Political Flashback: Hillary Clinton "We need to bring them to heel" (Superpredator)
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“We have to bring them to heel”: Watch a decade of Hillary Clinton’s shameful hypocrisy on racism
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/01/we_...illary_clintons_shameful_hypocrisy_on_racism/
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/01/we_...illary_clintons_shameful_hypocrisy_on_racism/
Is Hillary Clinton Being Unfairly Targeted for Her Use of the Word "Superpredator?"
Recently, Democratic candidate for President Hillary Clinton has been the subject of criticism for her use of the word "superpredator" during a speech at Keene State College in New Hampshire on January 28, 1996. A courageous Black Lives Matter activist, Ashley Williams, heckled Clinton at a private fundraiser , telling her "I am not a superpredator," calling on her to apologize to blacks for "mass incarceration," and unfurling a banner with Mrs. Clinton's own words from the 1996 event: "We Need to Bring Them to Heel." After Ms. Williams was ushered out of the event, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged to a reporter at the Washington Post that she "shouldn't have used those words" and pointed to her lifelong record of working on behalf of disadvantaged children and youth.
Enough said? Time to move on?
Not yet.
First, let's put Mrs. Clinton's speech in context. The Keene State College speech
came almost two years after Congress passed the 1994 Crime Bill. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, there was a rapid increase in violent crime on the streets of many urban centers in the country. Much of this violence was related to the crack cocaine trade and some of this violence was committed by youthful offenders. Adult gang members recruited teens as their child soldiers, armed them with high-powered weaponry, and dispatched them to do battle over with other gangs over turf in the drug trade. State legislators had already begun to respond to this violence by passing laws that made it easier to prosecute children as adults but the alarmist tone struck by many in the debates over the Crime Bill only accelerated this trend. The Crime Bill also gave financial incentives to states to build prisons and its endorsement of "truth in sentencing" laws which required that offenders serve between 85% to 100% of their sentences ensured that these prisons would be filled for years to come.
In the debates over the Crime Bill, there was plenty of ugly dehumanizing rhetoric about juvenile offenders, including many references to them as "wolfpacks" "thugs" and "predators." But the word "superpredator" had not yet been born. Professor John DiIulio, a Princeton political science professor, first mentioned the word in November 1995 in an article he published in The Weekly Standard. DiIulio's superpredators were "subhuman," "amoral," "feral" creatures ready to maim, rape, and murder Americans without a second's thought. DiIulio became the darling of crime control conservatives. His forecast of a "coming Armageddon" of this "new breed" of urban (i.e. black and brown) youth criminals ignited an already combustible issue. Fear of superpredators unleashed a moral panic that led virtually every state to enact laws making it easier to prosecute and sentence juveniles as adults, send them to adult prisons, and keep them there for most or all of their lives.
When Hillary Clinton traveled to New Hampshire in January 1996, the ink had barely dried on DiIulio's article announcing his "superpredator" theory. To a lily-white audience in a state that is 95% white, Mrs. Clinton delivered what can only be called a Jekyll and Hyde speech. She began by stating that there is "nothing more important than our children" and during the first twenty minutes of her speech, she outlined the President's plans to help support families in ensuring their children would thrive. She discussed an array of government programs including earned income tax credits, raising the minimum wage, reforming health insurance, giving parents the right to choose public schools or charter schools, and protecting Medicaid and Medicare.
Then the speech took a darker turn to the subject of crime. After talking about the 1994 Crime Bill's 100,000 police officers and citing "community policing" as the main reason why progress was being made in the fight to "take back our streets", Mrs. Clinton started to promote the President's new plan to wage war against street gangs. According to Mrs. Clinton, these gangs, with links to the "cartels," are often made up of the kinds of kids that are called "superpredators" who have "no conscience, no empathy.....We can talk about how they got that way but we first have to bring them to heel."
Why Mrs. Clinton chose to drop the "superpredator" bomb to a room full of white people in a state that had few black and brown citizens and little gang violence, is perplexing. It shows that she was firmly in the grip of the moral panic that would soon sweep the country but it also suggests that she had fully embraced this theory without questioning its bases and was willing to use it for political purposes. To her credit, she apparently came to her senses. As far as I can tell, she never used the word again, at least in her public speeches.
