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“Given the United States’ history of real anti-Black conspiracies, conspiracy theorizing amongst Black Americans is in no way illogical (Turner 1993; Waters 1997). The ongoing over-incarceration of Black people via unfair sentencing laws and the over-policing of urban Black neighborhoods; the coercive use of government assistance to pressure Black women into getting the Norplant birth control implant in the 1990s and subsequent refusal to provide any financial assistance for having it removed; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; the surveillance and murders of Black revolutionaries in the 1960s; among countless other constructed plots to persecute Black people, were all real, anti-Black conspiracies. As such, those who are racialized as Black in America attempting to understand and uncover how our subjugation is being maintained via racist plots against them (i.e., conspiracy theorizing), is a reasonable practice to engage in. Rooted in the need to survive the impositions of white supremacy, conspiracy theorizing amongst Black Americans is often an effort to make sense of how anti-Blackness is made manifest in their everyday lives. As such, this project draws on alternative, more critical understandings of history and the lived experiences of anti-Black oppression to demonstrate how differing subjectivities create a state of affairs where mere “conspiracy theory” to some groups can be understood as truth to others.”

Chapter 1 Subverting the Western Episteme: Alternative Knowledges & Black Cultural Production