Bring the superpredators to heel.

In 1993, after Washington state passed the first “three strikes” law and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (aka the crime bill) was introduced, television coverage of crime more than doubled from 1992. I wrote on The Root about how even today, media injustice is killing black America.

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When the crime bill passed in 1994, it was with the help of 23 members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the support of NIMBY black community leaders who believed that increased punitive punishment would save “good” children from “bad” children. Professor Michelle Alexander explained that some of these leaders were expecting reinvestment in black communities—schools, better housing, health care and jobs. But that’s not what happened.

Before the 1994 crime bill could make it through the House, it was stripped of the Racial Justice Act, which would have allowed death row inmates to use data showing racial inequities in sentencing. The bill was also stripped of $3.3 billion—two-thirds of it from prevention programs. A provision that would have made 16,000 low-level drug offenders eligible for early release was also removed.

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And in 1995, Dilulio was waving his “superpredators” flag, which turned out to be a complete lie. That didn’t matter, though, because the political mechanisms had already been activated. More states would soon be passing their own version of “three strikes” laws, and they would be awarded Truth in Sentencing grants to build and expand prisons.

“[Dilulio’s] prediction wasn’t just wrong; it was exactly the opposite,’’ said Franklin E. Zimring, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and director of the university’s Earl Warren Legal Institute, in 2001. “His theories on superpredators were utter madness.”

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HRC made her “superpredators” statement in 1996 while deep poverty was beginning to increase thanks to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which ushered in the age of time limits, stricter work requirements and less assistance (pdf) for those in deep poverty. This disproportionately affected black families, even more so in the Deep South, and the prison-industrial complex was expanding at a steady clip.

At the time, Clinton’s mentor Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, said of Bill Clinton, “His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” As recently as 2007, Edelman said that the Clintons were “not friends in politics”:

We profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we need health care, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.

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Dilulio co-authored Body Count in 1996—the same year that Hillary Clinton made the “superpredators” statement and the same year that PRWORA was passed. This is a book that further stigmatized drugs and called for a ramping up of the war against black and brown communities, as well as tough-on-crime legislation to cure society’s ills. His predictions of unhinged black and brown youths rising up in violent rage, too high on their own supply to know any better, directly contradicted 1995 national juvenile-crime data showing that crime among youths 18 and younger was on the decline for the first time in a decade.

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Despite this, more prisons were built, incarceration rates and poverty increased, and the war on drugs continued.

Bring the superpredators to heel.

The myth of black predatory behavior and criminality has played a role in the current state-sanctioned street executions and systemic criminalization of black people. In 2015 Bill Clinton acknowledged his role in expanding mass incarceration, telling CNN:

The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison. And we wound up … putting so many people in prison that there wasn’t enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives.

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Still, when his legacy was called into question while stumping for his wife in Philadelphia earlier this year, he snapped at activists holding a sign that read: “Black youth are not superpredators”:

I don’t know how you would describe the gang leaders who got 13-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.

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Hillary Clinton did not distance herself from that statement.

As I’ve written previously, the racism that peeked through the fabric of Clinton’s 2008 presidential run against then-Sen. Barack Obama was merely an extension of 1996 “superpredators” Clinton—and it is that Clinton we still see struggling with herself today on issues of race.

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Supporters can say that she’s evolved; that may even be true. Despite her long-standing criticisms of Clinton, Edelman appeared in a campaign spot for her in June. Thanks to a talented crew of black women around her and a movement that will win, Clinton has learned the language of social justice and dismantling systems of oppressions—though she still has not spoken directly to white people as she said she’d “maybe” do. Her criminal-justice platform, which she has stated that she hopes will right some of the ramifications of her husband’s policies (which she strongly supported), is decent and can be found here.

But black votes are worth more than talk; sounding good and doing right are two different things.

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Wherever voters land in the booth on Election Day or outside of it, political revisionism must not be allowed to stand. For the sake of historical accuracy and black lives, we must make it plain that “superpredators” was a racist term used to push racist tough-on-crime legislation. It was not a generic signifier with no racial context; it was a piercing dog whistle used to expand support for racist policies and fan the flames of anti-black culture in ways that continue to have a detrimental—and too often fatal—impact on black America today.

Let the record reflect: No amount of whitewashing can rinse away those blood- and tear-stained facts.

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Listen to Professor Angela Davis discuss the effects of mass criminalization below:

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