By 2001, after seven years of declining juvenile violent crime, the "superpredator" theory was relegated to the trash heap of bad "science." The Surgeon General of the United States issued a report stating that there "is no evidence" that young people engaged in violence during the 1990's "were more frequent or vicious than youth of earlier eras." Even Professor DiIulio has issued a mea culpa, admitting that he was wrong in arguing that "demography is not fate and criminology is not pure science."
My mother is voting for Hillary Clinton for President. She's a Gloria Steinem-Democrat, an early subscriber of Ms. Magazine, and would love to see a woman as President before she dies. One of my three sons, a supporter of criminal justice reform and concerned about Mrs. Clinton's ties to Wall Street, is firmly in the Bernie Sanders camp. As for me, I have not decided who I am voting for in Illinois's primary. But taking Mrs. Clinton at her word - she says she is going to fight for every vote - I would like to see her work a little harder to earn my vote and more importantly, to earn the vote of my son and other younger or first-time voters, including many of the Black Lives Matter activists.
I don't need to bring Mrs. Clinton to heel. I want her to renounce the "superpredator" theory and state that she is going to work hard to roll back many of the laws that were passed in its wake. I want her to state clearly that children are less culpable for crimes than adults and that no child should be sentenced to life without parole and few should receive sentences that will lock them up and throw away the key until they are senior citizens. I want her to support federal incentives to states to close down prisons and urge states to invest the savings from these closings into community based programs that aim at keeping men, women, and children out of prison on the front-end and assist prisoners once they are released.
Finally, I want her to take a page out of President Obama's playbook. I want her to unveil her plans to the group who were most directly affected by the 1994 Crime Bill and the "superpredator" theory. I want her to announce these plans to a group of mostly black and brown inmates in a juvenile correctional facility or a prison.
Recently, Democratic candidate for President Hillary Clinton has been the subject of criticism for her use of the word "superpredator" during a speech at Keene State College in New Hampshire on January 28, 1996. A courageous Black Lives Matter activist, Ashley Williams, heckled Clinton at a private fundraiser , telling her "I am not a superpredator," calling on her to apologize to blacks for "mass incarceration," and unfurling a banner with Mrs. Clinton's own words from the 1996 event: "We Need to Bring Them to Heel." After Ms. Williams was ushered out of the event, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged to a reporter at the Washington Post that she "shouldn't have used those words" and pointed to her lifelong record of working on behalf of disadvantaged children and youth.
Enough said? Time to move on?
Not yet.
First, let's put Mrs. Clinton's speech in context. The Keene State College speech
came almost two years after Congress passed the 1994 Crime Bill. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, there was a rapid increase in violent crime on the streets of many urban centers in the country. Much of this violence was related to the crack cocaine trade and some of this violence was committed by youthful offenders. Adult gang members recruited teens as their child soldiers, armed them with high-powered weaponry, and dispatched them to do battle over with other gangs over turf in the drug trade. State legislators had already begun to respond to this violence by passing laws that made it easier to prosecute children as adults but the alarmist tone struck by many in the debates over the Crime Bill only accelerated this trend. The Crime Bill also gave financial incentives to states to build prisons and its endorsement of "truth in sentencing" laws which required that offenders serve between 85% to 100% of their sentences ensured that these prisons would be filled for years to come.
In the debates over the Crime Bill, there was plenty of ugly dehumanizing rhetoric about juvenile offenders, including many references to them as "wolfpacks" "thugs" and "predators." But the word "superpredator" had not yet been born. Professor John DiIulio, a Princeton political science professor, first mentioned the word in November 1995 in an article he published in The Weekly Standard. DiIulio's superpredators were "subhuman," "amoral," "feral" creatures ready to maim, rape, and murder Americans without a second's thought. DiIulio became the darling of crime control conservatives. His forecast of a "coming Armageddon" of this "new breed" of urban (i.e. black and brown) youth criminals ignited an already combustible issue. Fear of superpredators unleashed a moral panic that led virtually every state to enact laws making it easier to prosecute and sentence juveniles as adults, send them to adult prisons, and keep them there for most or all of their lives.
When Hillary Clinton traveled to New Hampshire in January 1996, the ink had barely dried on DiIulio's article announcing his "superpredator" theory. To a lily-white audience in a state that is 95% white, Mrs. Clinton delivered what can only be called a Jekyll and Hyde speech. She began by stating that there is "nothing more important than our children" and during the first twenty minutes of her speech, she outlined the President's plans to help support families in ensuring their children would thrive. She discussed an array of government programs including earned income tax credits, raising the minimum wage, reforming health insurance, giving parents the right to choose public schools or charter schools, and protecting Medicaid and Medicare.
