University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1995 Beyond Black Demons & White Devils: AntiBlack Conspiracy Theorizing & the Black Public Sphere Regina Austin University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the African American Studies Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Law and Society Commons, Public Economics Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, and the Social Psychology Commons Repository Citation Austin, Regina, "Beyond Black Demons & White Devils: AntiBlack Conspiracy Theorizing & the Black Public Sphere" (1995). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 812. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/812 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. BEYOND BLACK DEMONS & WHITE DEVILS: ANTIBLACK CONSPIRACY THEORIZING & THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE* REGINA AUSTIN** I. INTRODUCTION We live in conspiratorial times.1 Almost everyone has a favorite conspiracy theory or two. Even so, I suspect that, relative to other groups, black people espouse an inordinate number of conspiracy the ories, most of which involve plots directed against them.2 Of course, black people bear more than their share of problems to theorize about and have more than their share of reasons to believe that their con spiracy theories are true. Although blacks appear to be fairly quies cent and uninterested in mass political protest, there is a great deal of activity at the level of social discourse in the form of antiblack con spiracy theorizing.