By Terry Manning
In December 2020, just a couple weeks before Christmas, I found myself at the esteemed Charleston City Market.
I was there to photograph Corey Alston, a renowned sweetgrass basket weaver. It was my first assignment as a freelance photographer, for a magazine that recognizes artisans keeping alive the traditional ways of craft making.
Foot traffic was light. The COVID-19 pandemic was new enough that the casual passersby Alston and his fellow vendors counted on to purchase their wares were scarce. I was suffering from what I now know was Long COVID, random dizzy spells or flashes where I was convinced I could smell cigars or frayed electrical wires. I wanted to return home.
I had taken photos of Alston and the beautiful works that showcased artistry passed down through generations of his family — and even got footage for a short interview — but I knew I needed to get images of him interacting with customers.
I asked him for a break to review the photos I had taken up to that point and positioned myself across a walkway. With I and my camera less visible, a couple of customers approached Alston’s stall. I grabbed a few images of him charming them and, deciding that was enough, prepared to pack my things.
Then I noticed a younger Black man slip under the fabric behind Alston’s tables. He shifted nervously, and I remember wondering what he was up to. The customers left and he approached Alston, leaning in close. In the quiet of the morning I could make out bits and pieces of what he whispered:
“I ain’t taking no vaccine …same thing they did with AIDS … the white man made this stuff … 5G will give people brain cancer.”
Oh Lord, I thought, now I was definitely ready to leave.
On the drive home, all I could wonder to myself was, why are Black people so susceptible to conspiracy theories? Yes, there have been plenty times in history where minorities have been abused by systems and institutions we should have been able to trust.
We can look to Tuskegee’s syphillis experiments; the abuse of Black women in developing the field of gynecology; the destruction of “Black Wall Street;” the crack epidemic; the burning of Rosewood; allegations of smallpox among America’s Indian tribes; the roundup of Asian-Americans during World War II; Henrietta Lacks; jetliners’ contrails; and many more.
It’s not like there aren’t plenty of situations where Black and other minorities still are being shortchanged. It felt like COVID took the delusions to new extremes.
There was the student in my computer lab who told me in February 2020, “You know Black folks can’t catch that stuff,” referring to COVID. When I asked for the reasoning behind her statement, she explained that it had “something to do with the melanin in our skin.”
I laughed and assured her that if there ever were such a thing as a whites-only epidemic, a sizable contingent would try to kill off as many Blacks as they could before they succumbed.
Then there was the Black woman I ran into at lunch one day not long after that conversation. She wore a shirt bearing the logo of the Georgia Department of Public Health. I asked her about the student’s contention that Black people couldn’t catch COVID. She laughed and shook her head.
“We don’t have any evidence to support that,” she answered. “But you know, all this is in the Bible.”
My brain is sparing me memories of the rest of that conversation, but I do remember thinking, shouldn’t an employee of the state health department be focused more on the science of the pandemic than its possible role in Bible prophecy?
I found a 2018 study that correlated Blacks’ enthusiasm for conspiracy to their historically diminished social status in this country. The study, in the European Journal of Social Psychology, indicated African Americans’ beliefs in certain conspiracy theories are driven in part by a need to compensate for social devaluation.
While there was an expected embrace of race-related theories, Blacks in the study also were more likely to embrace those that had nothing to do with race or were race-neutral.
Hmm. People who are kept down are more likely to believe conspiracies, eh?
In my next column, I’ll look at how Donald Trump is exploiting this dynamic to woo Black voters — and why his “Never Surrender” sneakers could hurt this goal more than help.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
