[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 141 (Thursday, October 3, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12244-S12252]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       SENATOR BRADLEY'S SPEECHES

  Mr. BRADLEY. Mr. President, the Senate floor is a place where 
speeches are made, sometimes longer than they should be, sometimes 
shorter than they should be. I have made my share of speeches on the 
Senate floor in the last 18 years. But a Senator is also called upon to 
speak off the Senate floor in gatherings in his or her State and in 
sites across the country.
  I have often thought of the Senate speech as a form of communication, 
as a way of educating, as a way of leading. I have tried to do that on 
the Senate floor. In the last 2 years, we have had a number of 
restrictions that have made this kind of speech that I would give, 
which would be a very lengthy speech, more difficult in morning 
business as we have 10-minute time limits. For that reason, in the last 
2 years I have given a number of speeches that have not been reflected 
in the Record but have been given at other forums across the country.

  I believe that these were speeches that I worked on as a Senator. 
These were speeches that I thought about as a Senator and delivered as 
a Senator. Therefore, I believe that it is important that I share them 
with the Senate and for the Record. I see the Chair twitching a little 
bit. He need not worry that I am going to deliver all these speeches at 
this moment.
  I would like to submit for the Record a speech called ``America's 
Challenge: Revitalizing Our National Community,'' ``After the 
Revolution: Rethinking U.S.-Russia Relations,'' ``Race Relations in 
America: The Best and Worst of Times,'' ``Harry Truman: Public Power 
and the New Economy,'' and the speech to the National Association of 
Radio Talk Show Hosts on the occasion of the Freedom of Speech Awards 
Gala Dinner. I ask unanimous consent that all of these speeches be 
printed in the Record and that they be my last official act as a U.S. 
Senator on the floor of the Senate.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

        America's Challenge: Revitalizing Our National Community

                       (By Senator Bill Bradley)

       Two nights ago I attended a dinner in St. Louis, Missouri 
     to honor former U.S. Senator Jack Danforth. Fifteen Senators 
     from both parties attended along with several thousand 
     Missourians. Nearly a million dollars was raised for an 
     organization called Interact, to which Jack Danforth will 
     dedicate much of his post-Senate energies. The organization's 
     charter is to coordinate efforts by the religious community 
     in St. Louis to support programs which will improve the life 
     chances of inner-city, predominately African children.
       When I left Missouri for college back in 1961 the number of 
     children in St. Louis born to a single parent was 13%; now it 
     is 68%. Among black children it is 86%. Senator Pat Moynihan 
     points out that this social crisis is taking place across the 
     North Atlantic world (English out-of-wedlock births are 31%, 
     and in France, 33%) and Jack Danforth has waded into this 
     crisis in hope of developing a strategy that can turn these 
     tragic numbers around.
       I begin with this story because Jack has chosen to leave 
     government to tackle one of the nation's most intractable 
     problems and he has chosen to do it through institutions of 
     religious faith. His efforts may offer us a fresh perspective 
     on our commitment to address not only single parenthood in 
     poor neighborhoods, but what is happening to our sense of 
     family and community in suburbs, cities and small towns 
     across America.
       Never in American history has a new vision begun in 
     Washington. Never has it been the sole property of either 
     political party. In fact, to initiate a frank discussion of 
     our current American condition requires us to throw off many 
     of the barnacle-encrusted categories with which we are 
     accustomed to talking about this nation's problems. This 
     could seriously disrupt the respective moral allegiances and 
     political turfs of both the Democrats and Republican parties. 
     I would like to start making that disruption happen, for out 
     of such ferment might emerge the fresh ideas of a better 
     American future.
       Our contemporary political debate has settled into two 
     painfully familiar ruts. Republicans, as we know, are 
     infatuated with the magic of the ``private sector'', and 
     reflexively criticize government as the enemy of freedom. 
     Human needs and the common good are best served through the 
     marketplace, goes their mantra.
       At the other extreme, Democrats tend to distrust the 
     market, seeing it as synonymous with greed and exploitation, 
     the domain of Jay Gould and Michael Milkens. Ever confident 
     in the powers of government to solve problems, Democrats 
     instinctively turn to the bureaucratic state to regulate the 
     economy and to solve social problems. Democrats generally 
     prefer the bureaucrat they know to the consumer they can't 
     control. Of course, both parties are somewhat disingenuous. 
     Neither is above making self-serving exceptions. For example, 
     Republicans say they are for the market, but they support 
     market-distorting tax loopholes and wasteful subsidies for 
     special interests as diverse as water, wheat, and wine. Then 
     there are the Democrats who say that they want an activist 
     government but won't raise the taxes to fund it or describe 
     clearly its limits or its necessity. Still, these twin poles 
     of political debate--crudely put, government action versus 
     the free market--utterly dominate our sense of the possible, 
     our sense of what is relevant and meaningful in public 
     affairs. Yet, the issues that most concern Americans today 
     seem to have little direct connection with either the market 
     or government. Consider the plague of violence, guns, and 
     drugs; the racial tensions that afflict so many communities; 
     the turmoil in public education; the deterioration of 
     America's families.
       Today I will suggest that any prescription for America must 
     understand the advantages and limits of both the market and 
     government, but more importantly, how neither is equipped to 
     solve America's central problems; the deterioration of our 
     civil society and the need to revitalize our democratic 
     process.
       Civil society is the place where Americans make their home, 
     sustain their marriages, raise their families, hand out with 
     their friends, meet their neighbors, educate their children, 
     worship their god. It is the churches, schools, fraternities, 
     community centers, labor unions, synagogues, sports leagues, 
     PTAs, libraries and barber shops. It is where opinions are 
     expressed and refined, where views are exchanged and 
     agreements made, where a sense of common purpose and 
     consensus are forged. It lies apart from the realms of the 
     market and the government, and possesses a different ethic. 
     The market is governed by the logic of economic self-
     interest, while government is the domain of laws with all 
     their coercive authority. Civil

[[Page S12245]]

