[Music] how do you not believe in any conspiracy theories i understand not all of them not most of them but you don't believe in any conspiracy there you just think the government's just batting a thousand and telling us the whole truth when we talk about conspiracy theories oftentimes we're talking about stories that people gravitate towards the black communities always had a vacuum of information you know afforded to them so the stories that are being promulgated we could call them conspiracy theories to some degree but they're also potentially a survival mechanism absolutely and that's the key
part of it is survival so when it comes to things like conspiracy theories around health or more social issues that vein of racism is still present we hear a piece of information that is either so true that it hurts or so personal that it's painful to accept it as it is and so we make it more comfortable for ourselves i think conspiracy theories are just that they're a tool of comfort and safety that people use to manage all this information that's coming into their system that just feels too big or too raw are there things
that are specific in the black community that are are more apt to take hold because of the history that black people have had in the country so there are a lot when it comes to health especially physical health in the black community with the pandemic and the vaccine there are theories about the vaccine being a tool of biological warfare so a lot of people believe that it's meant to emasculate black men by sterilizing them and killing black people overall there are a lot of theories about whether this vaccine is being put in the black and
black communities to really use us as lab rats as testing subjects you know and there are a lot of theories around why the vaccine is being pushed so readily now versus months ago how quickly it came about and the misinformation i think the country entirely has about the vaccine is sort of heightened in the black community and that's a tricky thing right there's so much that's actually true about the way this society is unfair towards black people and the pandemic put into you know bare relief that black and brown communities specifically were hit harder by
it so with the pandemic we're seeing all these different stories around the world of how it's impacting different kinds of people but we're also in our own homes and communities seeing people die and seeing people that are greatly impacted whether it's from losing their jobs or losing their homes not having access to the vaccine having access to hospital care they need it and i think that just sort of reinforces the us and them mentality that we're often put into as black people so we want to stay very much secluded in our own community with our
own people and our own ideas and meaning systems around what's happening and why it's happening versus what we're seeing come mainstream because it could be harmful so does that make it a little more hard to dispel notions in the black community yes yeah i don't blame black people who believe in some of these theories because things that have happened throughout history sounds like they're conspiracies but they're true like how the father of modern gynecology performed horrifying experiments on enslaved women without anesthesia or how hundreds of black men with syphilis were subjects in the notorious tuskegee
experiment they thought they were being treated but were actually given placebos so the government could study the long-term effects over 40 years even in west indian countries like in jamaica they had the green bay killings which is similar they lured a lot of men to a certain site for jobs and executed all of them on the spot wow so things like that you hear and it sounds fantastical but they're true and like all that wasn't bad enough some racist studies have further ingrained discrimination into the fabric of society the bell curve is a book that
is written about why black people aren't as intelligent as other people it talks about african culture and a lot of afrocentric um ideas that are misinterpreted and used as again proof as to why my people aren't intelligent people interesting and that book was touted for so long and used as rationale for how school systems were set up and how zoning laws were put in place to keep black people in a certain environment because we deserved that based off this factual research and that factual research not true not true [Music] so this mistrust of authority has
been building and it's paved the way for the covet 19 conspiracies in the black community now but are these conspiracies taking a stronger hold than in other cross-sections of american society so research is showing that black people are getting vaccinated at higher rates in other communities despite skepticism higher yeah and a lot of people who are not getting vaccinated are white republican people and that's a very big contrast what you're seeing in the news which is black people don't want the vaccine that people don't want you know to believe it's true but in reality we're
getting vaccinated at higher rates than others are the black community is not a monolith you know we have people in the community who are always going to dispel those kinds of theories and people are always going to believe in those theories and that's just nature of human beings really it's just wild that just thinking about black individuals as individuals is like a radical and necessarily thought right right we've always been but you know i think lumping us together makes it easier to justify the things that are marginalizing and [Applause] [Music] discriminatory you
