Hillary Clinton has responded to Jonathan Capehart’s question about what she would have said to Ashley Williams who confronted Sec Clinton last night about comments Hillary made 20 years ago.
In that speech, I was talking about the impact violent crime and vicious drug cartels were having on communities across the country and the particular danger they posed to children and families. Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.
My life’s work has been about lifting up children and young people who’ve been let down by the system or by society. Kids who never got the chance they deserved. And unfortunately today, there are way too many of those kids, especially in African-American communities. We haven’t done right by them. We need to. We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.
As an advocate, as First Lady, as Senator, I was a champion for children. And my campaign for president is about breaking down the barriers that stand in the way of all kids, so every one of them can live up to their God-given potential.
It is clear from the speech Hillary Clinton gave 20 years ago in 1996, that she was not referring to all people of color, instead about gang members. She should not have used such racialized language as “superpredators” but taking that line out of context to say she was calling people of color superpredators is grossly unfair. Capehart notes
This isn’t the broad brush Clinton’s critics today are accusing her of using 20 years ago. Despite Williams’s assertion that “I know you called black youth ‘superpredators,’” Clinton was clearly talking about a narrow band of young people who would not have included the admirably assertive Williams or the vast majority of African American youths then and now.
And as Capehart concludes
Pushing Clinton on her past statements as Williams did is eminently fair. What isn’t fair is ignoring what Clinton promises to do to fix the glaring problems unleashed by a bill Sanders voted for and Clinton’s husband signed into law.