     society, on the other hand, is the sphere of our most basic 
     humanity--the personal, everyday realm that is governed by 
     values such as responsibility, trust, fraternity, solidarity 
     and love. In a democratic civil society such as ours we also 
     put a special premium on social equality--the conviction that 
     men and women should be measured by the quality of their 
     character and not the color of their skin, the shape of their 
     eyes, the size of their bank account, the religion of their 
     family, or the happenstance of their gender.
       What both Democrats and Republicans fail to see is that the 
     government and the market are not enough to make a 
     civilization. There must also be healthy, robust civic 
     sector--a space in which the bonds of community can flourish. 
     Government and the market are similar to two legs on a three-
     legged stool. Without the third leg of civil society, the 
     stool is not stable and cannot provide support for a vital 
     America.
       Today the fragile ecology of our social environment is as 
     threatened as that of our natural environment. Like fish 
     floating on the surface of a polluted river, the network of 
     voluntary associations in America seem to be dying. For 
     example, PTA participation has fallen. So have Boy Scout and 
     Red Cross volunteers. So have labor unions and civic clubs 
     such as the Lions and Elks. In the recent ``Mood of America'' 
     poll taken by the Gannett News Service, 76 percent of those 
     surveyed agreed that ``there is less concern for others 
     than there once was.'' All across America, people are 
     choosing not to join with each other in communal 
     activities. One recent college graduate even volunteered 
     sadly that her suburban Philadelphia neighbors ``don't 
     even wave.''
       Every day the news brings another account of Americans 
     being disconnected from each other. Sometimes the stories 
     seem comical, such as that of the married couple in 
     Rochester, New York who unexpectedly ran into one another on 
     the same airplane as they departed for separate business 
     trips and discovered that each had, unbeknownst to the other, 
     hired a different babysitter to care for their young 
     daughter. Often the stories are less amusing, such as that of 
     the suburban Chicago couple who, unbeknownst to their 
     indifferent neighbors, left their two little girls home alone 
     while they vacationed in Mexico. Or the story in New York 
     City of the murder of a young woman in a running suit whose 
     body went unidentified, unclaimed, and apparently unwanted 
     for a week before she was identified by her fingerprints as a 
     New Jersey woman wholly estranged from her family.
       It is tempting to dismiss these stories as isolated cases. 
     But I think they have a grip on our imaginations precisely 
     because they speak to our real fears. They are ugly reminders 
     of the erosion of love, trust, and mutual obligation. They 
     are testimony to a profound human disconnectedness that cuts 
     across most conventional lines of class, race and geography.
       That is one reason, perhaps, that we love the television 
     show, ``Cheers.'' It is the bar ``where everyone knows your 
     name.'' How many of us are blessed with such a place in our 
     lives? How many of us know the names, much less the life 
     stories of all the neighbors in our section of town or even 
     on several floors of our apartment building?
       To the sophisticates of national politics, it all sounds 
     too painfully small-time, even corny to focus on these 
     things. After all, voluntary local associations and community 
     connection seem so peripheral to both the market and 
     government; both the market and the government have far more 
     raw power. Government and business are national and 
     international in scope. They're on TV. They talk casually 
     about billions of dollars. In many ways the worlds of 
     politics and business have de-legitimized the local, the 
     social, the cultural, the spiritual. Yet upon these things 
     lie the whole edifice of our national well-being.
       Alongside the decline of civil society, it is a sad truth 
     that the exercise of democratic citizenship plays, at best, a 
     very minor role in the lives of most American adults. Only 
     39% of the eligible voters actually voted in 1994. The role 
     formerly played by party organizations with face to face 
     associations has been yielded to the media, where local TV 
     news follows the dual credos, ``If it bleeds, it leads, and 
     if it thinks, it stinks,'' and paid media politics remains 
     beyond the reach of most Americans. Whey only the rich, such 
     as Ross Perot, can get their views across on TV, political 
     equality suffers. The rich have a loudspeaker and everyone 
     else gets a megaphone. Make no mistake about it, money talks 
     in American politics today as never before, and no revival of 
     our democratic culture can occur until citizens feel that 
     their participation is more meaningful than the money 
     lavished by PACs and big donors.
       Then, there are the campaigns that we politicians run which 
     short-circuit deliberative judgment. People sit at home as 
     spectators, wait to be entertained by us in 30-second pre-
     polled, pre-tested emotional appeals and then render a thumbs 
     up or a thumbs down almost on a whim. Outside the campaign 
     season, we, the elected leaders, too often let focus groups 
     do our thinking for us. Public opinion does not result from 
     reasoned dialogue, but from polls that solicit knee-jerk 
     responses from individuals who have seldom had the 
     opportunity to reflect on Bosnia, GATT, property taxes or 
     public education in the company of their fellow citizens.
       From the Long House of the Iroquois to the general store of 
     de Tocqueville's America to the Chautauquas of the late 19th 
     Century, to the Jaycee's, Lions, PTA's and political clubs of 
     the early '60s, Americans have always had places where they 
     could come together and deliberate about their common future. 
     Today there are fewer and fewer forums where people actually 
     listen to each other. It's as if everyone wants to spout his 
     opinion or her criticism and then move on.
       So what does all this imply for public policy?
       First, we need to strengthen the crucible of civil society, 
     the American family. Given the startling increase in the 
     number of children growing up with one parent and paltry 
     resources, we need to recouple sex and parental 
     responsibility. Rolling back irresponsible sexual behavior 
     (sex without thought for its consequences), is best done by 
     holding men equally accountable for such irresponsibility. 
     Policy should send a very clear message--if you have sex with 
     someone and she becomes pregnant, be prepared to have 15% of 
     your wages for 18 years go to support the mother and child. 
     Such a message might force young men to pause before they act 
     and to recognize that fatherhood is a lifetime commitment 
     that takes time and money.
       And, given that 40% of American children now live in homes 
     where both parents work, we have only four options if we 
     believe our rhetoric about the importance of child-rearing: 
     higher compensation for one spouse so that the other can stay 
     home permanently; a loving relative in the neighborhood; more 
     taxes or higher salaries to pay for more daycare programs; 
     or, parental leave measured in years, not weeks, and 
     available for a mother and a father at different times in a 
     career. The only given is that someone has to care for the 
     children.
       Secondly, we need to create more quality civic space. The 
     most underutilized resource in most of our communities is the 
     public school, which too often closes at 4:00 pm only to see 
     children in suburbs return to empty homes with television as 
     their babysitter or, in cities, to the street corners where 
     gangs make them an offer they can't refuse. Keeping the 
     schools open on weekdays after hours, and on weekends, with 
     supervision coming from the community, would give some kids a 
     place to study until their parents picked them up or at least 
     would provide a safe haven from the war zone outside.
       Thirdly, we need a more civic-minded media. At a time when 
     harassed parents spend less time with their children, they 
     have ceded to television more and more of the all-important 
     role of story-telling which is essential to the formation of 
     moral education that sustains a civil society. But too often 
     TV producers and music executives and video game 
     manufacturers feed young people a menu of violence without 
     context and sex without attachment, and both with no 
     consequences or judgement. The market acts blindly to sell 
     and to make money, never pausing to ask whether it furthers 
     citizenship or decency. Too often those who trash government 
     as the enemy of freedom and a destroyer of families are 
     strangely silent about the market's corrosive effects on 
     those very same values in civil society. The answer is not 
     censorship, but more citizenship in the corporate boardroom 
     and more active families who will turn off the trash, boycott 
     the sponsors and tell the executive that you hold them 
     personally responsible for making money from glorifying 
     violence and human degradation.
       Fourth, in an effort to revitalize the democratic process, 
     we have to take financing of elections out of the hands of 
     the special interests and turn it over to the people by 
     taking two simple steps. Allow taxpayers to check off on 
     their tax returns above their tax liability up to $200 for 
     political campaigns for federal office in their state. Prior 
     to the general election, divide the fund between Democrat, 
     Republican or qualified independent candidates. No other 
     money would be legal--no PACs, no bundles, no big 
     contributions, no party conduits--even the bankroll of a 
     millionaire candidate would be off-limits. If the people of a 
     state choose to give little, then they will be less informed, 
     but this would be the citizens' choice. If there was less 
     money involved, the process would adjust. Who knows, maybe 
     attack ads would go and public discourse would grow.
       Public policy, as these suggestions illustrate, can help 
     facilitate the revitalization of democracy and civil society, 
     but it cannot create civil society. We can insist that 
     fathers support their children financially, but fathers have 
     to see the importance of spending time with their children. 
     We can figure out ways, such as parental leave, to provide 
     parents with more time with their children, but parents have 
     to use that time to raise their children. We can create 
     community schools, but communities have to use them. We can 
     provide mothers and fathers with the tools they need to 
     influence the storytelling of the mass media, but they 
     ultimately must exercise that control. We can take special 
     interests out of elections, but only people can vote. We can 
     provide opportunities for a more deliberative citizenship at 
     both the national and the local level, but citizens have to 
     seize those opportunities and take individual responsibility.
       We also have to give the distinctive moral language of 
     civil society a more permanent place in our public 
     conversation. The language of the marketplace says, ``get as 
     much as you can for yourself.'' The language of government 
     says, ``legislate for others what is good for them.'' But the 
     language of community, family and citizenship at its core is

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     about receiving undeserved gifts. What this nation needs to 
     promote is the spirit of giving something freely, without 
     measuring it out precisely or demanding something in return.
       At a minimum, the language of mutual obligation has to be 
     given equal time with the language of rights that dominates 
     our culture. Rights talk properly supports an individual's 
     status and dignity within a community. It has done much to 
     protect the less powerful in our society and should not be 
     abandoned. The problem comes in the adversarial dynamic that 
     rights talk sets up in which people assert themselves through 
     confrontation, championing one right to the exclusion of 
     another. Instead of working together to improve our 
     collective situation, we fight with each other over who has 
     superior rights. Americans are too often given to speaking of 
     America as a country in which you have the right to do 
     whatever you want. On reflection, most of us will admit that 
     no country could long survive that lived by such a principle. 
     And this talk is deeply at odds with the best interests of 
     civil society.
       Forrest Gump and Rush Limbaugh are the surprise stars of 
     the first half of the '90s because they poke fun at hypocrisy 
     and the inadequacy of what we have today. But they are not 
     builders. The builders are those in localities across America 
     who are constructing bridges of cooperation and dialogue in 
     face to face meetings with their supporters and their 
     adversaries. Alarmed at the decline of civil society, they 
     know how to understand the legitimate point of view of those 
     with whom they disagree. Here in Washington, action too often 
     surrounds only competition for power. With the media's help, 
     words are used to polarize and to destroy people. In cities 
     across America where citizens are working together, words are 
     tools to build bridges between people. For example, at New 
     Communities Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, people are too 
     busy doing things to spend energy figuring out how to tear 
     down. In these places there are more barn-raisers than there 
     are barn-burners. Connecting their idealism with national 
     policy offers us our greatest hope and our biggest challenge.
       Above all, we need to understand that a true civil society 
     in which citizens interact on a regular basis to grapple with 
     common problems will not occur because of the arrival of a 
     hero. Rebuilding civil society requires people talking and 
     listening to each other, not blindly following a hero.
       I was reminded a few weeks ago of the temptation offered by 
     the ``knight in shining armor'' when the cover of a national 
     magazine had General Colin Powell's picture on it with a 
     caption something like, ``Will he be the answer to our 
     problems?'' If the problem is a deteriorating civic culture, 
     then a charismatic leader, be he the President or a General, 
     is not the answer. He or she might make us feel better 
     momentarily but then if we are only spectators thrilled by 
     the performance, how have we progressed collectively? A 
     character in Bertolt Brecht's Galileo says, ``Pity the nation 
     that has no heroes,'' to which Galileo responds, ``Pity the 
     nation that needs them.'' All of us have to go out in the 
     public square and all of us have to assume our citizenship 
     responsibilities. For me that means trying to tell the truth 
     as I see it to both parties and to the American people 
     without regard for consequences. In a vibrant civil society, 
     real leadership at the top is made possible by the 
     understanding and evolution of leaders of awareness at the 
     bottom and in the middle, that is, citizens engaged in a 
     deliberative discussion about our common future. Jack 
     Danforth knows that, and so do thousands of other Americans 
     who have assumed their responsibility. That's a discussion 
     that I want to be a part of. The more open our public 
     dialogue, the larger the number of Americans who join our 
     deliberation, the greater chance we have to build a better 
     country and a better world.
                                                                    ____


         Race Relations in America: The Best and Worst of Times

                       (By Senator Bill Bradley)

