The "Con" in Conspiracy: Racial Violence as Political Assassination in Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog

Introduction: The Man Who Cried Conspiracy

In the fall of 1967, a man walked onto the New York subway with one hundred copies of a document detailing a multinational government conspiracy to eradicate racialized people from the United States. He proceeded through subway cars, dropping flyers on seats at random to be discovered by anyone who happened on them. The man was John A. Williams, the author of a novel called The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), in which these documents appear in full under the cryptic title, "The King Alfred Plan." Nominally intended as a form of guerilla marketing for his novel, this flyering began the propagation of a conspiracy theory that still has traction among black Americans today.¹ In the novel, the plan is discovered by Max Reddick, a black expatriate American writer who, not unlike Williams himself, has experienced a series of racially charged events that have all but thwarted his literary career. The plan itself describes emergency measures to be taken by various government and policing bodies—from the National Security Council and the Department of Justice to the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation—in the case of overwhelming racial unrest. "When that Emergency comes," the plan reads, "we must expect the total involvement of all 22 million members of the Minority, men, women and children, for once this project is launched, its goal is to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society, and, indeed, the Free World" (Williams 372).

While profoundly hyperbolic in its content and rhetoric, Williams's fictional deployment of an insidious plot against minorities represents an attempt to conceptualize the malignant telos of American racism in cohesive terms. His formulation of a conspiracy theory explanation for black oppression is symptomatic of a feeling that the Civil Rights Movement had, by that point, resoundingly failed to uplift black Americans. Malcolm X had been assassinated two years earlier, and Williams held out little hope for the vision of racial equality articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he considered a puppet of white power, unable to enact radical change.² As a whole, Williams's novel—along with the incendiary tactics he used to promote it—reflects the author's total disillusionment with the ideals of the movement and points to his desire to galvanize radical revolutionary upheaval that would lay waste to the structures of white oppression. Indeed, the wanton dissemination of The King Alfred Plan without any indication of its origins in a fictional work underscored Williams's belief in the necessity of an easily digestible, propagandistic vision of American racism that could efficiently convey a transparent truth about the nature of white power to the disenfranchised. In so doing, he hoped to catalyze a revolutionary movement to tear it out at the root.

While Williams's articulation of a conspiracy against the American racial minority was perhaps the most fully realized depiction of its kind, he was not alone in marshalling a paranoid conception of the structures of racial oppression. Merve Emre frames Williams's novel as participating in a broader social and cultural movement among African American writers of the era who strategically wielded paranoid literary aesthetics to radicalize their readership:

In the work of [Richard] Wright, Williams, James Baldwin, Gil Scott Heron, and thousands of Black American readers in the 1960s and 1970s, it was precisely the diffuseness of paranoid reading that enabled its emergence as a potentially revolutionary strategy for shaping how subjects denied access to political institutions could transform their linguistic performances into the discursive equipment of social protest.

(Paraliterary 217)

For Emre, the paranoid aesthetics of these authors' literary works was a form of "social efficacy" adopted to incite a revolutionary response in readers and eventually to organize a mass opposition to the structures of racial oppression (221). Considered in this broader context, Williams's work seems to typify a collective feeling of black disenchantment not only with the structures of white supremacy but also with the extant forms of...