Scholars examine the impact of conspiracy theories on African Americans
Have you checked the numbers on your social security card yet?
Rumor has it that the federal government keeps track of Black folks by
assigning them social security numbers that contain an even number in
the fifth digit.
If you are now rifling through your wallet looking for your social
security card, stop. The rumor is untrue. But it is one of several that
have been burning up the Internet in recent months, causing African
Americans of all walks of life to wonder, if only momentarily, about
the validity of these conspiratorial rumors.
Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie, according to Dr.
Anita Waters, a sociologist at Denison University, who describes such
theories as “ethnosociologies.” Yet, what makes Black belief in
conspiracy theories so difficult to interpret and evaluate is that in
many recent cases the rumors are based in fact.
Black America’s willingness to entertain beliefs in conspiracy
theories, sometimes referred to as “urban legends,” has been widely
studied and analyzed by a variety of scholars — most particularly, by
those in the fields of folklore, political science, medicine, and
public health.
Most who investigate these tales believe that they are a
significant phenomenon in African American culture dating back to the
earliest contact between Africans and Europeans.
Dr. Patricia Turner, a professor of African American studies at the
University of California-Davis has made an exhausting compilation of
African American rumors and conspiracy theories. She believes that from
Black Americans’ encounter with racism, “folklore emerges in which
individuals translate their uneasiness about the fate of the group as a
whole into more concrete, personal terms.”