       Slavery was America's original sin, and race remains its 
     unresolved dilemma. For the last year, three Black males have 
     dominated the nation's focus on race. They are OJ Simpson, 
     Louis Farrakhan and Colin Powell. Each in his own way fed 
     America's appetite to live vicariously and to shrink from 
     confronting our racial reality. Each said something different 
     about the state of race relations in America. They allowed 
     White Americans to either ridicule, demonize, or idealize 
     Black Americans. The OJ case conveyed an almost irrevocable 
     division between Blacks and Whites with the same disparate 
     percentages of Blacks and Whites feeling he was guilty before 
     and after the trial. Louis Farrakhan allowed Whites to attack 
     the messenger rather than confront the part of his message 
     about the desperate conditions in much of Black America. 
     Colin Powell permitted White America to fantasize that an 
     answer to our racial divisions amounted to no more than, ``We 
     like you; you do it for us.''
       Any person, Black or White, touched by the media becomes 
     bigger than life so that, as with the latest athletic 
     virtuoso, the rest of us become spectators. Little of the 
     media attention on these men recognized the kind of work 
     necessary for individual Americans, Black and White, to 
     bridge the racial divide. In each of their stories, the 
     media, with its need to oversimplify, was crucial in building 
     them up or tearing them down or both in sequence. Each of 
     them became more a symbol than a human being.
       The real heroes, however, are not the ones that the media 
     churns up and then discards. The real heroes are the parents 
     who lead every day in their homes (as Barbara Bush said. 
     ``What happens in your house is more important than what 
     happens in the White House''), and the citizens and community 
     leaders who are not courting fame, but producing results, who 
     give of themselves because they hold certain values about 
     people in America.
       For example, there were other African Americans this year--
     Anna Deavere Smith, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Kimberle Crenshaw and 
     Harlon Dalton--who hardly made a ripple in our mass culture. 
     If you know their names, raise your hand. Yet, each in his or 
     her own way through art, government, writing and the law was 
     confronting the hard facts of our reality and raising the 
     deeper questions of race related to identity and to our 
     common humanity. Anna Deavere Smith, a professor and 
     playwright, was writing and acting the voices of Jews and 
     Blacks in Crown Heights, New York and, in the work called 
     Twilight: Los Angeles, finding rich strains of diversity in 
     Black America itself as well as the words of White Americans 
     who are part of the racial dialogue. L.A. city councilman, 
     Mark Ridley-Thomas was conceiving, organizing and carrying 
     out racial dialogues during some of the tensest race moments 
     in Los Angeles' history. Law professor, Kim Crenshaw, through 
     an analysis of the legal history of civil rights, was 
     brilliantly revealing the attitudinal antecedent to today's 
     White backlash against affirmative action and in so doing, 
     asking us all if we really want to head down that road again. 
     Finally, Harlon Dalton, author, singer, and professor, was 
     challenging people of good will in both races to risk candor 
     and build a new political vision that could dry up the fear 
     and heal the wounds of racial division.
       What each of them was saying in different ways was that the 
     issue of race can never be a Black issue alone--not only 
     because America is blessed by an abundance of Asian 
     Americans, Latino Americans, and Native Americans, but 
     because a racial dialogue cannot take place without White 
     Americans becoming full participants. White Americans have a 
     race too. Black separatists flourish where Whites shut their 
     doors to dialogue and assume no responsibility for their own 
     stakes in racial healing.
       As America heads into a presidential election year and 
     California confronts affirmative action in one of its ballot 
     initiatives, the racial landscape of America seems full of 
     land mines. Yet it is precisely at such moments of heightened 
     awareness that we can make the greatest progress because it 
     is at those moments that the necessary pain of candor can be 
     endured and then transcended. So let us ask people who run 
     for president to give us their pedigrees on race, including 
     the real life experiences that led them to their present 
     understanding. Let us urge them to step up to the subject 
     regularly, not just when there is a racial explosion 
     somewhere in America. Let us urge Republicans not to play the 
     race card and Democrats to do more than the minimum to ensure 
     a strong Black voter turnout. Above all, let both parties 
     stop demagoguing the tragic issue of welfare, and start 
     digging deeper into themselves about America's racial future. 
     To expect less is to admit that our politics has failed us on 
     one of America's most important issues.
       So what is the state of Black-White relations in America? 
     Both Black and White America are caught in a traumatic 
     economic transformation in which millions of Americans feel 
     insecure about their future and for good reason. There are 
     130 million jobs in America and 90 million of them involve 
     repetitive tasks, which means that a computer can displace 
     any of those jobs. In a world where credit departments of 300 
     people are routinely displaced by 10 computer workstations, 
     more and more Americans will lose good paying jobs along with 
     their health insurance and often their pensions, so that 
     corporate profits can rise and productivity increase.
       During the first six months of 1993, the Clinton 
     Administration announced that 1.3 million jobs had been 
     created, to which a TWA machinist replied, ``Yeah, my wife 
     and I have four of them.'' And indeed, over half of the newly 
     created jobs were part-time.
       If you're African American, you've seen it before. In the 
     1940s the cotton gin pushed Black field hands off the farms 
     of the South and to the cities of the North. Labor-intensive 
     manufacturing jobs seemed to be the Promised Land. Then 
     automation arrived and the last hired were the first fired 
     and millions of unskilled Black workers lost their jobs. 
     Still, many hung on in the manufacturing sector. Then, 
     with the advent of information technology and foreign 
     competition, labor unions, such as the multiracial 
     steelworkers saw their membership plummet from 750,000 in 
     1979 to 374,000 in 1990. Finally, in the 1960s and '70s, 
     government began to employ African Americans in sizable 
     numbers, but in the 1980s and 1990s, with the fiscal 
     crunch in full progress, government employees were let go. 
     In the midst of the information revolution, just as in the 
     midst of any recession, tough economic winds become a 
     hurricane for African Americans.
       Many White Americans who have been caught in the cold winds 
     for the first time feel disoriented. Many become easy prey 
     for politicians who want to explain deteriorating standards 
     of living by stigmatizing Black Americans. ``You have lost 
     your job,'' these

[[Page S12247]]

     mischief makers say, ``because of affirmative action or 
     because of the money government spends to help the poor.'' 
     Instead of seeing the demographic reality-that only as all 
     Americans advance will White Americans advance--they often 
     fall into the scapegoating trap. It's an old story.
       In California, a white-collar worker named Ron Smith who 
     lost his job at McDonnell-Douglas two years ago, told a 
     journalist how his sense that he was ``starting to lose my 
     grip'' feeds into the divisiveness that is tearing our 
     country apart: ``I get angry, and a lot of anger is coming 
     out,'' he said. ``I'm blaming everyone--minorities, aliens 
     coming across the border. I don't know how much truth there 
     is to it. I mean, I don't think there are any planners and 
     engineers coming across the border. But it hurts when you go 
     to an interview and you know damn well you can do the job, 
     and you know they are looking at you and thinking, `Forget 
     it.' ''
       The fact is that, economically, Black America is in the 
     best and worst of times. Roughly a third of Black America can 
     now be called middle class. Black Americans distinguish 
     themselves in virtually every field of endeavor. But more 
     than 30% of Black Americans live in grinding poverty. Many 
     can't find a job, can't get credit to buy a house or start a 
     business, and increasingly can't make ends meet for 
     necessities, much less save for the future. Indeed, the 
     unemployment rate for Blacks is routinely twice that for 
     Whites. Also, the earnings of Black college-educated men have 
     only recently reached parity with those of White men with 
     high school diplomas. Of greater significance is the fact 
     that 46% of Black children live below the poverty line, 
     compared with 17% of White youngsters.
       Without question, disintegrating family structure 
     contributes to Black poverty. The average income for a two-
     parent Black family is three times the income of a single-
     parent White family. But poverty is more than a Black 
     problem. It is a broad national systemic issue flowing from 
     inadequate economic growth unfairly shared. Indeed, there are 
     16 million more White Americans in poverty than there are 
     Black Americans in poverty. But many Whites feel it is 
     primarily a Black problem. Because of lingering racial 
     attitudes and stereotypes, marshaling resources to cope with 
     it becomes more difficult. In that sense, racism contributes 
     to Black poverty and to White poverty, too.
       The conflict between generations in the Black community is 
     real and the primary responsibility for bridging it rests 
     with the Black community. There is a breakdown in 
     communication and a breakdown in values. When I left Missouri 
     for college in 1961, the number of children in St. Louis born 
     to a single parent was 13%; now it is 68%. Among Black 
     children it is 86%. In some cities, such as Baltimore, 55% of 
     the African American males between the ages of 18 and 34 are 
     either in jail, on probation, or awaiting trial. The 
     idealistic call of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the disciplined 
     march of Muslims who have declared war on Black self-
     destruction, can't compete with the latest gangsta rapper who 
     from the TV screen calls young people to a life of crime, 
     violence, White hate, and female abuse. Increasingly, a 
     generation with little to lose pulls the trigger without 
     remorse, risks nothing for their neighbor and invests little 
     in their own futures. They live for today, some because 
     that's all they have ever done and others because they 
     believe that their tomorrow will only be worse.
       Is the plight of this element of young Black America an 
     isolated cancer, or a harbinger of all our futures? Is the 
     message of these young black Americans pathological or 
     prophetic? Will the rest of America respond or turn its back?
       White Americans seem to have ignored the devastation in 
     many American cities. Both government and the private sector 
     have proven inadequate to the task of urban rejuvenation. 
     It's almost as if the kids with AIDS, the gang members with 
     guns, the teenagers lost to crack cocaine, the young rape 
     victim whose only self-respect comes from having another 
     child, don't exist for most White Americans. That is why the 
     Million Man March was so important. Although it was based on 
     the premise that White Americans won't help, it was itself I 
     think a remarkable moment in American history. First, in a 
     country where murder is the number one cause of death among 
     young African American males, and where single-parenthood 
     continues to rise, and where drugs and dealing drugs are 
     sometimes the profession of choice for the young as opposed 
     to teaching or becoming a minister of any faith, it is 
     enormously positive to have a million African American men 
     come together and say, We're going to take individual 
     responsibility to change these circumstances. But, similar to 
     Promise Keeper, a group of the Christian community that 
     gathers 50,000 predominantly White middle-class men in a 
     stadium where they pledge to be good fathers and husbands, 
     the hard part is living the pledge every day. The test will 
     be whether the million men return to their communities, 
     reduce the violence and drugs and become meaningful figures 
     in the lives of fatherless children.
       My Senate office legal counsel, who is African American, 
     attended the Million Man March on the National Mall. He told 
     me that the atmosphere was electric and that it reflected 
     great diversity. For example, a Korean American woman was 
     selling soda and ice-cream and at one point during the day, 
     up came a Black man to purchase a drink. Another Black man 
     was standing nearby with his arms folded, and he said, ``No, 
     not today brother; today you buy from a brother, not from 
     her.'' Another one came up and said, ``Not today brother; 
     today you buy from a brother, not from her.'' A third guy 
     came up and said the same thing, but the third guy replied, 
     ``What do you mean, `I buy from the brother'? Don't you 
     realize you're doing the same thing to her that was done to 
     us for 200 years. I'm buying from her!'' And he does. 
     Another one came up, the same experience, an argument: 
     ``I'm buying from her because why should we discriminate 
     against her the way we've been discriminated against?'' 
     The Million Man March was not of one mind; it was a 
     million minds whose faces happened to be Black.
       Minister Louis Farrakhan has said things that are on many 
     levels despicable. But more importantly, in practical terms, 
     his separatist message is a dead end. If he succeeds in 
     countering self-destructive behavior while also separating 
     the Black community from the White community, what he will 
     have created is the equivalent of many a segregated 
     neighborhood prior to the civil rights revolution. 
     Ultimately, the question is not only how do we counter the 
     poverty, violence and family disintegration, but how do we 
     all live together?
       Although some Black Americans resent it, White Americans 
     also have a view on how we can resolve the problem of race. 
     Although some White Americans resent it, Black Americans can 
     challenge us to reflect on our own race. Among other things, 
     that means that we have to recognize that the flip side of 
     racial discrimination is racial privilege, which consists of 
     all those things that come to White Americans in the normal 
     course of living; all the things they take for granted that a 
     Black person must never take for granted. Race privilege is a 
     harder concept to grasp than racial discrimination, 
     especially for Whites, because it is more subtle. It is 
     rooted in assumptions about every day, yet there is no 
     denying it. For example, if I'm looking to buy a house and 
     I'm White, I never fear someone will say no to me because of 
     my race, but if I`m Black, I constantly make assessments 
     about what is possible, problematic or impossible. That 
     freedom from fear is a White skin privilege. If I'm White, I 
     know that if I meet the economic criteria I'll get the loan. 
     If I'm Black, I know I might not. Skin privilege means that I 
     don't have to worry that my behavior will reflect positively 
     or negatively on my race; it will reflect only on me and on 
     my family. Skin privilege means that I can relate to a 
     stranger without first having to put them at ease about my 
     race. I know Black males who walk the street whistling 
     classical music to let Whites know they're not dangerous.
       As long as White America remains blind to its own racial 
     privilege, Black Americans will feel that the focus falls too 
     heavily on them. I never thought much about my skin privilege 
     until I became a professional basketball player. That was a 
     time when pundits asserted that the reason some teams drew 
     sparse crowds was because they had five Black starters. 
     Suddenly, in my first year, I began to receive offers to do 
     commercial endorsements. I felt that they were coming to me 
     instead of my Black teammates not because I was the best 
     player; I wasn't. No, they were coming because of skin 
     privilege, because I was me and I was White and marketers 
     still believed, like the teams that hesitated to start the 
     five best players because they might be Black, that a White 
     public would never buy from a Black salesman. Some companies 
     still believe that. That's why Bill Cosby's Jell-O ads were 
     so important and why Michael Jordan must never forget who 
     paved the way.
       As long as White America believes that the race problem is 
     primarily a Black problem of meeting White standards to gain 
     admittance to White society, things will never stabilize and 
     endure. But the flip side of White skin privilege is negative 
     Black attitudes--reflected in even small things, such as 
     coldness in daily interactions at work, slowdowns in 
     providing services to Whites, or gathering at separate tables 
     in cafeterias--that cast any attempts by Whites at racial 
     dialogue as disingenuous and illegitimate. African Americans 
     have to open up their worlds to Whites just as Whites have to 
     open up their worlds to Blacks. Without that kind of candor, 
     the dialogue will be phoney. Without that kind of mutual 
     interest, the ties will not bind. Without that kind of mutual 
     commitment, racial hierarchy will persist.
       I believe most White Americans are not racist. Mark Fuhrman 
     is, thank God, the exception, not the rule. Most White 
     Americans easily reject the crude stereotyping and violent 
     race hate of a Fuhrman. We are no longer living in a time 
     where a group of German prisoners of war could be served at a 
     Kansas lunch counter, while the Black soldiers guarding them 
     could not sit next to them. We are no longer living at a time 
     when in Washington, D.C. a priest refused to continue his 
     sermon until a Black worshiper moved to the back of the 
     church. Today there is something much more subtle afoot in 
     America. As Harlon Dalton writes of the African American 
     experience:
       Instead of having doors slammed in our faces, we are 
     cordially invited to come on in. Instead of being denied an 
     application, we are encouraged to fill one out. Instead of 
     failing to make the first cut, we make it to the final round. 
     And when the rejection letter finally arrives, it has a 
     pretty bow tied around it, (Something like: ``We were not 
     able to make you an offer at this time, but we really enjoyed 
     having the chance to get

