Bill Clinton, Superpredator | Jacobin
On the evening of April 7, 2016, at a campaign event in Philadelphia, Bill Clinton lost his temper. Clinton had found himself noisily confronted by members of the Black Lives Matter activist group, who repeatedly interrupted his speech to denounce him. The activists carried signs that read “Welfare reform increased poverty” and “Clinton crime bill destroyed our communities.”
Bristling at the protesters’ continual outbursts, Clinton began to raise his voice.
He challenged the activists’ portrayals of his record on welfare and crime. He insisted that thanks to his policies, poverty had decreased and our streets were safer. Clinton claimed that the protesters simply didn’t want to know the facts, as evidenced by the vehemence of their clamor: “They won’t hush. When someone won’t hush and listen, that ain’t democracy. They’re afraid of the truth. Don’t be afraid of the truth.”
Of course, one could perhaps take issue with Clinton’s equation of hushing and democracy (“Hush and Listen” sounding like the official slogan of a folksy police state run by bayou Stalinists). But the testiest part of the exchange, and the one that made the next morning’s headlines, concerned the phrase “superpredator.”
The seeds of the “superpredator” scuffle were sown many years earlier. At an event in New Hampshire in 1996, Hillary Clinton had been discussing the administration’s “organized effort against gangs.” She described gangs as a nationwide problem, one requiring a muscly policy response, with our generation having to face up to gangs “just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob.”
Gangs were a scourge, she suggested, and to deal with them we must exercise the full might of the law’s brawny arm. “We need to take these people on,” she declared.
But it was a particular couple of sentences in Hillary Clinton’s gang monologue that would haunt her, and would be the direct cause of Bill Clinton’s news-making outburst twenty years later. Describing the type of juvenile gang members she was referring to, Hillary said:
They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called “super-predators.” No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.
Her words were not controversial at the time. But in the 2016 election, they proved a source of significant embarrassment.
By that time, the “tough on crime” political rhetoric of the 1990s was under strong criticism. The Black Lives Matter movement arose as a reaction to decades of abusive policing practices and failed criminal justice policies. To a new generation of activists, Hillary’s having called kids “superpredators” seemed perverse.
At first, Clinton seemed bewildered by the criticism. When a Black Lives Matter activist named Ashley Williams crashed a Clinton fundraiser holding a sign with the infamous quote, a tense exchange ensued:
Hillary Clinton: I think we’ve got somebody saying [something] here, have you? [reading sign] “Bring them to heel?”
Ashley Williams: We want you to apologize for mass incarceration. I’m not a superpredator, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton: Okay fine, we’ll talk about it.
Williams: Will you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?
Clinton: Well, can I talk, and then maybe you can listen to what I say. Fine. Thank you very much. There are a lot of issues in this campaign. The very first speech that I gave back in April was about criminal justice reform.
Williams: You called black people “superpredators.”
Unidentified Fundraiser Attendee: You’re being inappropriate, that’s rude.
Williams: She called black people “superpredators,” that is rude.
Clinton: Do you want to hear the facts or do you just want to talk?
Williams: I know that you called black people “superpredators” in 1994, please explain it to us. You owe black people an apology.
Clinton: If you give me a chance to talk, I’ll come to your side . . . You know what! Nobody’s ever asked me [this] before. You’re the first person to ask me and I am happy to address it. But you are the first person to ask me.
At that point, Clinton moved on, and Williams was escorted from the event by Secret Service. But faced with the prospect of continuing to be dogged by sign-wielding Black Lives Matter supporters, Clinton soon repudiated her use of the phrase in a conversation with theWashington Post’s Jonathan Capehart.
“Looking back,” she said, “I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.” She emphasized her commitment to children, and mentioned the importance of ending the notorious “school-to-prison pipeline” that ensnares so many young African Americans.
Given that Hillary herself had just disowned the words and apologized for using them, one might therefore have expected Bill Clinton to display a similar contrition when confronted by the activists in Philadelphia. But when they mentioned the phrase “superpredator,” he exploded in unqualified defense of the term:
I don’t know how you would describe the gang leaders who got thirteen-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out in the streets to murder other African-American children! Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.
