consented to the procedure but I was too numb to protest, too afraid a blood vessel would rupture and too exhausted from being tricked into scenarios like this. After she’d pulled the two-foot long tube out, I gasped and coughed, covering my heart. I said I didn’t know she was going to do that and she replied that studies show it’s better to do the procedure on patients without them knowing, because that way their bodies are more relaxed.
I went home feeling like a body and nothing more. If the doctor had already done a procedure without my consent, what would prevent her from doing anything with my DNA? At the end of that tube, was there a separate device collecting samples of me? She advised me to manage my stress levels and anxiety and, after looking at my weight again, said to keep an eye on the types of food I ate. She said it would go away soon, but the knot did not go away soon.
The realities of medical racism, terror and experimentation on Black, Brown and Native women’s bodies kept me from going back to that doctor. No matter what, I was never going to follow up with her again.
Rumor and skepticism function as toolkits, glossaries and blueprints for Black folks to navigate the haunting brutality of white economies and its conductors.
Police officers engage in misconduct all the time. They’ve coordinated coverups, planted evidence on civilians and killed folks for having the audacity to hang out in their own neighborhoods. We’ve been under siege and are expected to remain faithful to a government that has been plotting on our demise, to biomedical industries that kill us and to physicians who believe we can tolerate more pain.
In 1912, over two thousand Black Cubans were ordered to be massacred by Cuban President José Miguel Gómez for protesting Black exclusion from national office and unemployment. Black folks have been drafted into wars under the promise that they would receive their rights as citizens once they came out. They were lied to.
In 1956, the FBI launched a counterintelligence program dubbed “COINTELPRO”. The program specifically targeted and surveilled Black US citizens. Though COINTELPRO was technically disbanded in 1971, The FBI continues to target Black activists claiming that they are Black Identity Extremists. In the last four years, more than six Ferguson activists have been found dead under “mysterious” circumstances.
My grandmother was a member of the Black Panther Party (along with my grandfather who drowned at Lake Camanche). The state has killed so many of their friends, comrades and leaders. These agencies also sought out Black informants to help collect information on folks they were investigating and then used that information to jail, kill and/or ostracize them.
It’s through rumor, urban legends and investigation that we’ve made our communities safe. The truth is that we have the data. It’s in our blood and in our apartment complexes. It’s with our neighbors who turned up missing, whose disappearances go on and underreported, who somehow end up shooting themselves in the head while being both unarmed and handcuffed.
The U.S. government has a long history of using propaganda, caricatures and its legislators to reinforce anti-Black policies. Depicting Black folks as ignorant, greedy and criminal continues to this day. I believe that “they” know this. The elusive they, the government, the man, other Black folk who enlist in this tired narrative, whoever. That we are too conspiratorial is a lie and perhaps a ruse to draw attention away from the connections that we’ve already made. We are capable of understanding the complex mechanisms that go into oppressing our folks and we’re skilled at providing alternatives to navigate it.
Passing along everyday knowledge about the material conditions plaguing Black folks and the identity of the arbiters of these conditions is a skill. Black folk have always used this as an organizing strategy. Our rumors, “superstitions” and conspiracy theories should be taken seriously instead of being easily dismissed.
Black folk are constantly searching for answers and alternatives to the government determining our lives, our deaths and our punishment. Sometimes those answers are misguided or downright wrong, like folks claiming Bill Cosby is innocent and the allegations against him were made up to bring down prominent Black men.
Before Nipsey Hussle was murdered, he was working on a documentary about Dr. Sebi’s life, which included the allegation that Sebi might have been killed because he was “curing” AIDS. Hussle was convinced that the government killed Dr. Sebi because he was a threat to the medical industry. Once Hussle was killed in front of his store, the conspiracy theories flowed citing that the US government killed him in an attempt to silence the documentary on Dr. Sebi.
I have friends whose family members died from following Dr. Sebi’s advice and medicine. Their conditions ranged from being HIV positive to having cancer to being on dialysis. Dr. Sebi convinced these folks that he could cure them all if they stuck to the strict diet provided. His methods were not successful and they died. Most of them also refused to continue medical care from their physicians and signed waivers opting out of chemotherapy and radiation in order to receive Dr. Sebi’s care.
Dr. Sebi did not save lives. He facilitated in ending them. I can understand this, and still insist that my belief in Black folks is unwavering. Doing so means holding the reality that some of our solutions and approaches are misguided, ineffective and misinformed, but they are not nonsensical.
When we get away from relying on, preferring and/or preserving particular representations of intelligence that have been heavily influenced by whiteness, we move towards more possibility, connection and solutions. When we attempt to use those calculations and metrics against other Black folk, we reinforce the state’s excitement at our disconnection and pain. I believe in us so much that I know we can find other ways and that these ways don’t mean we have to die to reach them.
Black folks have always provided alternatives to the realities of what this world is. Skepticism is a part of our experience because we’ve experienced everything under the sun and because we know we can’t trust anyone to tell our history but us.
May we never stop trying to tell it.
Suggested Readings:
Patricia Turner, I Heard It Through The Grapevine, 1994
Tomatsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociology Study of Rumor, 1966
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 2004
Amber Butts is a writer, organizer, grief worker and educator from Oakland, CA who believes that Black folk are already whole. Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders. It asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while living in a world reliant on our terror.
Amber comes from a long line of hairdressers, storytellers and loud women from The South. She likes cheese, comic books and sings off-key.