[[Page S12248]]

     to know you.'') Similarly, we hardly ever run into Bull 
     Connor or even David Duke anymore. Instead, we encounter 
     people who are ostensibly on our side and who seek to protect 
     us from the stigma of affirmative action and the dependency 
     created by too much government support. Instead of 
     confronting nasty people intent on using our color against 
     us, we are surrounded by perfectly nice people who embrace 
     the colorblind ideal with a vengeance.
       All of this poses a question I raised in 1992 at the 
     Democratic Convention. The silence of good people in the face 
     of continuing racism is often as harmful as the actions of 
     bad people. While most people aren't racist, there are some 
     White and Black people in America who do remain racists, 
     spewing hostility toward another person simply because of his 
     or her race. There are White politicians who play the ``race 
     card'' and there are Black politicians who play the ``racist 
     card.'' But the word racist is over used. Most people aren't 
     brimming over with race hatred. To say that someone who 
     opposes affirmative action is racist denies the possibility 
     that the person may just be ignorant or unknowledgeable. If 
     one hurls the epithet, ``racist'' a meaningful dialogue is 
     unlikely to follow and it is only out of candid conversations 
     that Whites will discover skin privilege, Blacks will accept 
     constructive criticism from Whites and progress will come 
     steadily.
       But let us not abandon the quest to end racism. Let us root 
     out what Harlon Dalton calls those ``culturally accepted 
     beliefs that defend social advantage based on race.'' To 
     do that however, takes individual initiative and 
     involvement. That begins with a President and doesn't end 
     until all of us as individuals become engaged. Ronald 
     Reagan denied that there was any discrimination in 
     America, much less racism. George Bush was a little 
     better, but then he appointed Clarence Thomas to the 
     Supreme Court who, in an odd twist, turned the clock back 
     on the whole issue. And now Bill Clinton says, Yes, there 
     is racism; yes we need affirmative action; and yes, I'll 
     give my own pedigree in terms of my own experience. I 
     believe he is strongest when he talks about conviction 
     related to race because I do think he has that conviction. 
     But the question we need to hear him answer is, What are 
     we going to do about it? One would like to see him talk 
     about it more, to remind people of our history, to educate 
     Americans about why it's important that we get beyond 
     these stupid divisions that diminish our possibilities as 
     individuals and as a nation.
       Affirmative action takes on such a disproportionate place 
     in our national politics because many Whites cannot conceive 
     of White skin privilege and because discrimination, when it 
     occurs, remains largely unaddressed. Why not deal with the 
     underlying issue which is discrimination and facilitate 
     remedies for discrimination? Affirmative action is a response 
     to a discriminatory pattern over many years in institutions 
     run by individuals who are confident that they don't have to 
     change. To the extent that you don't remedy individual 
     discrimination early and forcefully, then you are going to 
     have thousands of judges around this country making broad 
     brush rulings that often seem unfair to Whites. And then 
     you're going to have other self-interested groups in the name 
     of affirmative action asking for things that are not 
     affirmative action. It's beyond me for example, how giving a 
     group of investors who have an African American participant a 
     tax subsidy in the purchase of a radio or television station 
     is affirmative action; it's not. But it's easier to say no if 
     you can say yes to facilitating the battle against 
     discrimination. You cant say no unless you realize that in 
     some place affirmative action is the only way we can balance 
     White skin privilege. For example, the US military, even 
     after President Truman's desegregation order, remained a 
     bastion of White, often Southern, officers. It took Jimmy 
     Carter and his African American secretary of the Army, 
     Clifford Alexander, to change the way promotions were granted 
     so that Black officers had a chance to become generals. In 
     other words, without Cliff Alexander, there would be no Colin 
     Powell. If you don't believe me, ask Colin Powell. If you 
     believe that that was then and this is now, and that there is 
     no need to look at other institutions, I refer you to the 
     report of the Glass Ceiling Commission. I ask you only to 
     answer why there are no Black CEOs of major corporations and 
     why major New York law firms still have only a minuscule 
     number of Black partners.
       To understand what needs to be done requires knowing a 
     little history. The issue arose during the consideration of 
     the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Do we put an administrative 
     enforcement mechanism in the law to remedy discrimination in 
     employment? The Republicans in the Senate said they would 
     join the Southern Democrats and filibuster the bill if 
     President Johnson gave the soon-to-be-created EEOC an 
     administrative enforcement mechanism, so he dropped it out. 
     Now, if there is an act of discrimination, what you do is 
     file a petition with the EEOC. But there is no way to bring 
     the issue to a conclusion. So, the case languishes 
     indefinitely. There are now 97,000 cases backlogged at the 
     EEOC. Imagine you're a competent mid-level clerk in a company 
     that has promoted Whites, but rarely a Black, or you're the 
     25th African American who's applied for a job with a police 
     department in a city that is overwhelmingly African American, 
     and not one has ever been accepted and so you decide to bring 
     a case at the EEOC. After five years you get no remedy. So 
     then you go to court for another five years, at the end of 
     which you may or may not get a remedy, which means for people 
     of modest means, you don't have a remedy for discrimination 
     because you can't afford a lawyer for ten years in order to 
     get your promotion from a $30,000 to $40,000 a year job.
       The EEOC should have the same power that the National Labor 
     Relations Board has, which is cease and desist authority, the 
     ability to bring a case to a conclusion and say, Yes, there 
     was discrimination and this is a remedy, or say, no, there 
     was no discrimination, this is frivolous. With a more 
     streamlined procedure for resolving charges of 
     discrimination, companies would pay less to lawyers defending 
     them against frivolous cases and individuals who have a 
     legitimate claim would get a more timely resolution to the 
     problem of discrimination. But once given real power, the 
     EEOC has to resist ridiculous interventions that allow 
     Americans who don't want to fight discrimination an excuse to 
     discredit the whole EEOC effort. Self-indulgence at the EEOC 
     breeds disrespect for what should be a mechanism of our 
     national self-respect.
       Finally, when it comes to attacks on affirmative action, it 
     is important to see how similar they are to the legal 
     justification for segregation in the 19th Century. As 
     Kimberle Crenshaw points out in a brilliant paper, treasured 
     American values such as autonomy, freedom, individualism, and 
     federalism were deployed in support of discrimination. For 
     example, the Supreme Court ruled that a White person deciding 
     to prohibit a Black person from riding in a certain train car 
     was exercising his individual freedom of contract. Decades 
     later, Thurgood Marshall and other freedom fighters argued 
     before the court that even though the acts of individual 
     discrimination might be protected as private rights of 
     contract, the discriminatory practices were so widespread 
     that they acted as an impediment to interstate commerce for 
     Black people as a group. Individual freedom yielded to group 
     remedy for group discrimination. Thus, the interests of the 
     national community to prevent racial discrimination took 
     precedence over the individual right to bar Black Americans 
     from enjoying the benefits of full citizenship.
       Today, many of the people who oppose affirmative action and 
     state a preference for color blindness and justify their 
     position by reference to the American tradition of 
     considering individuals equal before the law are often the 
     same people who seldom have Black friends and who will choose 
     the White teacher for their children every time. when people 
     shout reverse discrimination they ignore our history, the 
     continuation of subtle White skin privilege, and the fact 
     that more White people lost their jobs in the 1982 recession 
     than blacks have gained jobs from court-ordered affirmative 
     action since its inception. When people diminish real, not 
     imagined, Black contributions to our society as if they were 
     a threat to our historical canon, they diminish their own 
     understanding of themselves and their country. What is at 
     work here is the attempt to again distort traditional 
     American values to slow down progress on race.
       During the civil rights era, the message was that Black 
     Americans wanted to make something of themselves through hard 
     work, religious devotion, political activism and educational 
     attainment. White America had only to do what was in its own 
     long-term interests anyway and remove the architecture of 
     racial oppression. The movement had the high moral ground. 
     Today, with murder, AIDS and drugs running rampant through 
     the black community, with many blacks unwilling to accept 
     some of the responsibility for their predicament, White 
     Americans seem more and more unwilling to make sacrifices to 
     change the abysmal physical conditions. When black 
     separatists come across more like Governor Wallace than 
     Martin Luther King, they give those Whites who are only 
     marginally interested in Black folks in the first place a 
     reason to turn off.
       To counter the human devastation in parts of urban America, 
     chronicled so vividly by Jonathan Kozal in Amazing Grace and 
     Savage Inequalities, will take an heroic effort by thousands 
     in the Black and White communities working together. It will 
     take police departments that do their jobs conscientiously 
     and with adequate resources. It will take schools that are 
     teaching institutions, not simply warehouses for storing our 
     children. It will take surrogate families who will express 
     some small love for a kid without parents. It might even take 
     boarding schools for kids that can't make it in the 
     neighborhood. Above all, it will take a new biracial 
     political vision that acts, because to fail to act will stain 
     our ideals, diminish our chances for long-term prosperity, 
     and shortchange our children--all our children.
       In the 1960s the Civil Rights movement thrived on the 
     assumption that an America without racism would be a 
     spiritually transformed America. That, after all, is what 
     affirmative action affirms--that America can get over its 
     racial nightmare; that few in America should be poor or dumb, 
     or violent because the rest of us have cared too little for 
     them; that no one in America should have a racial limit set 
     on where their talents can take them; and that the process of 
     seeing beyond skin color and eye shape allows us not to 
     ignore race but to elevate the individual. A new political 
     vision requires people to engage each other, endure the pain 
     of candor, learn from each other's history, absorb each 
     other's humanity and move on to higher ground. Such is the 
     task of those who care

