Well, the first 2024 presidential debate happened, and we’re checking in — you guys doing okay? Because it was a lot. As is often the case, both candidates made a lot of assertions. One such example was Donald Trump‘s claim that President Biden referred to African American men as “super predators.”
Trump’s “super predator” criticism stems from the 1990s, when Joe Biden was a Delaware senator. In the `90s, President Clinton introduced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, sometimes called the “Clinton Crime Bill.” At the time, the “Clinton Crime Bill” was a pivot for the Democrats to push back on their soft-on-crime reputation. Since then, however, the bill has been roundly criticized for contributing to America’s rates of mass incarceration, especially among African American men.
Biden was a senator in 1994 when the bill passed, so did he call African American men “super predators?” Trump also mentioned super predators and Biden in the 2020 election, according to Reuters. And Trump was partially right both times he brought up the problematic statement: A leading Democrat did refer to criminals in those terms, but it wasn’t Biden.
Hillary Clinton said it
Biden did use the word “predators” in a more general context relating to the Clinton bill, but not specifically referring to Black men, quite the opposite in fact: Biden rejected the term “super predators” in a 1997 senate hearing, according to CNN. The politician who did call criminals “super predators” was then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election, in a 1996 speech. Even so, she didn’t explicitly call Black men “super predators,” but she did say it in the context of gangs, so it’s easy to read between the lines.
Biden did, however, use the word “predators” relating to the Clinton Crime Bill, referring to “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale.” But in 1997, Biden walked back “super predators” when he said the following,
In 1994, there were about 1.5 million juvenile delinquency cases. Less than 10% of those cases involved violent crimes. So when we talk about the juvenile justice system, we have to remember that most of the youth involved in the system are not the so-called ‘super predators.’ ”
via CNN
Clinton has since apologized
Trump’s not the only politician to use Hillary Clinton’s hamfisted statement for their own gain. Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s Democrat opponent in the 2016 election cycle, called it a “racist term” in 2016, and two Black Lives Matter demonstrators demanded Clinton apologize for the comment. And she did, the next day in The Washington Post. “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today,” Clinton said.
