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  • 2020-10-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Biden Call Black Americans 'Super-Predators'? (en)
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  • In both of the televised debates during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, President Donald Trump asserted that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, had referred to Black Americans as superpredators. In the first debate on Sept. 29, for example, Trump declared: You did a crime bill, 1994, where you call them super predators. African-Americans are super predators and they’ve never forgotten it. They’ve never forgotten it. In the second debate, on Oct. 22, Trump stated: Again, [Biden's] been in government 47 years. He never did a thing except in 1994 when he did such harm to the Black community, and he called them super-predators. And he said it, 'super-predators,' and they have never lived that down. However, Trump appeared to have mistakenly conflated a remark made by Biden with one made years later by Hillary Clinton. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which, among other provisions, banned the manufacture of various military-style assault weapons, expanded the federal death penalty to encompass several dozen additional offenses, and provided new and stiffer penalties for violent and drug trafficking crimes committed by gang members. Back in 1993, when the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was under consideration by Congress, Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A day before the Senate voted on that body's version of that bill, Biden delivered remarks in support of the bill during which he said the word predators more than once, but he didn't use the term superpredator, nor did he state he was referring to Black people: Over two years later, while delivering a Jan. 1996 speech at Keene State College in New Hampshire, First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke approvingly of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act her husband signed into law. During that speech, Clinton used the term super-predators in reference to young gang members: Although Clinton also hadn't specifically referenced Black people when she used the term super-predators, her remarks were certainly construed to mean as much by some, and when she was running for president twenty years later, Clinton acknowledged that she shouldn't have used that term: (en)
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