How the Branding of African American Youth as Superpredators Helped Destroy a Generation: Bill Berkowitz
December 22, 2020
The promulgation of the “superspreader” myth is a modern incarnation of stigmatizing black males that is a slander that dates back to slavery (Dandelion Salad)
By Bill Berkowitz
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing….
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. – Malcolm X
Twenty-five years ago, John Dilulio, a Princeton political science professor, made a huge splash with a Weekly Standard story titled “The Coming of the Super-Predators.” The term “Superpredator” described what Dilulio called “stone-cold predators.” He characterized young African Americans as “kids that have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.” DiIulio’s description caught fire in the media, giving sustenance to the branding a generation of African American youth "fatherless, Godless, and jobless" and labeling them "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more teenage boys, who murder, assault, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious [linked] disorders."
These African American youth weren’t the juvenile delinquents of the 1950s. They were, as criminologist James A. Fox, warned, a impending "crime wave storm," a veritable "bloodbath" of teen violence in the offing.
If it bleeds it leads has always been a hallmark of tabloid media, but in the case of Dilulio’s pronouncements, mainstream media outlets joined in, hook, line and sinker.
Mass incarceration became the future for many of the young African American youth villainized by Dilulio and Fox were talking about, that future would become clear, resulting in massive levels of incarceration. And it wasn’t your temporary/rehabilitative juvenile incarceration, but rather incarceration of the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” type.
Instead of a “crime wave storm,” what washed over the land was the demonizing and dehumanizing of black youth; the erosion of protections for juvenile offenders and the advent of harsh sentencing; the building of more prisons; and the growth of the private prison system which gave rise to the Prison Industrial Complex.
In The New Civil Death: Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Conviction, legal scholar Gabriel Chin wrote: “Borrowing from its English forebears, the United States once had a form of punishment called civil death. Civil death extinguished most civil rights of a person convicted of a crime and largely put that person outside the law's protection.
“Civil death as an institution faded away in the middle of the twentieth century. Policymakers recognized that almost all convicted persons eventually rejoin society, and therefore, it was wise and fair to allow them to participate in society with some measure of equality.. . .[C]ivil death has surreptitiously reemerged. It no longer exists under that name, but effectually a new civil death is meted out to persons convicted of crimes in the form of a substantial and permanent change in legal status, operationalized by a network of collateral consequences.”
From the advent of slavery, white supremacy defined Black criminality. The work of 18th-century political and intellectual leaders justified slavery by asserting that Africans were naturally inferior and were indeed best suited for slavery, which would keep them from becoming criminals. The 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery in America, had the precious loophole of allowing ”convicted felons” to perform work previously done by slaves; thereby encouraging incarceration.
But it wasn’t only Dilulio and Fox who embraced the term “superpredator,” and advanced draconian solutions to fend it off. Both Democratic and Republican Party politicians conceived and passed strict, and severely punitive, anti-crime legislation. According to The Marshall Project’s recent report on the media’s response to the Superpredator complex: “The record doesn’t show then-President Bill Clinton using the word “superpredator,” but Hillary Clinton did as first lady.
The Well-Crafted Superpredator Myth
The Marshall Project’s report is titled “Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth.” “DiIulio’s big idea wasn’t original, ”the report’s authors Carroll Bogert, president of The Marshall Project, and Lynnell Hancock, professor emerita at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, wrote. “His mentor as a graduate student at Harvard, the influential political scientist James Q. Wilson, had been warning for years about a new breed of conscience-less teen killers.”
It became fashionable for the mainstream media to use the term: “But DiIulio was a clever popularizer who quickly became a darling of the think-tank circuit—and of the media. The Marshall Project’s review of 40 major news outlets in the five years after his Weekly Standard article shows the neologism popping up nearly 300 times, and that is an undercount.”
In April 2014, The New York Times’ Clyde Haberman wrote a piece for its Retro Report feature, titled “When Youth Violence Spurred ‘Superpredator’ Fear,” which pointed out that “superpredator jeremiads … proved to be nonsense. They were based on a notion that there would be hordes upon hordes of depraved teenagers resorting to unspeakable brutality, not tethered by conscience.”
As Haberman noted, “Instead of exploding, violence by children sharply declined. Murders committed by those ages 10 to 17 fell by roughly two-thirds from 1994 to 2011, according to statistics kept by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.”
It was indisputable that talk of superpredators “had a racial component,” Haberman wrote. “What the doomsayers focused on, in the main, were young male African-Americans. For Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University writing for The Huffington Post a few months earlier, the deep-seated fear that any black teenager in a hoodie must be up to no good was essentially what got Trayvon Martin killed in Florida two years ago.”
According to The Marshall Project, By the late 1990s, the “superpredator” mania was dying down. “Young killers remain well-publicized rarity,” a Tribune headline said in February 1998. “‘Superpredators’ fail to grow into forecast proportions.”
As time passed, Dilulio offered up a not-so-mighty mea culpa, maintaining that “Demography is not fate.” “The term ‘superpredator’ has become, I guess, part of the lexicon,” he told NPR in the summer of 1996. The word had “sort of gotten out and gotten away from me.”
“In 2001, DiIulio admitted his theory had been mistaken, saying ‘I'm sorry for any unintended consequences.’ In 2012, he even signed on to a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a successful effort to limit life sentences without parole for juveniles.”
However wrong he turned out to be, after promulgating his “superpredator” branding, Dilulio’s career took off with a series of favorable profiles in mainstream media outlets such as The New Yorker magazine, an op-ed in The New York Times, and multiple conference and media appearances. He was later appointed the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush. He currently serves as the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Only a few media outlets have issued apologies for recklessly brandishing the term. As The Marshall Project’s report notes, “The Los Angeles Times conceded in September that an insidious problem ... has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history … a blind spot, at worst an outright hostility, for the city’s nonwhite population.” The L.A. Times used “superpredator” “more than any other major newspaper. But it was hardly alone in branding a generation of young men of color as animals and paving the way for harsher juvenile justice.
“If we don’t acknowledge the impact of what past stories did," said Kim Taylor-Thompson, a law professor at New York University. "I’m not sure the media’s behavior will change.”
The media can take a proactive role in insuring that the past is not erased in current efforts to reform the criminal justice system and the prison-industrial complex. The targeted attack on a generation of young black men, the school to prison pipeline that has destroyed so many lives must be acknowledged. And this may be a pipe dream, but in the true spirit of Black Lives Matter, this is a time for mainstream media to take a stand and advocate for truth, and for reparations to this generation whose lives were destroyed by a myth.
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