Infamous in the annals of ghetto stereotyping is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s leaked 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which he wrote: “The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” Moynihan was serving as an assistant secretary in the US Department of Labor and did not write the report for public consumption. It was an internal call to action to convince President Johnson and others in the administration to boldly address an ongoing and expanding crisis. He wrote of the divergence between a reported half the Negro population that constituted a stable and growing Black middle class and the other half that was a “disadvantaged lower class.” Moynihan, a scholar and policy wonk, wrote that because of housing segregation Black middle-class children grew up in or adjacent to slums and were “therefore constantly exposed to the pathology of the disturbed group.” In his rendering, everyone in the ghetto was pathological. And yet his analysis was more nuanced than his conclusions.
Moynihan acknowledged that the American slavery from which Negroes descended was the cruelest system of bondage in human history, one that stripped the enslaved of any rights or autonomy, rendering them utter chattel for owners. He cited Black American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s 1939 book, The Negro Family, and what Frazier wrote about the effects on Black families of living in “city slums.” He acknowledged the lack of employment in those neighborhoods and cited data showing that Black families were stronger in rare years of low Black male unemployment. He acknowledged “deep-seated structural distortions” visited upon Black people over “three centuries of injustice.” But he concluded that these external forces had resulted in a “tangle of pathology” for the disadvantaged that was “capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” Showing his sexism and that of the times, he argued that federal policy should aim to fix the allegedly broken, matriarchal Black family structure, to help Black men find work so that they could return to their rightful place as heads of households. Unlike the Kerner Commission report that would come, Moynihan’s report did not suggest the federal government should attack the “structural distortions” it and white America had supported, like segregation.45
The Moynihan Report reverberated for half a century. Progressive scholars and voices castigated Moynihan for “blaming the victim.”46 Conservative thinkers and pundits endorsed what the report had to say about “pathology,” and allegations of welfare dependency, single Black motherhood, drugs, and violent thuggery became regular conservative fodder. Each generation had public intellectuals and private armchair mythologists who offered versions of these tales to explain a status quo of racial inequality. Among them, Charles Murray, author of anti-welfare polemics in the 1980s and ‘90s, argued that the “underclass” and Black people were less intelligent than others and that this intellectual inferiority and social welfare programs encouraging dependency explained their disadvantaged status. He advocated for a eugenic ethno-fatalism in which the state would abolish social welfare programs and once even recommended containing impliedly pathological people in their own zones and allowing disease, suicide, and homicide to reduce this undesired population.47 Some of Murray’s critics accused him of being a white supremacist and white nationalist.48 Certainly his arguments mirrored the inferiorizing that accompanied slavery and Jim Crow. Murray and others who pathologized the ghetto poor were enormously influential, helping to shrink social welfare spending even as government largesse to affluent spaces continued.49
Black intellectuals, though often more empathetic to their poorer brethren, struggled with classism. Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro, Black elites had to reconcile their own status as talented, aspiring, ostensibly “new” Negroes with the “old” Negroes of the agrarian South who made their way north, with shabby clothes and country habits. Social distancing and anguish as well as trying to live apart were part of the response.50 In the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, Black sociologists and academics struggled to understand and interpret the persistence of inequality in high-poverty Black neighborhoods. Some, like William Julius Wilson, identified structural forces as dominant while acknowledging culture, others, like Orlando Patterson, stressed culture.51 In the height of the drug war when levels of violent crime soared, Black intellectuals and policy elites debated about how to respond to the few descendants who were shooting and menacing. Distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy and Justice Clarence Thomas aligned their writing and judgments with protecting the interests of the law-abiding Black people who were victimized by violent Black criminals, even if that meant ceding more power to law enforcement and narrowing individual liberties.52 A young lion law professor and former prosecutor, Paul Butler, argued that Black jurors should refuse to convict nonviolent Black offenders because of the justice system’s ingrained racism and that Black people should coalesce to solve community problems.53
At some point “ghetto” became an adjective with distinct cultural meaning that distinguished its style, dress, speech, and social codes from middle-class respectability.54 Sometimes middle- and upper-class Black people participate in this othering. Even in Washington, DC, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by about twelve to one, and where Black Americans, for many years, controlled government, political leaders pursued punitive laws that fueled mass incarceration and filled DC prisons with young Black men.55 The same Black political leadership was also slow to adopt an inclusionary zoning ordinance that requires mixed-income development and instead pursued policies that displaced many poor residents from the city. Whatever cultural forces operate in poor Black spaces, real or imagined, here my purpose is to show that politicians weaponized stereotypes in ways that masked unequal treatment and distribution of resources. And US presidents and politicians campaigning for that highest office have been the greatest players in this performance art.
