“Super-predators” without “conscience” or “empathy” who need to be brought “to heel”…this is the dehumanizing language that was successfully used to usher in Bill Clinton’s infamous Three-Strikes crime bill that accelerated a new era of the so-called war on drugs (aka the New Jim Crow), where black and brown people were disproportionately jailed not just for violent crimes, but also for possessing small amounts of drugs like marijuana or crack cocaine, while white people were given probation for the same amounts of powdered cocaine, and often given a complete pass for possessing marijuana
So to all the people now saying, “It was a different time back then” or “Nobody’s perfect, we’ve all evolved and changed our minds on things”…I need to say a few things to you:
First of all, it was the 90s, not the 1800s. That’s within my lifetime. I think would have been around 11 or 12 years old back then
Worse, criminalizing blackness with coded language is hardly anything “new” or “different” in America. In fact, it’s enforcing the same racist status quo that’s been around forever. So for me, as a BLACK man, Clinton’s full throated support of those laws, and casually using charged code words, is not something I can take lightly, or belittle or minimize. The stereotypes that phrases like “super-predators” evoke are not of little blonde haired, blue eyed white children who are presumed innocent in the eyes of the law. That’s specifically coded language which has been carefully cultivated over time to evoke specific racial stereotypes
And I can’t help but note how the statement, “They’re not just gang kids anymore” is precisely the same kind of logic that the police, mass media and courts use to suggest that innocent black children aren’t actually innocent, or even children; it’s the same logic police use to dehumanize and justify the murders of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Mike Brown, LaQuan McDonald, Freddie Gray and far too many others
A famous Republican strategist, Lee Atwater (the Frank Luntz of the 70s and 80s) once said that for casual, ingrained racism to be successful, coded language had to keep pace with the times and become more and more abstract. It isn’t too difficult to see how in the 1990s the phrase “super-predators” was then, what the word “thugs” is today, or how it quietly equated black youths with dangerous animals
So no…it’s not some small or trivial thing for me. Please stop telling black people to “just get over it” because I guarantee you that there are black and brown people who are still in prison right now, TODAY because of how Three-Strikes was used as an excuse to incarcerate even more black people and feed the private prison industry (which Hillary maintained financial ties to until late 2015 when she suddenly “evolved” after repeatedly being called out by activists)
Unless I missed reading about a shit ton of Presidential pardons by Bill Clinton, none of those people (or their broken families) are benefiting from Bill or Hillary’s very recent, very well-timed “change of heart”
And finally, yeah, evolving is actually a good thing. We all get to change our minds, but I just have to question when someone’s mind “coincidentally” happens to change on things like the Iraq war, the KXL Pipeline, DOMA, Glass-Stegall, and other key issues, at exactly around the same time it becomes politically popular to do so. Sorry, but that just seems like chasing opinion polls, and makes me wonder if primacy won’t take over, and HRC simply won’t revert back to some of her more conservative core values if elected
So, obviously you can vote however you want to vote in the primaries, but for now - for right now - please don’t try to tell me about how “progressive” Hillary Clinton was
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