[[Page S12249]]

     about racial healing. It won't happen overnight nor will one 
     person bring it, however illustrative his career, nor will 
     one person destroy it, however heinous his crime or poisonous 
     his rhetoric. It can never be just about numbers. It must 
     ultimately always be about the human spirit. What will be 
     built has its foundation in the individual interactions of 
     individual Americans of different races who dialogue and then 
     act together to do something so that like a team, a platoon, 
     a group building a home or cleaning up a park, something is 
     transformed because of the common effort. Slowly, with acts 
     of brotherhood transforming physical circumstances even as 
     they bind the ties among the participants, we can say that 
     racial progress has ceased retreating and is once again on 
     the advance. In other words, only together can we chart a 
     brighter future.
                                                                    ____


             Harry Truman: Public Power and the New Economy

                       (By Senator Bill Bradley)

       I understand that I am getting this award because the 
     Truman Award Commission felt that I exemplify at least some 
     of the traits of President Harry S. Truman. I came up with 
     three that I know both he and I share: We were both born in 
     Missouri of Scotch Irish heritage; neither of us were 
     considered natural public speakers; and, occasionally, we 
     could be considered just a little bit stubborn. As Bess 
     Truman would point out if she were here today, some of these 
     traits are shared with old Missouri mules, except that a mule 
     might have given a better keynote speech that I did at the 
     1992 Democratic National Convention.
       That I should receive the Truman Award is a great honor 
     because I have been long been an admirer and a student of his 
     political career. Truman's come from behind Senate re-
     election campaign in 1940, which in many ways was a precursor 
     to the 1948 presidential race, was the subject of my 
     Princeton senior thesis, entitled ``On That Record I Stand.'' 
     I had wanted to read my entire 140-page senior thesis today 
     but fortunately for all of you, there isn't the time.
       Some thirty years after I wrote my college thesis, I found 
     myself again thinking about the 33rd president and 
     remembering a conversation I had with a couple of ``good ole 
     boys'' from North Carolina. They had told me how they didn't 
     like Jesse Jackson, whom they considered a ``rabble-rouser,'' 
     nor Jesse Helms, whom they considered ``a disgrace to the 
     state.'' So, I asked them for their favorite president. 
     ``Harry Truman,'' one shot back, ``because he was one of the 
     people, and when he spoke we could understand him. Just 
     because some is President, you know, doesn't make him better 
     than me.''
       There it was. To be a leader that good old boys related to, 
     you had to have a fierce egalitarian spirit, the spirit that 
     made Harry Truman ``the man of the people.'' Truman's view 
     was that a person should be judged without regard to material 
     possessions or social position. Each individual has an 
     inherent and independent worth, regardless of knowledge or 
     wealth. Nobody has a monopoly on morality or wisdom. No 
     American should be expendable. Each man and woman in our 
     democracy should have a voice in charting our collective 
     future.
       I, too, believe in these values and have tried to infuse 
     them in my pubic service. But Harry Truman was not the first 
     person to preach these ideals; they come directly from the 
     Declaration of Independence, which to me is our most 
     important historical document. Times have changed since July 
     4, 1776, but the idea that all people are equally imbued with 
     the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and 
     that no individual is more important than another remains at 
     the heart of what makes America special. And, indeed, 
     national government is constituted in part to guarantee this 
     individual right through the exercise of public power.
       In further reflection on Truman's career, characteristics 
     other than his ``common touch'' also stand out. He sent 
     comprehensive civil rights legislation to Congress when it 
     was supported by only 6% of the national public, according to 
     one Gallup Poll. He acted on his own authority to desegregate 
     the armed forces. Speaking as the first President to address 
     the NAACP, he declared that all Americans were entitled to, 
     not only civil rights, but decent housing, education, and 
     medical care. Such political courage is all too rare.
       Today, people have become so cynical about politics that 
     they think all elected officials are controlled--by special 
     interests who give them campaign money, by pollsters who tell 
     them that thought is not as important as focus group phrases, 
     by political parties which often stifle their independent 
     judgment, and by their own ambition which rarely permits them 
     to call things like they really see them, for fear of 
     angering a constituency group that will be needed for a 
     future election. While most politicians do not knowingly say 
     something false, they tend to emphasize the issue that the 
     group to which they are speaking agrees with. That is 
     commonly referred to as ``good politics,'' but it is the 
     exact opposite of the Truman way of ``telling it like it 
     is.''
       But perhaps Truman's most important characteristic was that 
     he stood up for the working American in a way few politicians 
     have. In 1947 and 1948, Truman issued dozens of vetoes on 
     legislation passed by a reactionary Republican congress not 
     unlike the one we have today. In mid-1947, Truman vetoed two 
     popular Republican tax cut proposals because they would have 
     favored the right and penalized the middle-class through 
     higher inflation.
       Truman's most famous veto of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley 
     Act, was overridden by a Congress responding to polls that 
     showed most Americans believed the unions--then representing 
     24% of the workforce--had become too powerful and needed to 
     be restrained. Truman felt that Taft-Hartley went too far and 
     would, he said, ``take fundamental rights away from our 
     working people.'' He did not flinch. He acted as a truly 
     progressive president, unafraid to use public power.
       At the end of World War II, Harry Truman needed to find a 
     way to cushion the effects of the armed forces 
     demobilization. War contracts would be canceled, price 
     controls would be ended, war-time labor agreements would 
     expire, and millions of service men and women would come home 
     looking for jobs. Some predicted a return of the Depression.
       His solution was a 21-point program offering economic 
     security to every American citizen. Truman's reconversion 
     plan urged an extension of unemployment compensation, an 
     increase in the minimum wage, expansion of social security, 
     extension of the GI Bill, universal health insurance, and 
     what he called ``full-employment'' legislation that would 
     guarantee a job to every able-bodied American willing to 
     work. Parts of the program were considered radical even in 
     the era just after the New Deal. And while many of Truman's 
     proposals never became law, the breadth of his approach 
     showed that he was thinking of the well-being of all classes 
     in America. And indeed, all classes shared in the boom: 
     Unemployment all but disappeared. Real living standards were 
     higher when he left office than when he took over from 
     F.D.R.
       I believe that America is at a similar economic crossroads 
     today as we move into the information age and that we again 
     need approaches of breadth and innovation to assure the 
     American dream for our people. They start with a 
     reinvigoration of public power--our power.
       The use of public power still has a valid role to play in 
     ensuring fairness and economic security for all Americans. We 
     need to use our collective power to help individuals cope 
     with changing economic times, to ensure competition among 
     market participants and to prevent harm to the general 
     welfare. There is simply no other way to check the excesses 
     of private power except through public power.
       Such a willing use of public power disputes the Republican 
     notion that the private sector has all the answers and will 
     automatically relieve the fears of working Americans. It is 
     also different from the belief that to every social problem 
     in America there is an answer which has as its centerpiece a 
     federal bureaucracy delivering services through regional and 
     state bureaucracies. For example, there are 58 federal 
     programs for poverty and 154 federal programs for job 
     training. Yet, worker retraining without new jobs being 
     available leads nowhere.
       Idealism without resources is impotent. Just ask anyone who 
     thought that charitable giving could end poverty. Idealism 
     without accountability wastes money. Just ask anyone who 
     thought that HUD was sufficient to stabilize the decline of 
     urban America.
       I start with the belief that the market is the most 
     efficient allocator of resources and frequently the most 
     powerful undefined force in American life. It rewards those 
     with the highest skills, best processes and most desired 
     products. An ideal market would deliver the best quality at 
     the lowest price in the shortest time. But the market is 
     impartial and can be cruel in its verdicts, with the result 
     that many people get hurt. To cushion the impact of the 
     market is not easy to do and remain fair. Usually those who 
     escape the judgment of the market in our current political 
     system are not broad classes of similarly situated 
     individuals, but rather companies or individuals with the 
     best-connected lobbyist. Such is the inequality of the 
     administrative state, full of rules and exceptions, 
     definitions and effective dates. How to benefit from the 
     market's dynamism while protecting against the dislocation 
     that it sometimes causes remains our dilemma.
       I have always believed that the message of America is that 
     if you work hard you can get ahead economically, if you get 
     involved, you can change things politically and if you reason 
     patiently enough you can extend quality to all races and both 
     genders. Today, many Americans doubt these basic American 
     precepts. In the information economy, four computer 
     workstations replace 300 people in a credit department no 
     matter how hard they work. In our political dialogue, money 
     drowns out the voices of the people. In our social 
     interactions, few risk candor to create racial harmony.
       For nearly 20 years, the rhetoric of economic conservatives 
     has demonized government. Without making the distinction 
     between federal programs and public power, they labeled 
     government programs as waste and government rules as 
     limitations on freedom. The result has been that millions of 
     Americans concluded that government took their money in taxes 
     but worked for someone other than them. What most people have 
     missed is that, while government can be distant and 
     ineffective, public power can speak to people where they live 
     their lives.
       Public power isn't labor intensive; it doesn't require 
     massive decentralized programs delivering services to 
     millions of people; it won't guarantee full employment. But