Then the speech took a darker turn to the subject of crime. After talking about the 1994 Crime Bill's 100,000 police officers and citing "community policing" as the main reason why progress was being made in the fight to "take back our streets", Mrs. Clinton started to promote the President's new plan to wage war against street gangs. According to Mrs. Clinton, these gangs, with links to the "cartels," are often made up of the kinds of kids that are called "superpredators" who have "no conscience, no empathy.....We can talk about how they got that way but we first have to bring them to heel."
Why Mrs. Clinton chose to drop the "superpredator" bomb to a room full of white people in a state that had few black and brown citizens and little gang violence, is perplexing. It shows that she was firmly in the grip of the moral panic that would soon sweep the country but it also suggests that she had fully embraced this theory without questioning its bases and was willing to use it for political purposes. To her credit, she apparently came to her senses. As far as I can tell, she never used the word again, at least in her public speeches.
By 2001, after seven years of declining juvenile violent crime, the "superpredator" theory was relegated to the trash heap of bad "science." The Surgeon General of the United States issued a report stating that there "is no evidence" that young people engaged in violence during the 1990's "were more frequent or vicious than youth of earlier eras." Even Professor DiIulio has issued a mea culpa, admitting that he was wrong in arguing that "demography is not fate and criminology is not pure science."
My mother is voting for Hillary Clinton for President. She's a Gloria Steinem-Democrat, an early subscriber of Ms. Magazine, and would love to see a woman as President before she dies. One of my three sons, a supporter of criminal justice reform and concerned about Mrs. Clinton's ties to Wall Street, is firmly in the Bernie Sanders camp. As for me, I have not decided who I am voting for in Illinois's primary. But taking Mrs. Clinton at her word - she says she is going to fight for every vote - I would like to see her work a little harder to earn my vote and more importantly, to earn the vote of my son and other younger or first-time voters, including many of the Black Lives Matter activists.
I don't need to bring Mrs. Clinton to heel. I want her to renounce the "superpredator" theory and state that she is going to work hard to roll back many of the laws that were passed in its wake. I want her to state clearly that children are less culpable for crimes than adults and that no child should be sentenced to life without parole and few should receive sentences that will lock them up and throw away the key until they are senior citizens. I want her to support federal incentives to states to close down prisons and urge states to invest the savings from these closings into community based programs that aim at keeping men, women, and children out of prison on the front-end and assist prisoners once they are released.
Finally, I want her to take a page out of President Obama's playbook. I want her to unveil her plans to the group who were most directly affected by the 1994 Crime Bill and the "superpredator" theory. I want her to announce these plans to a group of mostly black and brown inmates in a juvenile correctional facility or a prison.
http://fair.org/home/why-did-it-take-an-activist-to-bring-superpredators-into-the-campaign/
The fact that it took Black Lives Matter activist Ashley Williams to bring “superpredators” into 2016 presidential campaign coverage (AlterNet,2/24/16) truly demonstrates the malfeasance of the corporate press.
At a private fundraiser in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 24, Williams confronted Hillary Clinton about a January 25, 1996, speech she gave at New Hampshire’s Keene State College, in which she said (Buzzfeed, 5/8/15):
We also have to have an organized effort against gangs…. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel, and the president has asked the FBI to launch a very concerted effort against gangs everywhere.
Her reference to “superpredators” was an invocation of a prominent political and media trope at the time: the idea that the US was about to be overwhelmed by a wave of remorseless killer kids. (Mike Males and Robin Templeton wrote about this for FAIR at the time—see Extra!, 3–4/96, 1–2/98.) The phrase was introduced by Rupert Murdoch’s neoconservative opinion magazine, theWeekly Standard, in a piece (11/27/95) by right-wing criminologist John DiIulio.
What’s striking, rereading DiIulio’s article today, is how feeble its argument is. He warned of “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future… big trouble that hasn’t yet begun to crest,” because “all of the research indicates that Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb…. What is really frightening everyone…is not what’s happening now but what’s just around the corner—namely, a sharp increase in the number of super crime-prone young males.”
How so?
Nationally, there are now about 40 million children under the age of 10, the largest number in decades. By simple math, in a decade today’s 4-to-7-year-olds will become 14-to-17-year-olds. By 2005, the number of males in this age group will have risen about 25 percent overall and 50 percent for blacks.
