The Final Call

Super Predators: How American Science Created Hillary’s Young Black Thugs, Pt. 1

By Dr. Wesley Muhammad | Last updated: Mar 22, 2017 - 10:22:07 AM

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We also have to have an organized effort against gangs, just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids who are called super predators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel. —First Lady Hillary Clinton, 1996

No. Let’s talk about how they got that way right now. When Hillary Clinton described in 1996 young inner-city Black males as “super predators” she was not simply hurling racist insults: she was speaking from within a long American tradition of science, pseudoscience and government policy aimed at deliberately creating Black super predators in the inner cities, the reasons for which we shall elaborate later.

Though the scientific myth of a class of genetic “super predators” can be said to have originated in 1965, the term “super predator” as a tag for young Black males was coined by Princeton University professor John DiIulio who claimed in 1995 and 1996 that America was facing a looming threat from a population of young Black boys who were “Godless” and “alien” and who can “kill or maim on impulse without any intelligible motive.”

DiIulio was one of 12 guests invited by President Bill Clinton to a three-hour working White House dinner in 1995 during which DiIulio discussed these Black super predators with the president who took copious notes. The national panic that was created around these semi-mythical inner city predators was used by President Clinton to justify his draconian Crime Bill of 1994, which had a devastating impact on Black communities across this nation. This bill was the basis for what Dr. Perry Moriearty, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and co-author William Carson describe as President Clinton’s “Super Predator War” of the 1990s aimed at Black male adolescents.

But what most people don’t know is that the young Black “super predator” at the heart of this national panic and the target of President Clinton’s Super Predator War was specifically created by government-funded science.

This occurred in two stages: 1.) through the scientific demonization of young Black boys in the 1970s via the mythical “XYY Syndrome” and 2.) through the deliberate manipulation of the biochemistry of young Black boys in the 1980s, producing hyper-aggression. Thus, by the Clinton presidency of the 1990s the government had already invested effort in producing the super predators of the inner cities that President Clinton would later wage war on. 

In 1965 chromosome analysis carried out on inmates at a Scottish prison showed a relatively high percentage of those inmates possessed a unique genetic signature: instead of the normal XY pair, these men possessed an extra Y chromosome (XYY). Soon a myth (later debunked) caught fire with the public as well as with medical, judicial and government agencies: the myth of a “XYY Syndrome” that allegedly predisposed such men to abnormal aggression and sexual pathology. Further investigation indicated that such was not the case: the XYY signature actually did little more than result in increased height, a little facial acne and diminished intelligence, but not increased aggression or sexual deviance. However, the myth of the XYY Super Predator was consciously perpetuated. Worse, the myth was deliberately and deceptively transferred to Black boys.

By 1972 researchers knew that XYY was largely a White genetic marker: it is three times more prevalent among White males than among Black males. The alleged XYY Super Predators in the media and in the public imagination were White males: Richard Speck of Chicago, Illinois; Robert Tait of Melbourne, Australia; and Ernst Dieter Beck of Bielifeld, Germany are examples. But in the 1970s the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded several projects that maliciously recast the image of the XYY Super Predator from tall White male to young Black boy. 

In the Boston Project beginning in April 1970 two Harvard professors, Dr. Stanley Walzer and Dr. Park Gerald, conducted a chromosome screening study at a hospital in the predominantly Black Roxbury District of Boston. Male fetuses and male newborns were “screened” for the largely White XYY genetic signature. Evidence has turned up that in such studies nurses deliberately distorted the test results of the fetuses—for example, falsely claiming a positive result—and encouraged mothers to abort their male babies under the false pretense that their boy would grow up to be a violent sexual predator. Yakub’s doctors and nurses are real. No doubt the evil agenda of this study was both the artificial tagging and social stigmatizing of Black males as genetic Super Predators and the encouragement and facilitation of the abortion of Black male babies under the false pretext that, if they came to term, they would be a “menace to society.” Our government through the NIMH funded this evil study to a tune of $465,000 over eight years, though it was prematurely terminated in 1974 due to public outcry. 

In Maryland a similarly evil study was funded by the NIMH and conducted by Dr. Digamber Borgaonkar under the aegis of Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded a three year, $300,000 grant to screen mainly Black adolescent boys in the Maryland juvenile justice system for XYY.  All the while, the government and its scientists knew that they were swimming in the wrong pool by screening Black boys for this known White marker. Yet they persisted. Why? Dr. Jonathan Beckwith, molecular biologist from Harvard and Jonathan King of M.I.T., the two who led the campaign to get the Boston study shut down, reported that “in one institution in Maryland, XYY inmates were treated with female sex hormones to restore ‘normal’ behavior.” Pumping these Black boys—falsely tagged as XYY carriers—with female sex hormones does not “restore normal behavior”; it feminizes the behavior and the body. Thus, the Boston study alerts us to the fact that these XYY screenings are a possible cover for the coerced abortion of Black male babies and the Maryland study alerts us to the fact that these screenings are a possible cover for the chemical feminization of Black adolescent males.

Look for part 2 of this article in an upcoming edition of The Final Call newspaper. Dr. Wesley Muhammad’s book, Understanding the Assault on the Black Man, Black Manhood, and Black Masculinity (Atlanta, 2017) can be ordered at www.store.finalcall.com.