PRESIDENTS AND PRESIDENTIAL ASPIRANTS AS GHETTO MYTHMAKERS
George H. W. Bush won the presidency in no small part through dog-whistling. Bush’s supporters cast William R. Horton as the villain in a thirty-second television advertisement that they produced to attack Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. In the ad, a narrator described the heinous deeds for which “Willie” Horton was convicted though he had never used that nickname. The camera lingered on a grainy prison picture taken after Horton had emerged from weeks of solitary confinement. A dark-skinned, Afroed Black man with a wildly overgrown beard stared back as the narrator announced that “Willie” Horton had been convicted for killing a young man by stabbing him nineteen times. Despite a life sentence, he was granted weekend furloughs from a Dukakis-backed program. Horton absconded, the narrator continued, to repeatedly rape a woman and stab her boyfriend. In that era, all fifty states deployed prison furlough programs to ease convicts’ inevitable reentry into society. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan had defended his state’s program as overwhelmingly effective after two furloughed prisoners committed murder.56
Though the Bush campaign denied involvement the Willie Horton ad, it created its own commercial criticizing the Massachusetts furlough program without mentioning Horton. On the campaign trail, Horton became for Bush what the welfare queen had been for Reagan. Bush pounded the Willie Horton narrative throughout the general election, mentioning him in speeches almost daily. Lee Atwater, Reagan’s former operative and Bush’s presidential campaign manager, had learned through focus groups that he could turn white Democrats away from Dukakis with the Horton story. “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate,” Atwater said.57
It worked. Dukakis’s seventeen-point lead in August 1988 evaporated, and Bush won the election handily.58 It was a watershed low in overt racial appeals that presaged the racial toxicity of the Trump era. Future candidates like Bill Clinton felt the need to establish their tough-on-crime bona fides with white voters. The ensuing frenzy of political competit
ion fueled mass incarceration and locked government into a punitive relationship with descendants that endures.59
President George H. W. Bush also used ghetto mythology to dramatically escalate spending on the drug war. In his first address from the Oval Office, on live television, he raised a baggie filled with crack cocaine and told the nation it had been purchased mere blocks from the White House. It was an orchestrated stunt and policymaking as performance. An undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent had lured Keith Jackson, a student at historically segregated Spingarn High School, to sell him crack in Lafayette Park. Jackson was under investigation as part of a wider effort to indict drug kingpin Rayful Edmond III. Jackson, so isolated in his northeast DC neighborhood, did not even know what or where the White House was and had to be directed there by the DEA agent.
Bush’s desire to dramatize and escalate the drug war set this farce in motion. He told his audience that the solution to drugs was “more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors,” and he announced a $1.5 billion increase in federal police spending, the largest single increase in the history of drug enforcement. The crack that Jackson supplied in Lafayette Park was a useful prop for a president who also announced that he was assigning the US military a new role in fighting drug traffickers internationally. The Cold War was ending, and ghetto myths helped fill the vacuum to justify perpetual militarized policing at home and abroad. By the end of Bush’s term, the Pentagon’s counter-narcotics budget was 100,000 percent higher than it had been when Reagan declared the drug war in 1982.60
In his first run for the presidency, Bill Clinton felt the squeeze of generations of political pandering to white voters. Clinton ran as a “New Democrat” and alternated between speaking to all Americans and trying to appeal to white racial conservatives through rhetoric and policy positions that harmed Black people. He left the campaign trail to oversee the execution of mentally impaired Black American Ricky Ray Rector, subsequently observing “No one can say I’m soft on crime.”61 He used a forum hosted by Jesse Jackson to attack rapper Sister Souljah, who had said publicly of gang violence in LA that young nihilists should consider being ecumenical in their killing and take white lives for a week. Whatever Souljah’s motives, Clinton was criticized for cynically using the moment to signal to whites the limits of his oneness with Jesse Jackson and Black people.62
Worse, Clinton sponsored and championed an extremely punitive $30 billion crime bill in 1994 that kick-started a prison-building boom and, among other things, ended Pell Grants for prisoners who sought to better themselves through education.63 He advocated for the one-hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine charges. He backed an unforgiving “three-strikes law.” He supported laws that would deny federal student financial aid, welfare, and food stamps to individuals with drug convictions. He allowed public-housing institutions to refuse to provide housing to anyone with a criminal past. With this cumulation of harshness, Michelle Alexander argued, Clinton relegated many Black Americans to a “permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow.”64
Together, President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich ended welfare as the nation had known it. The Clinton administration and the Gingrich Congress replaced AFDC, a cash assistance entitlement to individuals who met poverty criteria, with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. But most of this TANF aid was sent to states as block grants with much state discretion on how to spend the funds. Under Clinton and Gingrich, “welfare reform” denied food stamps to childless adults. Plenty were willing to work, trying and failing to find a job, but they could starve under new rules because of their failure to work.65
