Why Nipsey Hussle’s Death Set Off a Conspiracy Theory
Ashley Nkadi on the long, destructive history behind the anxieties that give rise to seemingly delusional theories like the one that rose up after Nipsey Hussle’s shooting.
Last Sunday, the 33-year-old Grammy-nominated rapper Ermias Asghedom, otherwise known as
Nipsey Hussle, was shot dead in front of one of his Los Angeles clothing stores.
More than a rapper, Nipsey established himself as a community fixture in his native South L.A., where he accrued local esteem by performing charitable acts both strategic (like opening a co-working space and STEM center) and full of heart (such as paying for funerals and giving out shoes to children). But as condolences poured out across social media, one insidious story started bubbling up in various corners of the Internet: a conspiracy theory that the government had plotted Nipsey’s death.
Musings on the theory, which were shockingly abundant, hinged on the idea that the government executed Nipsey to silence his upcoming documentary on
Dr. Sebi, a Honduran herbalist named Alfredo Bowman who was acquitted of criminal charges in the 1980s for practicing medicine without a license in New York. According to the whisperers, the documentary would purportedly reveal that the cure for HIV/AIDS was kept from society by the powers that be. When Nick Cannon announced that he would finish Nipsey's work, posting photos of Dr. Sebi with notes about Nipsey, it sent the whisperers into a tizzy to “protect” him from Big Pharma, too.
In reality, Dr. Sebi was about as much of a doctor as Dr. Pepper. He claimed he cured patients of HIV/AIDS with an alkaline diet, which he said could regulate the body's pH or acidity levels—food intake can't change the
body's blood acidity levels—and was arrested for money laundering several times in 2016. The idea that the government murdered a hip-hop artist to cover up an herbalist documentary is assuredly untrue. But there’s something to the anxieties driving it.
The U.S. government has carried out a number of unthinkable—but verifiable—contemptible acts that seem straight out of fiction:
poisoning alcohol during Prohibition; covertly
bringing Nazi scientists to the United States; the
CIA’s mind-control experiments. As today’s QAnon believers and anti-vaxxers demonstrate, conspiracy theorizing isn’t unique to any single American group. But the black community, in particular, has been on the receiving end of real and outrageously pernicious endeavors by the state, and community pillars have been targeted by the government. There are sweeping examples, such as discriminatory mortgage lending called “
redlining,” which, though now illegal, still shapes our nation’s highly segregated housing, neighborhoods, and school districts.
There are also more specific incidents. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service launched the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Researchers promised hundreds of
study participants free treatment, health care, meals, and burial insurance in exchange for their commitment to the program. In actuality, they were not treated at all. Instead, they were monitored by physicians and researchers to see the heights that the untreated illness could reach. The study went on for 40 years, as syphilis decimated the participants.
Around the same time, legal
eugenics programs took place in 32 states. The government orchestrated thousands of forced and coerced sterilizations of women who it deemed were unfit to regulate their own reproductive activities. Often, this meant black women, especially in southern states. Unnecessary hysterectomies—sometimes disguised as appendectomies—were performed on black girls as young as 9 years old, without their informed consent, during routine doctor visits, at state institutions, in prisons, and sometimes even at the requests of social workers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO—counterintelligence program—against social justice leaders and organizations was especially egregious. The program surveilled activists and civil rights organizations, including Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party, seeking to infiltrate and discredit the civil rights and Black Power movements, as well as their leaders. COINTELPRO employed spies, wiretaps, false media, and falsified correspondence and coordinated with local law enforcement to carry out illegal break-ins, unlawful arrests, assaults, raids, and even
executions. Nipsey wouldn't have been the first beloved community pillar targeted by the government. The FBI actually sent a
letter to King, urging him to kill himself: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
It’s not over, either. COINTELPRO still
monitors black activist groups, including Black Lives Matter. Beyond that, on the local level, city officials and departments have suppressed or lost body-camera and dash-camera footage in instances of fatal police encounters. In Chicago, it took a year for the police department to release footage of
Laquan McDonald's death, and only after a journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request and then took the Chicago Police Department to court. And in New York, police
targeted, harassed, and jailedRamsey Orta, after he filmed Eric Garner's death in a police officer's chokehold and that video went viral.
To the black community, instances of police harassment or coordinated cover-up are so familiar, they’re rote—the real lunacy isn't believing that the authorities might enact a grotesque plot, but that authorities have done it so often and egregiously. And yet black people are often treated as if these very real histories are paranoid delusions, rather than the cause of psychic trauma left behind in the collective mind of the black community. We are often slow to seek medical attention, safety, aid, or resources from institutions because we've long been denied.
Conspiracy theories in our community seem plausible because history is marked with actual coordinated abuses against our neighborhoods, our children, and our people. They defy reason but define cruelty, spreading a little madness to us all. And while the specific rumors about Nipsey Hussle and Dr. Sebi are nothing more than wacky conspiracy theories, there is nothing crazy about the very real fears and anxieties from which they arise.
