My top 5 white conspiracy theories and the truth behind them (Un-paywall'd)

Banned Histories of Race in America

As conspiracy theories concerning the attempted assassination of Donald Trump spread far and wide, I thought it might be a good time to un-paywall something I wrote last August. So, Please enjoy My top 5 white conspiracy theories and the truth behind them!

There is something oddly revealing about white conspiracy theories. It’s like their own history results in a paranoia magnified by self-victimization. They’ll falsely accuse other white people of doing to them what they’ve done to Black people. Even if the conspiracy theories don’t immediately appear to have anything to do with race, they seem to be rooted in a cultural memory that haunts them into mass delusion.

And so, here are my top five white conspiracy theories and the truth behind them:

Chemtrails

This one is my personal favorite. If you’re unfamiliar, the conspiracy theory around chemtrails is that the condensation left by jets and airliners is actually a poison being released on an unsuspecting public by the US government as part of a biological weapons program. It’s just about the silliest shit you can imagine, if you’re white.

If you’re Black, however, that conspiracy theory looks a little different. This is mostly because of that time in the 1950s when the US government flew planes over St. Louis releasing a poison on an unsuspecting Black public as part of a biological weapons program.

Banned Histories of Race in America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Qanon

No, I’m not going to tell you about a Black version of Qanon. There isn’t one. Just a reminder of how the beginning of the Qanon was all about how the democrats were actually cannibals. Didn’t that seem like it came out of nowhere? Like, where did they even get that idea? Well, it’s actually a myth originally perpetuated by slavers that Black Africans were cannibals. The truth behind the myth is that white people have cannibalized Black people for centuries. Europeans had already been eating their own dead since the 11th century and started eating African mummies pretty much as soon as they “discovered” them in the 1600s. Black people who survived the slave trade like Olaudah Equiano for example, wrote about living under threat of cannibalism. The captain and crew of the slave ship Arrogante were accused of killing one of the enslaved Africans on board, eating his organs, cooking his flesh and forcing the other enslaved Africans to eat it.

Voter/Election Fraud

Ever since we had a Black president there’s been a sudden rise in whites claiming that the systems are rigged against them. That’s super weird because the political systems of the country including local and state voter maps and the electoral college and even the structure of the US Senate are all built around excluding Black people. It’s almost as though white supremacy doesn’t work without having others to be supreme over.

Vaccines

COVID-19 showed us all how susceptible to conspiracy theories white Americans really are. The mass white death the coronavirus brought was certainly in large part to their belief that vaccines are some kind of secret horrifying experiment. Speaking of secret horrifying experiments, you’ve probably heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or as it was originally called, “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”. The secret horrifying experiment went on for 40 years and only stopped because they got caught.

Black Violence

George Washington enslaved more than 300 people, but only had five overseers. That wasn’t because Black people are inherently violent. I mean, for the group that did all the violent enslaving to claimed the enslaved are the violent ones… You get the idea. The creation of gun laws and drug laws and vagrancy laws and Jim Crow laws and various Black Codes were all created to police Black people and justified by false claims of Black violence. Over time those ideas become normalized and the myth of Black violence becomes a common white expectation. That expectation is used to justify their own violence and on and on and on…