Beware Of The Black Chaos Agents Here To Sow Discord

In 1956, in the months after the Montgomery Bus Boycott began and the momentum behind the modern civil rights movement took flight, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, initiated a covert program to spy on Americans, particularly Black Americans. The program was the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

Hoover ordered his agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of Black Panthers such as Geronimo Pratt, Assata Shakur, and Fred Hampton, as well as mainstream civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, and others, using misinformation and, at times, outright murder.

After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, the FBI agent in charge of monitoring King noted that “We must mark him now if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

Like all covert operations, they worked in the shadows, and it was only in 1971 that the program ended, and the full scope of the operation was exposed, to the shock of Black activists and organizations, who suddenly found out that people they’d trusted had been working for and informing the FBI. 

In the decades that followed, a level of healthy distrust has grown among African Americans, who add COINTELPRO, the Tuskegee Experiment, and the abuse and exploitation of Henrietta Lacks to a growing list of conspiracies against Black people that turned out to be not only true but worse than the imagined conspiracy. 

This brings us to the present day.

Although the landscape has changed, the ability to craft specific messages to manipulate Black people is still an ongoing and existential threat to the idea of a cohesive Black community, and there are Black chaos agents who feed into Black social media algorithms their own brand of misinformation that would leave the FBI of the 1960s feeling vindicated.

For example, the ADOS and the FBA movements, whose members and leaders, in their zeal to promote Black Americans as a separate ethnic group within the United States, dissociate themselves from other Black people from the Caribbean and Africa, labeling them “not Black,” ironically perpetuate a racial social construct built on a white supremacist notion of race and display a level of xenophobia toward other Black people that would make Stephen Miller applaud. 

Or perhaps you’ve seen those who claim that Black people didn’t come from Africa to North America via the Atlantic Slave Trade but are indigenous to America. Of course, as noted, “Black” is a social construct, so if these “Blacks” aren’t from Africa, then where did they come from? This isn’t to say that African explorers didn’t navigate the Atlantic Ocean and arrive in parts of North, South, and Central America. But it is worth noting that the numbers they did arrive were dwarfed by the more than three million who arrived in North America alone, not to mention the tens of millions to the Caribbean and South America.

In a world that’s increasingly narcissistic and lacks self-reflection, where surface-level knowledge is based on reading the headlines rather than the article, misinformation by bad actors finds a fertile field to grow its poisonous plant within the Black community. Add the idea that expertise is for the elite, and that having an erroneous opinion is fine because you’re “speaking your truth,” and the Black community finds itself spending valuable time combating divisive misinformation that serves a white supremacist structure and government, rather than building structures that can defeat them.  

Preventing misinformation requires Black people to be intentional about their sources of knowledge and highly skeptical of Black leaders who offer simple solutions to complex issues. This means not just saying, “do your research,” but actually doing that research with credible experts who can provide context and explanations for the information you’re seeking.

No one sane would accept the idea that the Earth is flat simply because a friend walked outside and declared it so. Sure, it’s his “truth,” and anecdotally, he did see the Earth as flat. And yet, we know that science proves the curvature of Earth, along with photographic evidence, showing that Earth is indeed round.

Now, can we challenge things and consider whether something once accepted may now need to be re-evaluated? Of course. But misinformation doesn’t do that. Misinformation in the Black community is designed to do the opposite. It’s designed to make you not think and to rely on things that sound like “truths.” Africans hate Black Americans is designed to play off your biases and is amplified by a tribe of people who believe the same thing, and you’re now operating in MAGA cult territory. 

Are these movements guided by principled people who hold a different view of the future of Black people, or is there an invisible hand guiding their efforts, amplified by bots and an algorithm designed by people who do not have Black people’s interests in mind? That is what we don’t know, but if history is any guide, like COINTELPRO, what is hidden in the dark will ultimately be revealed in the light. 

If this is the latter, the damage they’re doing is unforgivable, and they’ll be placed in the Skinfolks Not Kinfolks Hall of Fame as the latest form of Black chaos agents. The adage is that Black people have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and the last thing we need is for Black people to add to that work. And that’s not misinformation.  

SEE ALSO:

FBA, ADOS, And Misinformation Within The Black Community

Reparation Convention Disinvites ADOS Leader, Group Says