To some extent, it’s just that simple: More boys begets more bad boys…. James Q. Wilson and other leading crime doctors can predict with confidence that the additional 500,000 boys who will be 14 to 17 years old in the year 2000 will mean at least 30,000 more murderers, rapists and muggers on the streets than we have today.
More boys—and, crucially, a higher percentage of black boys. To some extent, it’s just that simple!
All that DiIulio really added to this formula is the “important and well-replicated finding that…each generation of crime-prone boys (the ‘6 percent’) has been about three times as dangerous as the one before it.” By way of illustration, he notes that the fictional “Sharks and Jets of West Side Storyfame” were not as bad as the real-life—and mostly African-American—”Bloods and Crips of Los Angeles County”!
Perhaps sensing that brandishing this “well-replicated finding”—sort of aMoore’s Law for juvenile delinquency—and pointing to a Broadway musical wasn’t particularly convincing, DiIulio offered this capstone:
How can one be certain that the demographic bulge of the next ten years will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips—known as O.G.s, for “original gangsters”—look tame by comparison?… The Bloods and Crips were so much more violent, on average, than their ’50s counterparts, and the next class of juvenile offenders will be even worse, because in recent decades each generation of youth criminals in this country has grown up in more extreme conditions of moral poverty than the one before it.
This is not demonstrated, merely asserted. Isn’t it self-evident that kids are going to hell in a handbasket? Look at the Bloods and Crips!
And this demographic nightmare would soon be coming to a neighborhood near you, all you frightened white people everywhere:
While the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland.
This patently racist nonsense was somehow convincing to Hillary Clinton, then 48 years old—perhaps because DiIulio delivered it directly to the White House:
Earlier this year, I was among a dozen guests invited to a working White House dinner on juvenile crime. Over gourmet Szechwan wonton and lamb, the meeting dragged on for three-and-a-half hours. President Clinton took copious notes and asked lots of questions, but nothing was accomplished.
Something was accomplished, though: Hillary Clinton got a new talking point that she could use to depict her husband as tough on crime as she stumped for his re-election in New Hampshire.
Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention/DoJ
In reality, the wave of youth crime associated with the crack epidemic—itself a product of the influx of cheap cocaine from Latin America, but that’s another story—had already peaked in 1994, and by 1996, when Hillary issued her warning, juvenile crime rates were in freefall. Far from unleashing a conscienceless, empathy-free reign of terror on the nation, teens a decade later were committing crimes at roughly one-half to one-third the rate of their older siblings.
The fact that as this remarkable decline in youth crime was happening, Clinton was warning that many “kids” were now “superpredators” whom “we have to bring…to heel” is surely relevant in a campaign in which Black Lives Matter has brought criminal justice issues to the forefront, and media constantly refer to African-Americans as Clinton’s “firewall” against the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders. Despite this, in the nine months after Buzzfeed‘s Andrew Kaczynski and Christopher Massie first unearthed the speech, there’s been a virtual blackout of Clinton’s “superpredator” quote in US newspapers.
According to a broad search of US newspapers and wires in the Nexis news database for stories containing the words “Hillary Clinton” and either “superpredator,” “super predator” or “super-predator,” there were only four stories that referenced the quote before Ashley Williams’ intervention—all from February 2016. The first was in a college paper, the Miami Student of Ohio’s Miami University, where Brett Milan (2/2/16) wrote of Clinton:
For starters, she helped perpetuate the racist myth of the super predator in 1996 and supported the 1994 crime bill, the worst crime bill in American history.
Next was Walt Rubel, managing editor of the Las Cruces, New Mexico, Sun-News (2/14/16), who wrote:
As a member of Congress, Bernie Sanders voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Omnibus Crime Bill. Hillary Clinton was not in Congress at the time. But as first lady, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the legislation, at one point referring to youthful offenders as “super-predators.”
The Nashville Pride (2/19/16), an African-American paper in Tennessee, published an interview (credited to the Trice Edney News Wire) with former NAACP chief Ben Jealous , in which he explained his endorsement of Sanders:
Jealous detailed how Clinton, on one hand, built the Children’s Defense Fund; but on the other hand, “championed the super predator theory which said that a child at age six months could be a sociopath beyond redemption. And it’s only used to explain the actions of young black men.”
