    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [January 12, 1998]
    [Pages 41-47]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in an Outreach Meeting on the President's Initiative on Race
    January 12, 1998

        The President. Well, welcome. I'm glad to see all of you, and I
    thank you for coming in, some of you from a very great distance. I will
    be very brief. We're about 6 months into this effort, and I think we've
    gotten quite a bit done, and we've certainly generated a fair amount of
    controversy. And we're hoping for a good next 6 months. We've got a very
    ambitious schedule laid out. But we thought it would be quite helpful to
    bring a group in and just listen to you talk about where you think we
    are with the issue, what you think still needs to be done, what this
    Advisory Board and our project can and cannot reasonably expect to do
    within this year. And maybe we can talk about some of the things that we
    expect to be in the budget and some other issues.
        But I'll say more as we go along through the meeting, but I'd rather
    take the maximum amount of time to be listening to you. And maybe we
    could just start with Wade.
        Wade Henderson. Thank you, Mr. President.
        The President. Nice tie.

    [Wade Henderson, executive director, Leadership Conference on Civil
    Rights, thanked the President for his initiative, noted that a challenge
    to affirmative action may appear on the November ballot in the State of
    Washington, and asked for the President's leadership to oppose it. He
    then urged a commitment to vigorous enforcement of existing civil rights
    laws, including a Federal zero-tolerance policy on discrimination and
    increased funding; suggested that the President direct the attention of
    business leaders toward addressing the growing gap in terms of the
    benefits of the Nation's robust economy between the haves and the have-
    nots; and suggested the creation of incentives to attract bright,
    committed, dedicated professionals to the teaching profession in order
    to ensure that more high-quality instruction is made available in both
    inner-city and rural school systems.]

        The President. I agree with that. Let me say on the first, on the
    discrimination, just very, very briefly, we're working on that. We have
    a good budget and a good plan. And I think we ought to go hard toward
    the people who say they are against discrimination but they oppose
    affirmative action in the Republican majority, and say, ``Well, if you
    are, why won't you fund the EEOC? Give us the tools to do the job.''
        On the economy, we'll have a very aggressive set of proposals that
    go right at what you're suggesting and also in education. Of course,
    we've already suggested that we--and have offered a program of loan
    forgiveness for people who will go into educationally underperforming
    school districts to teach. But we have some other things to offer in
    that regard.

    [[Page 42]]

        I think all these are important because we have to find ways to
    unify the American people around this agenda in ways that actually
    change the future outcomes for people. And so I appreciate that. I think
    that's very good.
        Who wants to go next? Go ahead.

    [Alfred Rotondaro, executive director,
    National Italian-American Foundation, stated that it would be a tragedy
    if the work of the racial commission stops this year and suggested it
    should enlist the Nation's opinion leaders, including white ethnic
    organizations, in an effort to continue the fight against social
    injustice and racism. He also stated that the problem involved elements
    of class and stressed the importance of changing the attitudes of urban
    minority children toward academic excellence. Nan Rich, president, National Council of Jewish Women, stated that
    her suggestions should be advanced in the context of public-private-
    nonprofit partnerships. She then emphasized increasing economic
    opportunity for women and minority groups and corporate training to
    increase cultural diversity awareness. She also suggested that early
    childhood programs focus on diversity. Mayor Joseph Serna, Jr., of Sacramento, CA, stated that California faced
    the dilemma of scapegoating immigrants and cited California's
    Proposition 187 and Proposition 209 as wedge issues which divide people
    along racial lines. He suggested encouraging citizenship in the Latino
    and Asian communities and directing the Immigration and Naturalization
    Service to move more quickly in the process of naturalization.]

