Why Did It Take an Activist to Bring ‘Superpredators’ Into the Campaign? (VIDEO)

Hillary Clinton and her superpredators comment

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.

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.

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.