Finally, the only US paper on Nexis to have published any version of the actual quote prior to Williams’ protest was the Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/21/16), where commentary editor D.J. Tice recalled the Keane State College speech:
The “challenge,” Clinton declared, “is to take back our streets from crime, gangs and drugs.” Boasting of the administration’s putting more cops on America’s mean streets, she called for “an organized effort against gangs, just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on…. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
The Star Tribune, by far the largest of the four papers that noted Clinton’s advancement of the superpredator theory, is the 19th-largest paper in the country. Where were all the political reporters at all the bigger papers? Did none of them know about the quote, even though a college journalist in Ohio did? Or, more likely, did they know about it and decide that it wasn’t necessary to report, even though—or maybe because—the conventional wisdom was that the African-American vote would determine the Democratic nominee for president?
It’s hard to say which option is more damning.
Black Lives Matter’s Ashley Williams confronts Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser over her “superpredator” remarks. (viaAlterNet)
When Williams finally forced the major papers to cover the story, they downplayed it in a way that suggests their earlier silence was intentional. The New York Times ran an AP story (2/25/16) under the campaign-friendly headline “Clinton Emphasizing Gun Laws Ahead of South Carolina Primary,” in which the exchange was buried in the 11th through 14th paragraphs. Though Clinton’s “superpredators” line was quoted, no context was provided for the language.
That might have been better, though, than the fake context provided by theWashington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart (2/25/16), who acknowledged that, “sure, her words sting in the light of 2016,” but tried to put the best possible spin on them:
This isn’t the broad brush Clinton’s critics today are accusing her of using 20 years ago. Despite Williams’s assertion that “I know you called black youth ‘superpredators,’” Clinton was clearly talking about a narrow band of young people who would not have included the admirably assertive Williams or the vast majority of African-American youths then and now. And in light of the overarching fear of crime across the United States back in the 1990s, Clinton’s going out of her way to define “superpredator” as a kid with “no conscience, no empathy” is noteworthy.
So in Capehart’s interpretation, Clinton’s assertion that young people in gangs are “often” superpredators becomes almost a compliment to all but “a narrow band of young people.” (The government estimated that there were about 850,000 gang members in the United States in 1996—not too narrow a band.) And Clinton’s description of these kids as inhuman sociopaths—which comes straight from DiIulio’s article, with its talk of “the ever-growing numbers of hardened, remorseless juveniles…who place zero value on the lives of their victims”—is apparently somehow a challenge to “the overarching fear of crime across the United States back in the 1990s”?
Rather than having to write such apologetics, one can see why political journalists instead tried to ignore the “superpredator” quote as long as they could.
New York Daily News columnist Shaun King (2/25/16)—himself an activist associated with Black Lives Matter—took a less dismissive approach, pointing out that “the notion that any children were superpredators without conscience was a dangerous lie designed to justify the mass incarceration complex.” He zeroed in on the most striking part of Clinton’s brief response to Williams:
You know what, nobody’s ever asked me before…. You’re the first person to ask me and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me.
King noted:
Her comments 20 years ago calling young black children “superpredators” have been widely discussed, publicly, among progressive thought leaders and activists throughout this entire campaign…. So, if it is true that Williams is the first person to ask Hillary Clinton about this, it says something about the type of people Hillary is surrounding herself with.
It also says something about the kind of people who cover presidential elections.
The fact that it took Black Lives Matter activist Ashley Williams to bring “superpredators” into 2016 presidential campaign coverage (AlterNet,2/24/16) truly demonstrates the malfeasance of the corporate press.
At a private fundraiser in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 24, Williams confronted Hillary Clinton about a January 25, 1996, speech she gave at New Hampshire’s Keene State College, in which she said (Buzzfeed, 5/8/15):
We also have to have an organized effort against gangs…. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel, and the president has asked the FBI to launch a very concerted effort against gangs everywhere.
Her reference to “superpredators” was an invocation of a prominent political and media trope at the time: the idea that the US was about to be overwhelmed by a wave of remorseless killer kids. (Mike Males and Robin Templeton wrote about this for FAIR at the time—see Extra!, 3–4/96, 1–2/98.) The phrase was introduced by Rupert Murdoch’s neoconservative opinion magazine, theWeekly Standard, in a piece (11/27/95) by right-wing criminologist John DiIulio.