[[Page S12250]]

     applied in the right way at the right time in the right 
     place, it can balance private power. Public power works only 
     if individuals are better off when it is exercised; only if 
     it enhances an individual's prospects for life, liberty and 
     the pursuit of happiness. Public power often means preventing 
     the ethos of the market from dominating other equally 
     important ethics--democratic, environmental, human, 
     spiritual. Public power can never replace the memories, 
     places and stories of these other ethics, but it can prevent 
     the cacophony of modern life from drowning out their voices. 
     Public power must always focus on the long-term; it must 
     always be accountable; it must never be exercised arrogantly; 
     it must always be a balancing force so that life can be whole 
     and market economic forces, while giving us low prices and 
     high quality, do not control our beings or destroy our 
     humanity.
       Workers caught in the midst of wage stagnation and economic 
     downsizing need public power to balance private power. 
     Millions of Americans are one or two paychecks away from 
     falling out of middle-class status and are never able to put 
     away enough so they feel comfortable. During the first six 
     months of 1993, the Clinton Administration announced that 1.3 
     million jobs had been created, to which a TWA machinist 
     replied, ``Yeah, my wife and I have four of them.''
       The heavy footsteps of relocation, part-time jobs, temp 
     jobs, middle age without health care and retirement without a 
     pension have made their way to the doorsteps of too many 
     American families. Millions of Americans no longer look to 
     the single workplace of the family's main breadwinner as the 
     site where their standard of living will improve. Wages have 
     been stagnant for too long. Too many good jobs have 
     disappeared. Too many expectations have been shattered.
       Who can an individual turn to for help when caught in this 
     economic trauma? The Church doesn't have resources or 
     temporal power; the unions now represent only 11% of the 
     workforce. The same man who things his deteriorating economic 
     circumstance is caused by government finds that only 
     government has the power to counter corporate power. When the 
     AT&T worker loses his job (as 7,000 have in New Jersey during 
     the past three months), his rugged individualism is no match 
     for the company's power. When a downsized IBM engineer who 
     formerly earned $60,000 takes a job for $45,000, a $300 tax 
     cut is a poor substitute. To work hard, play by the rules and 
     take your reward without worrying about your fellow workers 
     sounds fine until the rules change and the pink slip arrives. 
     Only then does the solitary individual sense his 
     powerlessness.
       Only public power can reduce the trauma for people being 
     thrown out of work without pensions, health care, or a chance 
     of getting another job at equal pay. People need an economic 
     security platform that will allow them to ride the rapids of 
     this economic transformation. That platform should consist of 
     the following: a year of company-paid health care for the 
     family of the downsized worker who has been employed by a 
     company of at least one hundred workers for at least ten 
     years. If you have a pension, it ought to be portable. Why 
     should a person who worked 22 years in one place still be 
     unable to have a pension simply because the place was owned 
     by three separate companies in those 22 years, and he vested 
     in none of them.
       In addition to health care and pensions, people 
     increasingly need educational opportunity throughout their 
     working lives. Professor Albert Einstein once monitored a 
     graduate physics exam and a student ran up to him and said, 
     ``Professor, these questions are the same as those on the 
     test that was given last year,'' to which Einstein replied, 
     ``Well, that's okay, because this year the answers are 
     different.'' In the information age, the answers are going to 
     be different every year and unless you have lifetime 
     education, you're not going to be able to come up with them.
       But issues of public power--the collective expression of 
     the people's power--extend to areas beyond the need for an 
     economic security platform in the midst of economic turmoil. 
     Take for example America's public lands--the one third of the 
     land mass of America that is owned by the federal government. 
     It belongs to all of us; it is our patrimony. The miners, 
     ranchers, loggers and corporate farmers of irrigated land do 
     not own it. From the beautiful Red Rock wilderness of Utah to 
     the majestic peaks of Alaska's Brooks range, there are places 
     that mankind has not yet altered. They are as they have been 
     for thousands of years. And if we want our children to 
     experience them in their pristine form, we must, as the 
     Iroquois did, think of the effect of our actions seven 
     generations ahead. The only way to prohibit the natural 
     resource industries from forcing the timeless expanses of 
     wilderness to fit a calendar of quarterly earnings is for 
     public power to say ``no,'' acting in behalf of all of us and 
     for the generations to come.
       Another example of public power lies in our ability to 
     reduce the role of money in our democratic process and to 
     better inform the voters so they can shape our collective 
     future. Today, candidates, in order to get their story 
     across, collect campaign contributions from special interests 
     and the wealthy and then give the money to local TV stations 
     to run campaign TV ads that often malign the character, 
     distort the record or overwhelm the prospects of a hapless 
     opponent with less money. Yet if one were only to think about 
     it, the solution to this national embarrassment is 
     commonsensical. TV largely comes over the airwaves. The 
     public--all of us--own the airwaves. They don't belong to 
     local network affiliates. We have the power to require time 
     to be available to political candidates for president and the 
     Senate. If democracy suffers from inadequately informed 
     citizens and citizens are disdainful of politics in part 
     because of campaign money then public power should require 
     local TV stations to give a specific amount of free time to 
     Senate candidates to make their case. The public airwaves are 
     not private property.
       Even on the issue of race, there is a role for public 
     power. Some institutions resist change. Some companies deny 
     white skin privilege. Even some governmental institutions 
     have needed additional pressure to level the playing field. 
     Yet there is no timely enforcement mechanism for the civil 
     rights laws that declare discrimination in job promotions 
     illegal. Because individuals are being hurt by discrimination 
     only public power can counter it. That is why the Equal 
     Employment Opportunity Commission should be given cease and 
     desist authority to being discrimination cases to a close.
       In all these areas--the guarantee of an economic security 
     platform for individuals caught in the turmoil of economic 
     transformation; the protection of pristine public lands for 
     generations of individuals to enjoy as our forefathers did; 
     the requirement to devote some of the public airwaves to the 
     dialogue of democracy; the ability of public entities to 
     determine if discrimination exists and to rectify it--you do 
     not need government programs and vast service-delivery 
     bureaucracies. You simply need what Harry Truman never shied 
     away from--a willingness to use public power for those with 
     relatively less power and to do so in the name of the people, 
     so that each individual will have a better chance for the 
     realization of his or her inalienable right to life, liberty 
     and the pursuit of happiness.
       One final area where the American people have latent power 
     concerns the American corporation itself. The American 
     corporation exists because the people gave it status and 
     limited liability. Such a grant was thought to be in the 
     public interest. Yet we measure the performance of a 
     corporation narrowly, by the financial balance sheet, even 
     though we all know that the corporation affects all of us in 
     many ways apart from the financial balance sheet.
       As we are entering the information age, it is important to 
     find a way to report not only financial data but information 
     on the impact of the corporation on its workers, its 
     community, and on the environment. We need something similar 
     to the form of the financial balance sheet developed by the 
     Financial Accounting Standards Board, but for the worker, the 
     community, and the environment. The requirement that 
     corporations adhere to standards for the full disclosure of 
     financial information has made U.S. capital markets the most 
     vibrant in the world and has given every investor equal 
     access to the same information. Full disclosure of the 
     corporate impact on workers, communities and the environment 
     will create unforseen pressures and innovations. The result 
     may well be not only a country with more long-term growth in 
     its economy, but also with more security and self-fulfillment 
     for its citizens.
       If information is available to the broadest number of 
     people, the market can often produce the result we want 
     without the heavy-handed intervention of government. By the 
     year 2000 there will be one billion users of the Internet, up 
     from today's 50 million users. There will be more global 
     traffic on the Internet in the year 2000 than is now on 
     telephone lines. With corporate information beyond the 
     financial balance sheet flowing to users indiscriminately, 
     many more people will be empowered. Hierarchy will give way 
     as power shifts down to pension fund managers who think about 
     the daily lives of workers as well as the highest return on 
     investment, to churches who want to measure a company's 
     profession of values against their real-world performance, to 
     small investors who want to follow ``green'' investments or 
     champion community responsibility at the same time they want 
     to maximize profit. With newly available information, groups 
     such as these can create a culture of accountability that 
     will lead to a more stable and humane American society.
       Power will also flow down to the knowledge worker. Wealth 
     will come less from natural resources or even capital, 
     because capital will follow knowledge. Microsoft--whoever 
     heard of it ten years ago? Now it's one of the biggest 
     companies in the world.
       In such an economy, the knowledge workers--those who write 
     the software programs, design the hardware, anticipate the 
     new linkages of information networks--have enormous 
     opportunity to effect change. If the brightest talent recoils 
     from working for a corporation that pollutes, ignores it 
     community or mistreats its laid-off employees, then the 
     corporation will suffer because it won't attract the 
     knowledge talent that it needs to raise the capital for its 
     growth. As a group, knowledge workers potentially possess 
     more power than industrial robber barons, natural resource 
     magnates or international financiers of previous eras.
       In a way, this offers the potential for a creative use of 
     market power. If public policy objectives--clean environment, 
     a diverse workforce, more sensitivity to the human needs of 
     longtime employees--can be carried out by the market, results 
     will be longer lasting. People can then do well economically 
     and do good socially at the same time.

