TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012290/01221013.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

Genocide Mumbo Jumbo


Some blacks claim they are being victimized by a white plot

By JACK E. WHITE -- With reporting by Priscilla Painton/New York


    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.