        The President. You know, when I came here, it was taking an
    unconscionably long time for people to get through the system, and we
    tried to accelerate it. And the Congress had such a negative reaction to
    it, the Republican majority did, they tried to investigate the whole INS
    because we took the position that you shouldn't have to wait years and
    years and years, after you had already been here 5 years, to have the
    Government decide whether you could become a citizen or not. I still
    think that's the right thing to do. I think it's entirely too
    bureaucratic, and I think we should do better.
        Karen Narasaki. Mr. President, I'm very
    glad to hear you say that, because the backlog persists. It's already 2
    million individuals, and it's 2 years long. That's how many would-be
    citizens we would have----
        The President. But we were taking it down--to be fair--until we were
    viciously and unfairly attacked for making the law work the way it's
    supposed to.

    [Ms. Narasaki, executive director, National
    Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, thanked the President for
    including more funding for food stamps in the budget, saying it would
    help the most vulnerable in society. She also thanked him for appointing
    Acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee and thereby putting a
    face on the affirmative action debate. She urged the President to help
    narrow the race discussion by homing in on such topics as bilingual
    education and affirmative action. She advocated challenging religious
    leaders, including the Christian Coalition, and the entertainment and
    housing industries to participate in the discussion. Representative John
    Lewis of Georgia stated that the President should
    address the question of race in his State of the Union Address, making
    it a moral issue, and that he should not back off on the affirmative
    action debate. Stewart Kwoh, president and
    executive director, Asia Pacific American Legal Center of Southern
    California, said that the appointment of Acting Assistant Attorney
    General Lee built the best multiracial coalition in decades. He then
    suggested the President request direct action from local leaders to
    improve race relations, as well as incorporating race relations
    improvement into Federal programs at the local level, such as
    AmeriCorps.]

        The President. That's interesting because I've been just--sort of in
    support of what you said, we have--one of the most clearly successful
    things we've done, even though it's not--we don't have it on prime-time
    television in ads or anything, because we don't have that kind of money,
    but we put up this Internet homepage with promising practices in
    communities around the country. And substantial numbers of people have
    tapped into it to see what's being done someplace else, and can they
    apply it in their own community, and is there some way to build on it?
    It's been very, very impressive.
        The other thing you said about recruiting leadership I think is--the
    one thing that we did was we wrote several thousand young people and
    asked them to take some initiative, and hundreds of them wrote us back
    with very specific things, saying what they were going to do. So that's
    some indication that if we identify a given

    [[Page 43]]

    list of people, whether they're mayors, city council people, county
    officials, you name it, and ask them to do something specific, that
    they'll do that.
        Hugh.

    [Hugh B. Price, president and chief executive
    officer, National Urban League, underscored the need to close the gap
    between young people who are achieving in school and those who aren't,
    advocated an almost warlike mobilization on that issue, and urged
    attention to those inner-city neighborhoods still unaffected by downtown
    revitalization efforts. He also raised the issue of police interaction
    with civilians, including attitudes of minorities toward police
    authority as well as problems in police practices.]

        The President. The profiling, I think, is a serious problem. We've
    talked a lot about it. I think I've seen--the three most glaring
    examples that I've seen since I've been President are the repeated
    examples black Americans have given of being stopped by police for no
    apparent reason--we had a black journalists group in here not very long
    ago, and every African-American male in the room had been stopped within
    the last few years for no apparent reason; the stopping of Hispanics for
    no apparent reason near the border--as part of drug--and the immediate
    assumption, after the Oklahoma City bombing, that some Arab-American had
    been involved. You know that I was able to sort of put a puncture in
    that within 24 hours, but it was--when I cautioned the American people
    not to do that. But we just--it's still a part of how we related to each
    other that we have to deal with.
        Eleanor, go ahead. I'm sorry.

    [Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of the
    District of Columbia praised the President for confronting race without
    a crisis situation, noting that there was more communication across
    racial lines during the era of the civil rights movement than today and
    that people comfortable in their separate racial niches tended to
    reinforce their own views. She emphasized the importance of filling the
    chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as
    adequately funding it. She also said that the State of the Union Address
    should present a call for action to the Nation and a call for Congress
    to avoid making affirmative action a wedge issue, and suggested that the
    President have a private conversation with Speaker of the House Newt
    Gingrich. Roger Wilkins, professor of history
    and American culture, George Mason University, thanked the President and
    described a similar meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, noting
    that John Hope Franklin had not been present because he was in jail.]