What’s striking, rereading DiIulio’s article today, is how feeble its argument is. He warned of “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future… big trouble that hasn’t yet begun to crest,” because “all of the research indicates that Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb…. What is really frightening everyone…is not what’s happening now but what’s just around the corner—namely, a sharp increase in the number of super crime-prone young males.”
How so?
Nationally, there are now about 40 million children under the age of 10, the largest number in decades. By simple math, in a decade today’s 4-to-7-year-olds will become 14-to-17-year-olds. By 2005, the number of males in this age group will have risen about 25 percent overall and 50 percent for blacks.
To some extent, it’s just that simple: More boys begets more bad boys…. James Q. Wilson and other leading crime doctors can predict with confidence that the additional 500,000 boys who will be 14 to 17 years old in the year 2000 will mean at least 30,000 more murderers, rapists and muggers on the streets than we have today.
More boys—and, crucially, a higher percentage of black boys. To some extent, it’s just that simple!
All that DiIulio really added to this formula is the “important and well-replicated finding that…each generation of crime-prone boys (the ‘6 percent’) has been about three times as dangerous as the one before it.” By way of illustration, he notes that the fictional “Sharks and Jets of West Side Storyfame” were not as bad as the real-life—and mostly African-American—”Bloods and Crips of Los Angeles County”!
Perhaps sensing that brandishing this “well-replicated finding”—sort of aMoore’s Law for juvenile delinquency—and pointing to a Broadway musical wasn’t particularly convincing, DiIulio offered this capstone:
How can one be certain that the demographic bulge of the next ten years will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips—known as O.G.s, for “original gangsters”—look tame by comparison?… The Bloods and Crips were so much more violent, on average, than their ’50s counterparts, and the next class of juvenile offenders will be even worse, because in recent decades each generation of youth criminals in this country has grown up in more extreme conditions of moral poverty than the one before it.
This is not demonstrated, merely asserted. Isn’t it self-evident that kids are going to hell in a handbasket? Look at the Bloods and Crips!
And this demographic nightmare would soon be coming to a neighborhood near you, all you frightened white people everywhere:
While the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland.
This patently racist nonsense was somehow convincing to Hillary Clinton, then 48 years old—perhaps because DiIulio delivered it directly to the White House:
Earlier this year, I was among a dozen guests invited to a working White House dinner on juvenile crime. Over gourmet Szechwan wonton and lamb, the meeting dragged on for three-and-a-half hours. President Clinton took copious notes and asked lots of questions, but nothing was accomplished.
Something was accomplished, though: Hillary Clinton got a new talking point that she could use to depict her husband as tough on crime as she stumped for his re-election in New Hampshire.
Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention/DoJ
In reality, the wave of youth crime associated with the crack epidemic—itself a product of the influx of cheap cocaine from Latin America, but that’s another story—had already peaked in 1994, and by 1996, when Hillary issued her warning, juvenile crime rates were in freefall. Far from unleashing a conscienceless, empathy-free reign of terror on the nation, teens a decade later were committing crimes at roughly one-half to one-third the rate of their older siblings.
The fact that as this remarkable decline in youth crime was happening, Clinton was warning that many “kids” were now “superpredators” whom “we have to bring…to heel” is surely relevant in a campaign in which Black Lives Matter has brought criminal justice issues to the forefront, and media constantly refer to African-Americans as Clinton’s “firewall” against the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders. Despite this, in the nine months after Buzzfeed‘s Andrew Kaczynski and Christopher Massie first unearthed the speech, there’s been a virtual blackout of Clinton’s “superpredator” quote in US newspapers.
According to a broad search of US newspapers and wires in the Nexis news database for stories containing the words “Hillary Clinton” and either “superpredator,” “super predator” or “super-predator,” there were only four stories that referenced the quote before Ashley Williams’ intervention—all from February 2016. The first was in a college paper, the Miami Student of Ohio’s Miami University, where Brett Milan (2/2/16) wrote of Clinton:
For starters, she helped perpetuate the racist myth of the super predator in 1996 and supported the 1994 crime bill, the worst crime bill in American history.
Next was Walt Rubel, managing editor of the Las Cruces, New Mexico, Sun-News (2/14/16), who wrote:
As a member of Congress, Bernie Sanders voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Omnibus Crime Bill. Hillary Clinton was not in Congress at the time. But as first lady, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the legislation, at one point referring to youthful offenders as “super-predators.”
The Nashville Pride (2/19/16), an African-American paper in Tennessee, published an interview (credited to the Trice Edney News Wire) with former NAACP chief Ben Jealous , in which he explained his endorsement of Sanders:
Jealous detailed how Clinton, on one hand, built the Children’s Defense Fund; but on the other hand, “championed the super predator theory which said that a child at age six months could be a sociopath beyond redemption. And it’s only used to explain the actions of young black men.”
Finally, the only US paper on Nexis to have published any version of the actual quote prior to Williams’ protest was the Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/21/16), where commentary editor D.J. Tice recalled the Keane State College speech:
The “challenge,” Clinton declared, “is to take back our streets from crime, gangs and drugs.” Boasting of the administration’s putting more cops on America’s mean streets, she called for “an organized effort against gangs, just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on…. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
The Star Tribune, by far the largest of the four papers that noted Clinton’s advancement of the superpredator theory, is the 19th-largest paper in the country. Where were all the political reporters at all the bigger papers? Did none of them know about the quote, even though a college journalist in Ohio did? Or, more likely, did they know about it and decide that it wasn’t necessary to report, even though—or maybe because—the conventional wisdom was that the African-American vote would determine the Democratic nominee for president?
It’s hard to say which option is more damning.
Black Lives Matter’s Ashley Williams confronts Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser over her “superpredator” remarks. (viaAlterNet)
When Williams finally forced the major papers to cover the story, they downplayed it in a way that suggests their earlier silence was intentional. The New York Times ran an AP story (2/25/16) under the campaign-friendly headline “Clinton Emphasizing Gun Laws Ahead of South Carolina Primary,” in which the exchange was buried in the 11th through 14th paragraphs. Though Clinton’s “superpredators” line was quoted, no context was provided for the language.
That might have been better, though, than the fake context provided by theWashington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart (2/25/16), who acknowledged that, “sure, her words sting in the light of 2016,” but tried to put the best possible spin on them:
This isn’t the broad brush Clinton’s critics today are accusing her of using 20 years ago. Despite Williams’s assertion that “I know you called black youth ‘superpredators,’” Clinton was clearly talking about a narrow band of young people who would not have included the admirably assertive Williams or the vast majority of African-American youths then and now. And in light of the overarching fear of crime across the United States back in the 1990s, Clinton’s going out of her way to define “superpredator” as a kid with “no conscience, no empathy” is noteworthy.
So in Capehart’s interpretation, Clinton’s assertion that young people in gangs are “often” superpredators becomes almost a compliment to all but “a narrow band of young people.” (The government estimated that there were about 850,000 gang members in the United States in 1996—not too narrow a band.) And Clinton’s description of these kids as inhuman sociopaths—which comes straight from DiIulio’s article, with its talk of “the ever-growing numbers of hardened, remorseless juveniles…who place zero value on the lives of their victims”—is apparently somehow a challenge to “the overarching fear of crime across the United States back in the 1990s”?
Rather than having to write such apologetics, one can see why political journalists instead tried to ignore the “superpredator” quote as long as they could.
New York Daily News columnist Shaun King (2/25/16)—himself an activist associated with Black Lives Matter—took a less dismissive approach, pointing out that “the notion that any children were superpredators without conscience was a dangerous lie designed to justify the mass incarceration complex.” He zeroed in on the most striking part of Clinton’s brief response to Williams:
You know what, nobody’s ever asked me before…. You’re the first person to ask me and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me.
King noted:
Her comments 20 years ago calling young black children “superpredators” have been widely discussed, publicly, among progressive thought leaders and activists throughout this entire campaign…. So, if it is true that Williams is the first person to ask Hillary Clinton about this, it says something about the type of people Hillary is surrounding herself with.
It also says something about the kind of people who cover presidential elections.
Black folks ain't listening, it's over. We as a group must not want shit to change. Not complaining, just the truth. the Clinton's can fuck us over for 8 years in the white house, a few years in the senate, cosign an illegal war (a stance that helped Obama get elected), talk shit about Obama as if he is a child PUBLICLY.....just fucking apologize and now its all good????
Now Back to the Issues!!
Now Back to the Issues!!
Can you get back to the issues ?
We have a relationship with Hillary and we love Hillary.
We have said the same things to our kids
Damn lil whippernappers
We have a relationship with Hillary and we love Hillary.
We have said the same things to our kids
Damn lil whippernappers
,....
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