Pew report on ‘conspiracy theories’ shows the limits of Trump’s Black outreach
A new Pew Research Center report might seem to give a boost to Donald Trump and other Republicans who hope to use conspiracy theories about the federal government to reach Black voters.
But if you dig into the numbers, it’s also clear why that approach will fail.
The report’s headline is a bit more provocative than the data supports: “Most Black Americans Believe Racial Conspiracy Theories About U.S. Institutions.”
But by “conspiracy theory,” Pew uses a broad definition: essentially, a belief that U.S. institutions — be that the media or federal agencies — have been used to deliberately harm Black people. The problem here is that, historically, that has often been true: from redlining to the Tuskegee syphilis study to gerrymandered voting districts that diminish Black voter power.
Pew’s definition lumps these in with bogus conspiracy theories like the claim that Covid-19 was created to “ethnically target” white and Black Americans and to spare Jewish and Chinese people.
The report’s author, Kiana Cox, told me she used the broad definition of “conspiracy theory” to “highlight the suspicions that people have about U.S. institutions, based on historic treatment and personal experiences of discrimination.”
Here’s a more thorough explainer from Cox:
I struggled with [the term]. I know that it can have a negative connotation that essentially boils down to ‘If you’d just go read or get some help, you wouldn’t believe that.’ But I decided to use it, because I think that, in essence, it’s about the stories that we tell to describe the things that we see. And sometimes, in the absence of data, or just based on personal experience, the stories that we tell over and over to describe things that we may not be able to prove, but that we suspect are going on, allow users to kind of get at that version of conspiracy theory while acknowledging that that term can be a little bit troubling.
A Pew story about the report now includes an editor’s note that says it is “under revision” and notes that using the words “racial conspiracy theories” as a shorthand “was not the best choice.”
“Black Americans’ doubts about the fairness of U.S. institutions are accompanied by suspicion,” the editor’s note says. “How Black Americans think those institutions impact their ability to thrive is worthy of study, and that’s the purpose of this survey.”
It’d be easy for someone to look at the title of this report and assume the worst about Black people. Or to assume that because Republicans these days often push right-wing conspiracy theories, Black people are broadly at risk of being enticed by those specific conspiratorial claims. But I think a closer look at the actual Pew data makes the case that Black people are far more discerning when it comes to claims about the weaponization of U.S. institutions than some people may believe — particularly, Trump-backing conservatives who think his rhetoric about the justice system being weaponized against him will attract Black voters.
For example, the data shows that 76% of Black people believe “Black public officials are singled out and discredited in a way that doesn’t happen to White public officials,” which might explain why Trump’s attacks on Black prosecutors for being “racist” against him — be that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — don’t seem to be resonating with most Black voters.
The data also shows that “most Black adults say the prison (74%), political (67%) and economic (65%) systems in the U.S., among others, are designed to hold Black people back.” Pew also found that majorities of Black Democrats and liberal independents (76%) and Black Republicans and conservative independents (63%) both feel like U.S. institutions have been systematically designed to hold them back.
Here, again, you can see why a conservative movement obsessed with rolling back civil rights for nonwhite people doesn’t appear to be attracting Black voters in droves.
On the one hand, I do think it shows that low-information voters who are Black and distrustful of U.S. institutions could feasibly be enamored by bogus talking points that come from sources they believe they can trust. That’s part of the reason I’ve been highlighting the spread of right-wing disinformation across nontraditional, Black-oriented news outlets like tabloids and hip-hop podcasts.
But I read the data as encouraging for liberals. To me, the report says that they can build inroads with more Black people — and maintain the community’s trust — as long as Democrats are willing to do what Republicans overwhelmingly won’t: acknowledge that the United States’ systems have been rigged against Black people and prioritize plans to remedy those harms.
You can read the full Pew report here.
