Shrinkwrapped examines the white-guilt writings of the New York Times Nicholas Kristof:

…To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people.

That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.

“That’s a real standard belief,” noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). “One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you’ve spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs.”

Occasionally, we’ve had glimpses of this gulf between white and black America. Right after the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a CBS News poll found that 6 out of 10 whites thought that the jury had reached the wrong verdict, while 9 out of 10 blacks believed it had decided correctly. Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.

In the almost surreal unreflective post-modernist posing that passes for intellectual discourse among the self-designated cognoscenti, Kristof takes the widespread acceptance of paranoid conspiracy theories in a large part of the black community as evidence that whites have neglected to listen to blacks:

What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.

All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward and essential. And that dialogue needs to focus not on clips from old sermons by Mr. Wright but on far more urgent challenges — for example, that about half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.

Then maybe we can achieve our goal of getting, finally, to the point where there is “not a black America and not a white America… . There’s the United States of America.”

It is not readily apparent what point Kristof is trying to make.  Is Kristof suggesting that if only we whites take the time and energy to lend credence to black paranoia, we would facilitate the more complete integration of blacks into America? 

I can’t quite tell from the piece exactly how Kristof imagines such ideas as “the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people” or “that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods” is related to the fact that “half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.”  There is a significant connection between the two data points but I suspect it is not one Kristof would allow himself to consider.

Until Kristof or anyone else can provide some evidence to show that government scientists invented the AIDS virus and then introduced it into the black community or unearth the policy papers describing how introducing Crack into black neighborhoods would somehow achieve whatever goal fevered imaginations can come up with, these ideas, along with many others that Jeremiah Wright promulgated with minimal demurral from Barack Obama, must be considered nothing more than the worst kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories.  These are not just different perspectives or different opinions but bizarre and damaging fantasy structures that infect the thinking of those who hold such ideas.   

Human beings are prone to believe in nonsense.  We typically find ways to use our rational thinking to support our nonsense theories, and usually the nonsense we believe in is harmless so long as it doesn’t interfere with our ability to work, love, and play (to use Freud’s old descriptor’s of mental health.)  In The Value of Conspiracy Theories I described a relatively harmless conspiracy theory that is ascribed to by perhaps 40% of our British friends.  JFK conspiracy theories have been a staple of the American zeitgeist for 45 years and have spawned a cottage industry and made many people quite wealthy.  In these cases, the conspiracy theories reinforce some people’s existing anxiety about government and also reinforce the comforting idea that life is not completely random.  Even if the “they” who are in control are evil, it is a comfort to know someone is in control and knows what is going on.