[[Page S12251]]

     In my own Senate career, tax reform, which eliminated 
     loopholes for the few while lowering rates for all Americans, 
     allowed equal incomes to pay about equal tax at the same time 
     the market functioned better. Reducing the subsidy for 
     irrigated agriculture in California benefitted urban and 
     environmental users by making them, given the functioning of 
     a more open water market, more likely to obtain water for 
     California's long-range non-agricultural needs. In both 
     cases, it was a matter not of subsidizing a desired objective 
     but of removing the subsidy for the activity that had come to 
     have a distorting impact on the whole community. Central to 
     achieving a better world through the market is removing 
     subsidies from everything except those ways of thinking which 
     are themselves not susceptible to economic calculation. How 
     much is wilderness worth? How do we determine the economic 
     value of a health democracy or racial harmony? How long will 
     the hard pressed middle class believe in the American dream? 
     These are the areas where public power, not the market, play 
     the decisive role.
       Again, I thank you for this award. Harry Truman was a 
     leader of candor and courage with a common touch and a 
     determination to serve all the people. The challenge to our 
     future is to recognize, as Truman did, that well-exercised 
     public power can benefit individuals and, as I sense, that in 
     the new economy, information can be a tool that allows the 
     market to serve ethics other than just the economic. This 
     combination of the use of public power and the understanding 
     that a market can do good socially at the same time it does 
     well economically can build a more stable, more prosperous, 
     more humane, more democratic America.
                                                                    ____


                          The Subject of Race

                       (by Senator Bill Bradley)

       Tonight, I want to talk about an issue of American 
     political life about which there is endless talk dealing with 
     surfaces, and very little movement deep down in the body 
     politic. Unless faced, it will prevent us from realizing our 
     potential as a pluralistic democracy with a growing economy 
     and instead it will foster a poisonous resentment, even a 
     hatred that kills much of life's joy. The subject is race.
       Frequently, we Americans have been unable to see deeper 
     than skin color or eye shape to the heart and individuality 
     of all our fellow Americans. There were times when we allowed 
     destructive impulses to triumph over our deeper awareness 
     that we are all God's children. Occasionally, the violence of 
     the few elicited the fears and seething anger of the many and 
     prevented the possibility of racial harmony. It's an old 
     story, and a sad one, too. Let me tell you a story.
       In 1963, four young African American girls in white dresses 
     were talking prior to Sunday services in the ladies lounge of 
     the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. 
     Suddenly, the church was ripped apart by a bomb which killed 
     the young girls instantly. There had been other bombings in 
     Birmingham aimed at halting blacks' progress toward racial 
     equality but they had not penetrated the national 
     consciousness. After that Sunday's explosion, people of all 
     races and all political persuasions throughout the country 
     were sickened in spirit. Coming eighteen days after Dr. 
     Martin Luther King, Jr. had shared his dream for America from 
     the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the bombing was a stark 
     reminder of how violently some Americans resisted racial 
     healing. Yet the sense of multiracial outrage and solidarity 
     that came out of this tragedy, combined with the seminal 
     leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, led to the Civil 
     Rights Act of 1964, and to the hope that the search for 
     racial equality could lead to the emergence of a spiritually 
     transformed America.
       In the summer of 1964 I was a student intern in Washington. 
     I remember being in the Senate chamber the night the Civil 
     Rights bill passed, the one that de-segregated restaurants, 
     hotels, and other accommodations. I watched the vote and 
     thought, Something happened in the chamber tonight that makes 
     America a better place. To be honest, that was the night that 
     the idea of being a U.S. Senator first occurred to me. I 
     thought, Maybe someday I can be in the U.S. Senate too and 
     make America a better place.
       As I recently recalled that summer of 1964, I was reminded 
     that slavery was our original sin. Race remains our 
     unresolved dilemma, and today, the bombers are back. From an 
     urban church in Knoxville, Tennessee, to countless rural 
     churches in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, North 
     Carolina, and Alabama, the flames of arson and the hatreds of 
     racism burn again.
       On the narrow subject of burning churches, there has been 
     rare bipartisan outrage. Conservative Republican Senator 
     Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina said last week on the 
     Senate floor that, ``if we in Congress cannot agree that 
     church burning is a despicable crime, what can we agree on? 
     It's not a matter of liberals, conservatives, blacks, whites; 
     it is about justice, faith, right, wrong.'' And he and 
     Senator Ted Kennedy introduced a bill to toughen the laws 
     against church arson.
       Well-meaning whites have also stepped forward to help 
     rebuild churches. The National Council of Churches and the 
     Anti-Defamation League have established national rebuilding 
     funds. Eight foundations have announced grants totaling $2.5 
     million to the National Council of Churches burned churches 
     fund. Habitat for Humanity is coordinating the labor of 
     volunteers who want to rebuild. Teams of Mennonites and 
     Quakers are rebuilding churches in Alabama. Raytheon, E-
     Systems and AT&T have pledged $50,000 each to rebuild burned 
     churches in Greenville, Texas. Friendship Baptist Church and 
     Canaan AME in Columbia, Tennessee were repaired so quickly, 
     with the aid of local whites, that no services were missed. 
     Hundreds of callers to a Dallas radio station spontaneously 
     offered money to help. The conservative Christian Coalition, 
     which met with African American church leaders on Wednesday, 
     pledged to raise $1 million to help rebuild. It is also 
     making money available for motion detectors, alarms, 
     floodlights, and smoke detectors for rural churches that are 
     most vulnerable to arson attacks. The National Trust for 
     Historic Preservation has announced a campaign to provide 
     financial and technical support to more than two dozen 
     African American churches hit by arson attacks. Nations Bank 
     posted a $500,000 reward for information leading to the 
     arrest and conviction of people responsible for the attacks. 
     The Southern Baptists pledged $300,000 at their annual 
     convention last week to assist in the rebuilding effort. On 
     Wednesday, the Laborers' International Union of North America 
     announced that it will rebuild Sweet Home Baptist Church in 
     Baker, Louisiana.
       But beyond deploring, rebuilding, toughening laws and 
     rewarding informants, what can you do? Well, you can look 
     deeper into the soul of America. You can be aware of the 
     context in which these acts are taking place. You can be 
     alert to emerging connections among white supremacist groups 
     dedicated to racial violence. You can ponder whether you see 
     your own reflection in the pool of indifference that has 
     surrounded racial healing for much of the last 15 years in 
     America.
       Let's start with who is committing the burnings. The 
     Washington Post has said that the perpetrators are 
     disproportionately young white males who, although some come 
     from the right side of the tracks, are more often 
     economically marginalized and poorly educated. These are the 
     children of the economic transformation and the products of a 
     television culture surfeited with instant gratification and 
     quick thrill violence. They are the sons of families who have 
     forgotten the power of love.
       For twenty years, wages have been stagnant for 70 percent 
     of the workers in America. In 1973, production, non-
     supervisory wages were $315 per week; by 1994 they fell to 
     $256, which confirms what most Americans know: They're 
     working harder for less, living two paychecks away from 
     falling out of the middle class. No matter how many jobs they 
     work, they can never put away enough to guarantee their 
     children a college education. With less in wages, both 
     parents have to work. Forty percent of the kids live in homes 
     in which both parents work. Add to that the 25% of the kids 
     who live with a single parent and that means that for 65% of 
     the kids there are often resource and time deficits between 
     parent and child.
       Now comes economic downsizing where hundreds of thousands, 
     no matter how hard they work, have lost their jobs. The 
     economic transformation has made them redundant. Three 
     hundred people in a credit department are replaced by four 
     computer workstations; two hundred people in Accounts 
     Receivable are bumped by two computer workstations. The heavy 
     footsteps of downsizing, relocation, part-time jobs, temp 
     jobs, middle age without health care and retirement without a 
     pension may be near or still distant, but they are heard in 
     every home. And for the children of families that have lived 
     through stagnant wages and downsizing, their future seems 
     even more uncertain. A decade ago they were called latch-key 
     kids, and now too many of them call themselves skinheads. The 
     idea that working hard can lead to a secure future, a chance 
     to provide for a better life for their children and an 
     adequate retirement, is slipping away. In its place comes the 
     quick fix of drugs and the quick thrill of violence. Add to 
     this the need for a high quality education in order to get 
     good jobs in the future and the absence of parental savings 
     to pay for that education, and for many millions of young 
     people, their future seems bleak.
       Racism breeds among the poorly educated and economically 
     marginalized. They don't see the deeper forces at work in the 
     economy. They don't sense the self-interest in greater 
     tolerance. They can't see the joy in brotherhood and can't 
     escape the prison of ingrained racial attitudes. Instead, 
     they focus on a scapegoat as the cause of the predicament. 
     ``It's aways the other guy's fault,'' becomes their theme 
     song, and the scapegoat often becomes the ``the other''--
     someone who looks different from them. In a world where 
     politics doesn't adequately address the economic 
     realities, fears can accelerate and demagogues can arise 
     to manipulate those fears for their own ends.
       Take affirmative action. Whether you're for it or against 
     it, keep the numbers in mind. More white Americans lost their 
     jobs in the 1982 recession because of terrible national 
     economic mismanagement than lost their jobs to all the court-
     ordered affirmative action since its inception. The young 
     white who feels that every time he doesn't get a job it's 
     been taken by a black simply doesn't know the numbers. And 
     politicians or talk show hosts who perpetrate and promote 
     that overreaction are similar to the person who throws a 
     match on a pile of oily rags.

