Genocide Mumbo Jumbo

By Jack E. White

One side effect of the racial hysteria that enveloped Boston after Carol Stuart's murder was to strengthen a fear among many African Americans that they are the targets of a white-orchestrated genocide plot. That belief has become endemic in recent years, as crack has invaded ghettos across the nation, causing so much death and destruction that many blacks are convinced its spread cannot be accidental. More or less preposterous genocide theories are being spun by black nationalists like Louis Farrakhan, so-called intellectuals and prominent clergymen. Even the National Urban League published this passage in its 1989 report on the state of black America: "There is at least one concept that must be recognized if one is to see the pervasive and insidious nature of the drug problem for the African- American community. Though difficult to accept, that is the concept of genocide."

Fears of a diabolical conspiracy to exterminate blacks have been around for decades, but seldom have they been believed by so many people. The idea is catching on, though even the most wild-eyed conspiracy mongers concede they have no evidence to support their claims. When filmmaker Spike Lee appeared on ABC's Nightline, for example, Ted Koppel asked him to back up his charge that it is "no mistake that a majority of drugs in this country is being deposited in black and Hispanic and low-income neighborhoods." Lee could point only to a scene in the movie The Godfather, in which a Mafia don decides to push drugs to blacks because they are "animals."

Genocide theorists disagree on whether whites are consciously plotting black extermination. Some, like the Rev. Cecil Williams of San Francisco's Glide United Methodist Memorial Church, pin the drug epidemic on "a group of whites somewhere" who think blacks are getting too much political power. Others charge that the U.S. Government developed AIDS to wipe out blacks, testing it on homosexuals before unleashing it in the ghetto. More widespread is the view, put forth by Joseph Lowery, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that genocide will inevitably occur because the U.S. Government is not doing enough to stanch the flow of drugs. Says Lowery: "If the powers that be really wanted to deal with this issue, they wouldn't have let it get this far."

Given the flimsiness of the evidence, why do such theories flourish? One reason is that the war against drugs has been so ineffectual. Another is that U.S. history is replete with episodes that help make even fanciful theories seem plausible: just consider what happened to the Native Americans. On a much smaller scale, there is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, during which the U.S. Public Health Service, working with black-controlled Tuskegee Institute and other agencies, deliberately withheld treatment from 400 Alabama blacks between 1932 and 1972 to study the progress of a disease whose course was already well known.

Genocide theorists deploy a welter of sociological facts and half-facts to buttress their case. Among them:

-- Infant mortality rates in poor black neighborhoods in cities like Washington are soaring in part because so many black children are drug addicts when they are born. The comparison is misleading, because poverty and a lack of access to prenatal care are the most important causes of high infant mortality. To genocide theorists, of course, keeping blacks poor and denying them health care are both part of the plan.

-- AIDS is spreading faster among low-income blacks than among any other segment of the population, including gays. Again the assertion, while true, is misleading: twice as many whites as blacks have died from AIDS.

-- Drug sales are largely concentrated in the ghetto, where they exacerbate violence so ingrained that homicide is the leading cause of death for young black males.

Combined with the historical record and the undeniable persistence of racial discrimination, those facts make it easy for blacks to conclude that someone is plotting their extinction. But, as Harvard political scientist Martin Kilson points out, it is "a long way from believing some whites would like to - exterminate blacks to believing they are capable of doing so." Conspiracy theories insult blacks by suggesting that they are hapless victims powerless to resist a racist scheme. They imply that the African Americans who have become mayors and police chiefs in dozens of cities are either willing participants in the plot or inept dupes.

The rainbow coalition of white, black, Latin American, African, Caribbean and Asian criminals who are deluging the ghettos (and the rest of America) with drugs is motivated by greed, not genocide. They seek to extract maximum profits from their sordid business -- and if some of their customers fatally overdose themselves or are gunned down in turf battles between dealers, so be it. Whatever the drug pushers' goal may be, blacks could thwart them by the simple expedient of refusing to use drugs. The question is whether they will be self-interested enough to reject deluded genocide theories and face up to an uncomfortable truth: if someone is trying to kill blacks with drugs, blacks are helping them do it.

With reporting by Priscilla Painton/New York