The Reagan administration had pushed people who found any work off the rolls, and now cash assistance and food stamp recipients were being castigated for not working. Clinton invoked rhetoric of personal responsibility, declaring that in dismantling AFDC and instituting TANF, he would end the “cycle of dependence” and “achieve a national welfare reform bill that will make work and responsibility the law of the land.” Newt Gingrich whistled louder, claiming: “It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing each other, 17-year-olds dying of AIDS, and 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t even read. Yet that is precisely where three generations of Washington-dominated, centralized-government, welfare-state policies have carried us.”66 Again, the main beneficiaries of cuts to these programs for the poor were rich taxpayers who received more tax cuts.67
Why did Clinton, a man who had Black friends, who so understood and reveled in Black culture that author-laureate Toni Morrison crowned him our “first Black president,” take such harsh positions that harmed Black Americans?68 Though Clinton personally liked and promoted Black folk in his administration, his success in politics depended on a dichotomy between middle- and upper-class “respectable” Blacks and inner-city residents whom he and previous presidents pathologized. In a speech that was very well received when it was delivered in November 1993, Clinton spoke of communities “where there are no families, where there is no order, where there is no hope.” He was addressing an audience of Black ministers in the hallowed pulpit in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last sermon. Clinton wondered aloud how they would explain to King, were he to reappear, “that we gave people the freedom to succeed and we created conditions in which millions abuse that freedom to destroy the things that make life worth living and life itself?” In the speech, Clinton applauded the achievements of the Black middle class, then castigated violent youth and alleged “millions” who were abusing the freedoms King died fighting for. Clinton channeled King, claiming that the slain leader would say:
I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. . . . I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandonment, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children to walk away from them and abandon them . . .69
The speech was considered among the best of Clinton’s presidency in an era when urban gun violence was dramatically higher than it is today.70 To his credit, Clinton bemoaned an epidemic that would make an eleven-year-old girl plan her own funeral, so sure she was that she would not live long in the world she knew. As he touted his crime bill, he also championed its ban on assault weapons and emphasized that in addition to policing and law enforcement he was trying to invest more in education and get a health care bill passed that would guarantee access to drug treatment.71 The stereotype of young Black teens toting assault weapons and killing other Black babes, however, drove his march to harsh penalties and more incarceration. Clinton refused, for example, to follow the recommendations of the expert Sentencing Commission to reduce disparities in penalties between crack and powder cocaine and in doing so, once again, invoked the image of a violent inner city.72
Hillary Clinton also deployed ghetto mythology to defend the crime bill. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators,’” she said in 1996, “no conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”73 In her own run for the presidency two decades later, she would recant this statement and champion prison reform as she wooed Black and brown voters.74
The theory of super-predators, promoted in a book by William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio Jr., and John P. Walters, has since been debunked. They fabulized that inner-city children, surrounded by delinquents, were becoming increasingly “radically impulsive” and “brutally remorseless”—criminals who would “murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.”75 Though this philosophy initially gained traction, it was soon discredited and DiIulio
himself, after having an epiphany while praying in church, renounced it.76
This debunking mirrors ongoing national trends and a bipartisan consensus that both mass incarceration and the drug war were designed and perpetuated in error. In 2015, a number of influential leaders, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz offered essays and reforms designed to rectify excesses in the criminal justice system.77 Some argue that these attempts at amelioration are motivated more by fiscal concerns than a desire to achieve true justice. Michelle Alexander warns, “the racial ideology that gave rise to these laws remains largely undisturbed.”78 In 2010, President Obama signed a bill reducing the disparity in sentencing for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine from one hundred to one to eighteen to one, which begs the question of why any disparity was allowed to persist.79
Barack Obama, the erudite community organizer who once worked with and for descendants on the South Side of Chicago, did not invoke overt ghetto stereotypes to shape policy during his presidency, though he did use the word “thugs” to describe vandals in the Baltimore uprisings and regularly lectured Black people. There was a common theme to the lectures, whether delivered from a pulpit of a Black church, a Morehouse College graduation, or some other very Black venue. In his first memoir, biracial Barry came of age and ultimately chose African American for his identity, becoming Barack Obama.80 When addressing the collective family he married into, Obama often used the language and admonishment of personal responsibility.81
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