The Clapback Mailbag: Trash Cans, Clocks and Satan's Choir

Our weekly response to emails, DMs, messages and comments from our readers.

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Perhaps my favorite African-American proverbs are the colorful words of wisdom that warn us that the truth can still be deceitful.

I’m sure your uncle has warned you that “a broken clock is right twice a day.” My friend Bobby loves to say, “A trash can will still catch a steak, sometimes.” Then, of course, there’s my grandmother’s favorite:

“The devil’s choir sings the angels’ songs.”

These adages all make the same point. Finding something good buried in a pile of filth doesn’t turn a garbage can into a treasure chest. A manipulative liar can sometimes exploit good people by surrounding a bunch of nonsense with facts and truth. But being correct doesn’t necessarily mean something is right.

And that’s why, every week, we respond to emails, DMs, tweets and comments from our readers. Because racists, devils and garbage human beings aren’t always incorrect …

But they’re always wrong.

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Last week’s article on the efforts to whitewash higher education also generated different versions of the same response.

There Was an Actual Conspiracy to Redefine CRT and DEI. Now They Have a New Target

From: Frank

Bullshit nigger nonsense. Whites don’t have to conspire against you tards

From: Frank

White supremaciy is a conspiracy theory

From: Lance
Subject: There Was an Actual Conspiracy to Redefine CRT

Why is it ok when Blacks believe in conspiracy theories?

Dear Frank and Lance,

You’re not wrong.

Black people do believe in a lot of conspiracies, including:

• COINTELPRO

• Reagan putting crack in Black neighborhoods

• The Tuskegee experiment

• The government is performing experiments on Black people

• The FBI assassinated Malcolm X

• The secret plan to abduct Black children

• The government operatives infiltrating organizations

But here’s the thing about people who believe in these harebrained plots to attack “the Black community.”

They aren’t theories.

In 1998, CIA Inspector General Frederick R. Hitz testified before the House intelligence committee that the CIA worked with "dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion” to Nicaraguan cocaine traffickers. Hitz noted that "there are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity." As the Washington Post notes, intelligence officials occasionally “instructed the Drug Enforcement Administration to hold back inquiring about charges involving alleged drug dealers” and that “allegations of drug trafficking did not disqualify individuals from being recruited for the CIA effort.”

So, there is absolutely no evidence that full-time employees of the Central Intelligence Agency conspired to drop off cocaine to dope boys on Compton corners. Instead, the most well-resourced intelligence agency on the planet had no clue that they were paying international drug traffickers. That is not a conspiracy or a theory. It is just a fact.

Here’s a theory:

If I were paying someone who was an international drug trafficker, I would not be charged with a crime.

For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service “withheld” syphilis treatment from 399 Black men in Tuskegee, Ala. While the men weren’t coerced to participate in the research project, the researchers “had not informed the men of the actual name of the study, i.e. ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,’ its purpose, and potential consequences of the treatment … the impact on their wives, girlfriends, and children they may have conceived once involved in the research.” A panel of experts also determined that the participants didn’t have the option to quit the study or receive treatment when penicillin became available as a cure.

However, there is also no evidence that the U.S. government conspired to inject Black men with syphilis.

It is not a theory that the U.S. government paid researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital to insert radioactive rods in the nostrils of 582 Baltimore schoolchildren. It is a fact that 88 poor Black cancer patients at the University of Chicago were exposed to whole-body radiation treatments without their knowledge or consent. North Carolina’s eugenics program that targeted Black women is real. The U.S. Army’s chemical warfare tests in St. Louis, Missouri, were not theoretical.

The FBI did assassinate Malcolm X. According to former undercover officer Raymond Wood, the FBI and the NYPD conspired to give assassins an opportunity to kill Malcolm X. For years, I reported on former Kansas City, Kansas, police officer Roger Golubski, who was charged with preying on Black women, including rape and kidnapping. His drug-dealing partner would wait outside of a juvenile facility to force girls as young as 13 into their sex trafficking ring. Judges in Pennsylvania actually conspired to funnel Black kids into the juvenile justice system. Government informants infiltrated the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020.

There is not one single conspiracy that the U.S. government has not used against Black people. Every crazy idea that white people have imagined has actually been used to oppress Black people. They actually changed our votes to steal a presidential election. They subjected our children to racialized curricula and discriminated against Black college applicants. The U.S. government allowed enslavers to abuse Black children, and Hollywood whitewashed us out of movies.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about all of these actual conspiracies is what Black people don’t do.

We don’t exclude white children from historically Black schools or teach them fake Black history. Majority-Black cities don’t try to disenfranchise white voters or keep white people out of Black neighborhoods. Why don’t Black doctors mistreat white babies and white expectant mothers? Why aren’t Black farmers upset when their white counterparts get money? Why didn’t Black business owners wail about “the welfare state” when white-owned businesses got 99% of PPP loans? How come Obama didn’t try to deport white immigrants? When was the last time Black people stormed the U.S. Capitol?

To be fair, this might all be part of a huge Black conspiracy.

Maybe all the Black people in the history of America are secretly trying to be better than white people.

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On Sunday, Donald Trump suggested that he would use his presidential powers to force the Cleveland Guardians and the Washington Commanders to revert to their old names. When news of Malcolm Jamal Warner’s death surfaced, I posted: “On a day we lost [Malcolm Jamal Warner], as the president tries to push a baseball team (and a country) to its racist past, it’s worth remembering what he said:”

The responses were pretty interesting: