The Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is despicable as he is acting against medical science and possibly causing U.S. deaths from measles, a preventable disease. But we knew from his history that he would do exactly that.
However, this past week, some of us learned that he is worse than that. He is also an old-fashioned racist, as revealed by Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama in her questioning of him in a Congressional hearing. Representative Sewell quoted remarks he made in 2024 when he was a presidential candidate.
Kennedy vehemently denied making the remarks he had made in 2024 when he was a presidential candidate. On the “High Level Conversations” podcast in 2024, he said, “Psychiatric drugs – which every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and [with me as president] those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.”
“Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a Black child?” Sewell asked, as her staff held up a poster featuring an abbreviated version of the quote. “I don’t even know what that phrase means,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to answer something I didn’t say.” “You’re making stuff up,” he later claimed. Well, as this exchange demonstrates, Kennedy is also a liar. But that may be what qualifies him to be in Trump’s cabinet.
A recording of the podcast shows he made those outrageous comments during a conversation about rehabilitation facilities he was proposing to open in rural areas across the country at the time.
Kennedy’s racist arguments in 2024 say two things. One is that black children need better parenting, and if they had better parenting, they would not need medication. And two, all black children are given “psychiatric drugs” that cause them to be even more violent. This kind of racist rhetoric in the 1990s led to the assertion that black youth were becoming “super-predators.”
John Dilulio’s 1990s “super-predator” theory, which warned of a rising wave of remorseless, violent youth, was widely criticized as a baseless, racially coded myth that fueled harsh juvenile sentencing and mass incarceration.
In 1996, while supporting President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill, Hillary Clinton stated: “They are not just gangs of kids anymore… They are often the kinds of kids that 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 [Emphasis added].”
Critics, including researchers, showed that the predicted crime surge never happened, and the rhetoric unfairly targeted Black and brown youth. Dilulio recanted and apologized for his theory and his prediction of a crime wave that did not occur, and Hilary Clinton disavowed her super predator argument under pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement during her presidential campaign in 2016. But these retractions did not occur before Clinton’s Crime Bill had led to the most significant increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.
Across the country, black youth are more likely to receive K-12 out-of-school suspensions than their peers. Robert Kennedy’s racist statement about black youth is the kind of attitude that feeds the stereotypes that cause black youth in general, and Black males in particular, to be suspended from school at such high rates.
Robert Kennedy’s family has been particularly critical of him. Following Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to suspend his presidential campaign and endorse Donald Trump in August 2024, members of the Kennedy family overwhelmingly condemned the move, calling it a “betrayal” of their family’s values.
The Kennedy family criticized RFK Jr.’s appointment as Health and Human Services Secretary. His sister, Kerry Kennedy, and nephew, Joe Kennedy III, publically called for his resignation after RFK Jr.’s contentious September hearing before the United States Senate. Caroline Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s cousin, repeatedly slammed RFK Jr. for his anti-vax stances and had urged the Senate to reject his nomination.
In addition to the problems with RFK Jr. noted by his family members, RFK Jr. is also a racist and a liar, but that is apparently okay with President Trump, who nominated him, and the Republican senators who approved him.