Clinton went on to defend every aspect of his criminal justice policy, chiding the activists by suggesting that they didn’t care about victims. This was despite his having previously apologized to the NAACP for his role in expanding the prison system, saying “I signed a bill that made the problem worse . . . and I want to admit it.”
Bill Clinton’s words were certainly curious. A man who has always portrayed himself as a friend to black Americans, Clinton had seemed just as sincere in his apology for his actions as in his later defense of them.
Which was the real Clinton: the one who apologized for his crime bill, or the one who snapped at people who criticized his crime bill? Was Clinton a good-hearted and progressive-minded criminal justice reformer, or an insensitive relic of the “tough on crime” era who still believed in conservative fables about roving sociopathic African American preteens? To many observers, the whole thing seemed paradoxical.
But for those acquainted with Clinton’s political history, there was nothing especially “baffling” about his behavior in Philadelphia.
Rather, it was simply the most blatant expression of traits that have been present in Clinton’s character since his early political career. From the very beginning, Clinton’s political success has been built on his skillful maneuvering between different rhetorical stances, his “triangulation” between right and left.
Bill Clinton has always been a person who says one thing to the NAACP, and another to white audiences. What happened in Philadelphia may have startled the young black activists who sought to challenge Clinton, but it shouldn’t have. For twenty years, Bill Clinton has shown a tendency to reverse himself on prior commitments, most especially those made to African American constituencies.
Perhaps the only surprising thing about this is that anybody is still surprised.
A Threat to Civilization
The myth of the “superpredator” would have terrible consequences for American children. In the mid 1990s, fueled by alarmist pseudo-scholarship by quack criminologists, a number of politicians sounded the alarm about a concerning new trend: the rise of a new breed of sociopathic juvenile delinquent, incapable of empathy and hellbent on robbing, raping, and terrorizing every decent churchgoing middle American community.
The 1980s and 1990s were a heyday for nationwide moral panics. The coming of the superpredators was just one of the paralyzing terrors of the period, which also included widespread fear of Satanic abuse at daycares and razorblades in Halloween candy. The superpredator legend, however, was more deeply insidious.
The term was coined by John DiIulio Jr, a professor at Princeton University. DiIulio interpreted rising juvenile crime statistics to mean that a “new breed” of juvenile offender had been born, one who was “stone cold,” “fatherless, Godless, and jobless,” and had “absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.”
DiIulio and his coauthors elaborated that superpredators were:
Radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious communal disorders. They do not fear the stigma of arrest, the pains of imprisonment, or the pangs of conscience. They perceive hardly any relationship between doing right (or wrong) now and being rewarded (or punished) for it later. To these mean-street youngsters, the words “right” and “wrong” have no fixed moral meaning.
For devising this theory, DiIulio was rewarded with an invitation to the White House, where he and a group of other experts spent three and a half hours with President Clinton.
Confirming DiIulio’s analysis was James Q. Wilson, the conservative political scientist who had devised the theory of “broken windows” policing. The broken windows theory posited that minor crimes in a neighborhood (such as the breaking of windows) tended to lead to major ones, so police should harshly focus on rounding up petty criminals if they wanted to prevent major violent crimes.
Put into practice, this amounted to the endless apprehension of fare-jumpers and homeless squeegee people. It also created the intellectual justification for totalitarian “stop and frisk” policies that introduced an exasperating and often terrifying ordeal into nearly every young black New Yorker’s life.
“Broken windows” had very little academic support (it hadn’t been introduced in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a short article for theAtlantic), but Wilson still felt confident in pronouncing on the “superpredator” phenomenon. He predicted that by the year 2000, “there will be a million more people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen than there are now” and “six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders — thirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now.”
DiIulio and Wilson said that it was past time to panic. “Get ready,” warned Wilson. Not only were the superpredators here, but a lethal tsunami of them was rising in the distance, preparing to engulf civilization.
nikkas wrote that?