This piece was originally published on The Huffington Post
Excerpt:
*President Bill Clinton doubled down on his 1994 Crime Bill, pulling back from his recent apology for his role in the over incarceration of young African Americans.
Instead, ( on 04-07-16) he labeled these youth in similar fashion to his wife’s description 20 years ago, as a type of predator that leads to people being “hopped up on crack.” Mass incarceration has largely been the type of stain on the Clinton legacy with Black Americans that doesn’t wash out with words.
Clinton’s bill has left in its wake a trail of devastated African American families cut off from loved ones that have served sentences for nonviolent drug offenses that were decades too long. For former President Bill Clinton to now insinuate that Black Lives Matter protestors are defending murderers and gang leaders, is offensive to a people that have been through so much due to his legislative actions.
Yet, here we stand in 2016 hearing the same rhetoric espoused to create the Crime Bill, now being used to justify its abhorrent results.
Where as in 1996 Hillary Clinton called young blacks super predators, that is now replaced with Bill Clinton saying,
I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out into the street to murder other African American children — maybe you thought they were good citizens.
Hillary Clinton’s statements calling inner city black youth, “super predators who must be brought to heel” was a line of thought built to create unfounded paranoia about urban youth back in the 1990s.
This super predator myth that was debunked long ago is now revived by President Bill Clinton in 2016, recycling the same racial stereotypes. Bill Clinton’s attempt to blame African American politicians for the Crime Bill he championed to prove he could be tougher on crime than the Republicans as part of his New Democrat strategy is historically inaccurate.
President Clinton, this is your legacy; own it as you do the economic gains Hillary Clinton has touted throughout her campaign. While African American politicians facing communities devastated by the results of Reganomics and the crack epidemic were desperate to deal with violent crime leading to their support of many tough-on-crime measures. They did not foresee the results of your policies, being that large parts of their communities would be placed in prison, and stripped of welfare.
Read more at Huffington Post.