[[Page S12252]]

       Likewise, take poverty. There are thirty-six million people 
     in poverty in America: Ten million are black; twenty-six 
     million are white. But many young whites oppose government 
     helping the poor because it means government helping blacks, 
     not realizing that, given their education levels and job 
     prospects, their opposition is often self-destructive.
       In a world where people don't see the underlying forces--
     the economic transformation, the TV culture, the marginal 
     numbers affected by affirmative action, the racial structure 
     of poverty--too many people take aim at blacks or immigrants 
     as the cause of their economic distress. But the seven 
     thousand downsized workers at AT&T who've lost their jobs in 
     the last six months in New Jersey did not lose their jobs 
     because of immigrants or because of blacks, but because the 
     company, acting rationally in a time of rapid change, could 
     maximize profits by letting them go. When people feel 
     desperate, they reach for the extremes that in good times 
     they would steer away from. And when they live in the 
     extremes, violence can be an action of first resort.
       What can we do about the context of church burnings beyond 
     having more economic growth more fairly shared and an 
     education system that teaches tolerance as well as 
     trigonometry?
       Let's start with what politicians can do. Too often, white 
     politicians have played the ``race card'' to get votes but, 
     to be honest, too often, black politicians have played the 
     ``racist'' card for the same reason. What has suffered is 
     honest dialogue and common action. We need more candor and 
     more voice from elected leaders who will choose to challenge 
     their constituents morally as well as challenge their 
     contributors financially. But without engagement you can't 
     have candor, and without candor you can't have progress. When 
     was the last time you talked about race with someone of a 
     different race? Although I'm leaving the Senate, I'm not 
     leaving public life and I intend to continue to speak out on 
     the need for racial healing. I'll look constantly for ways to 
     move the dialogue about race to a deeper level, as yet 
     unattained. For example, at the Democratic political 
     convention, I'll seek to demonstrate what is possible, and 
     I'll call on good people in both parties to step forward in 
     this time of confusion and rising tensions. Politicians have 
     the obligation to play to our higher aspirations as LBJ did 
     back in 1964.
       Talk show hosts also have some responsibility. While some 
     of you can be divisive, and maybe even racist, most of you 
     are not. My appeal is only to remember the paradox of free 
     speech: it can be the nutrient that allows the tree of 
     democracy to grow strong, but if misused, it can burn the 
     roots and deform the tree in ways no one ever expected. 
     Civility is the key and avoidance of the easy appeal to 
     stereotypes should be what you strive for. Remember there was 
     once a time in America when an audience laughed simply at the 
     appearance of a white actor in black face. Now we recognize 
     that we are a better people than that. The potential of 
     confusion is too great for those with the microphones not to 
     promote a deeper dialogue on race. The misunderstandings are 
     too deep for you not to search the heart as well as find the 
     pulse of your audience. I know it's asking a lot, but then so 
     do the ideals of our founders.
       As a way of thinking about our responsibilities to each 
     other let me close by asking you first to imagine that you 
     are a black parent of a nine year-old girl, and then imagine 
     that you are a white parent of a nine year-old son. A church 
     bombing has occurred in your church or in your town. What 
     does one say?
       What answer does a church member give to his 9 year old 
     African American daughter when she asks, ``Daddy, why did 
     this happen?'' What can one say to a daughter who has written 
     her school paper on Colin Powell, taken pride in American 
     having a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, grown up eating 
     Jell-O because of Bill Cosby and watched Michael Jordan 
     become a worldwide marketing phenomenon. In a world where so 
     much progress had been made, how could one explain the 
     phenomenon of burning churches?
       And what about the white parent? What does he say to his 9 
     year-old son? How can he explain the phenomenon of the 
     skinheads, bold Ku Klux Klanners or the new Nazi SS clubs in 
     high schools? How can he explain why blacks and whites can't 
     get along in life like they appear to get along on the 
     Chicago Bulls. What does he say about the burnings?
       I imagine the black parent saying something like this to 
     his daughter: ``There is evil in the world, and there are 
     some people who, because of the color of your skin, do not 
     view you as an equal member of society. These people have a 
     problem, and the problem is called racism. There were black 
     and white people who, decades ago, died so that black people 
     could enjoy equal opportunities with white people in America. 
     America is a much better place with respect to the way that 
     black people and white people interact than it was black when 
     brave Americans suffered to bring about equality.
       ``Racism is an evil and a sickness. You have the physical 
     and intellectual capacities to achieve whatever you want to 
     achieve, to be the best you can be. Look at Colin Powell, 
     Toni Morrison, Cornel West. The people who burned this church 
     are afraid of you; they are afraid to learn about you and 
     interact with you. You must not be afraid of them. You must 
     pray for them and ask God to forgive them. You must use your 
     talents to achieve greatness in life, and you must work in 
     your lifetime to help bridge the racial divide.
       ``Finally, try to understand what a great African-American 
     writer James Baldwin once said in 1957 to his young nephew 
     who was afraid of racial violence during the civil rights 
     demonstrations of the early `60s--He said, `it was intended 
     that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being 
     allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never 
     being allowed to spell your proper name. You have and many of 
     us have defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a 
     terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your 
     imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp on 
     reality. But these men are your brothers--your lost, younger 
     brothers. And if the word ``integration'' means anything, 
     this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our 
     brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from 
     reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my 
     friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great 
     things here, and will again, and we can make America what 
     America must become.'''
       And what should a white parent tell his 9-year-old son 
     about these church burnings? I imagine he would say something 
     like this: ``The burning of the African American church 
     outside our town is a product of racism and hatred. Racism 
     occurs when people of one race feel themselves to be superior 
     to those of another race for no other reason than the color 
     of the skin. I know that sounds like a stupid thing to do, 
     but this country has had a sad history of doing it. African 
     Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans, among 
     others, have suffered because of it. It is important for you 
     to know that racism is everyone's problem, both white and 
     black. It's the kind of problem that no one else can solve 
     for you. Like any other illness, you have to get over it 
     yourself with your own resources as a good human being 
     fighting it off. Racism is something that a person learns; it 
     is not something that people are born with. That's why I 
     punished you the first time you came home from school 
     disparaging someone because of their race. Where racism 
     exists, both black people and white people are harmed. Where 
     it exists, white people cannot develop their full potential 
     as individuals. To harbor racism in your heart is to deny 
     yourself the experience of learning from someone a little 
     different from you. And it makes you unable to share the joy 
     of our common humanity.
       ``A the church burnings reveal, just as they revealed in 
     the story I once told you about the four young girls in 
     Birmingham in 1963, racism is ugly and evil, and God does not 
     like evil. Sometimes, racism comes from black people who call 
     us devils and deny our individuality as much as some white 
     people deny theirs. Whether it comes from white or black it 
     is wrong, and violen is never acceptable. Remember what Dr. 
     Martin Luther King, Jr. said, `Returning violence for 
     violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a 
     night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out 
     darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; 
     only love can do that.'
       ``I am going to volunteer to go and help rebuild the church 
     that was burned. I want you to come with me. I want you to 
     bring Charlie, one of your black friends from school. I want 
     you to work side by side with Charlie, with me, and with 
     other blacks and whites who want to build a country that is 
     compassionate and that treats all of its people with dignity 
     and respect. I want you to treat everyone with respect, and I 
     want you to work in your lifetime to bridge the racial 
     divide.
       ``A Russian writer named Leo Tolstoy once said, ``many 
     people want to change the world; only a few people want to 
     change themselves,'' but with race you can't change the world 
     unless you change yourself.''
       And, I might add, that's as true for politicians as for 
     talk show hosts. And when enough Americans change themselves, 
     we will have true racial healing and then the result will be 
     a spiritually transformed America.
  Mr. LEVIN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
to proceed in morning business for 15 minutes. I see other Senators are 
on the floor here, and if that is inconvenient to them, I will ask for 
a shorter period of time. Let me just place the unanimous-consent 
request, and they can feel free to state a problem, if they have it. I 
ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to proceed in morning 
business for 15 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is 
so ordered. The Senator from Michigan is recognized for 15 minutes.

                          ____________________