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-- Infant mortality rates in poor black neighborhoods in cities like Washington are soaring in part because so many black children are drug addicts when they are born. The comparison is misleading, because poverty and a lack of access to prenatal care are the most important causes of high infant mortality. To genocide theorists, of course, keeping blacks poor and denying them health care are both part of the plan.
-- AIDS is spreading faster among low-income blacks than among any other segment of the population, including gays. Again the assertion, while true, is misleading: twice as many whites as blacks have died from AIDS.
-- Drug sales are largely concentrated in the ghetto, where they exacerbate violence so ingrained that homicide is the leading cause of death for young black males.
Combined with the historical record and the undeniable persistence of racial discrimination, those facts make it easy for blacks to conclude that someone is plotting their extinction. But, as Harvard political scientist Martin Kilson points out, it is "a long way from believing some whites would like to - exterminate blacks to believing they are capable of doing so." Conspiracy theories insult blacks by suggesting that they are hapless victims powerless to resist a racist scheme. They imply that the African Americans who have become mayors and police chiefs in dozens of cities are either willing participants in the plot or inept dupes.
The rainbow coalition of white, black, Latin American, African, Caribbean and Asian criminals who are deluging the ghettos (and the rest of America) with drugs is motivated by greed, not genocide. They seek to extract maximum profits from their sordid business -- and if some of their customers fatally overdose themselves or are gunned down in turf battles between dealers, so be it. Whatever the drug pushers' goal may be, blacks could thwart them by the simple expedient of refusing to use drugs. The question is whether they will be self-interested enough to reject deluded genocide theories and face up to an uncomfortable truth: if someone is trying to kill blacks with drugs, blacks are helping them do it.