        The President. That's why he looks so
    young; he had all those resting days. [Laughter]

    [Mr. Wilkins stated that the conversation was
    important and that the effort should not end in a year. He urged the
    President to use his office as a teaching lectern to remind the Nation
    of its history of denying opportunity to blacks. He also suggested
    establishing a Presidential medal to honor teachers, making teachers'
    pay a major issue, and focusing on joblessness as a detriment to good
    parenting.]

        The President. Let me say, one of the--just a couple of things real
    quick. Is it--one of the big entertainment organizations sponsors every
    year a big event honoring teachers. Is it Disney? Disney. Maybe we
    should see if we should do something with them.
        On this unemployment, one of you mentioned this earlier--I think it
    was Hugh that mentioned it--but we announced today, it was in the paper,
    that we're going to spend a ton of money to try to focus on just
    training people to take jobs in technology companies. And the reason--
    how that happened was I read two things at the same time several weeks
    ago.
        I get--a month after the unemployment rates comes out, the people
    who do the unemployment rates give you the State-by-State for that
    month, so like every month you're getting this month's national
    unemployment rate and last month's State-by-State. So I don't have the
    December State-by-States, but I do have it for November. In November,
    two States, North Dakota and one other--Nebraska, I think--had 1.9
    percent unemployment. Now, that is essentially negative unemployment
    because any economist will tell you there's somewhere between 2 and 3
    percent of the people walking around all the time. I mean, they're
    moving; they're getting married; they change States; they do something;
    something is always happening to a couple percent of the people that are
    just--in the way we measure unemployment.
        And Washington, DC, had 7.8, or whatever it was. And at the same
    time--this was this month. Anyway, the month before when this

    [[Page 44]]

    happened, the same day I pick up this article in the Washington Post
    which says that in all these suburban counties around Washington, DC,
    there's this huge shortage of high-technology workers. Well, if
    Washington, DC, had an unemployment rate of 2 percent instead of nearly
    8 percent, we'd have about a quarter of the problems we've got here,
    maybe a tenth.
        And so it occurred to me that a lot of--but a lot of these jobs in
    high-technology areas do not require 4-year college degrees. They do
    require technology training; they do require advanced skills over what
    you would get just coming out of high school. But they do not require a
    4-year college degree. So what this announcement in the paper is about--
    it's Alexis Herman and some others, we've been working on this--we're
    trying to figure out whether, not just in DC but anywhere around the
    country where you've got this suburban ring of job demand and a high
    unemployment core, whether we can go in there and do profiles on people
    and see who is capable of getting these skills. And we're going to try
    and do it in some of the less urbanized areas, too. One of the
    problems--a lot of our Native Americans without jobs, without good jobs,
    live in highly dispersed areas where it's not as easy to get there.
        But anyway, if this works--that is, if 4 months from now we can show
    you that we did ``X'' amount of training and the people that formerly
    would have gone into minimum wage jobs are now going into jobs that pay
    above-average wages, where they actually get retirement and health
    insurance and other things, because they got this--it will rather
    dramatically change the nature of job training and the whole strategy
    that the Federal Government has generally followed.
        So, anyway--but I appreciate what you're saying about it.
        Bob, you were next, I think.

    [Representative Robert T. Matsui commended
    the President for the diversity within his administration. He stated
    that affirmative action was a critical issue because its elimination
    would have a profound negative impact on the Nation. He also stressed
    the need to address inner-city poverty by involving the private sector
    in long-term planning, as well as technology and empowerment zone
    initiatives.]

        The President. Thank you. Go ahead.

    [Asifa Quraishi, president, Karamahi Muslim
    Women Lawyers for Human Rights, described the diversity within the
    American Muslim community and its problem of harassment as a response to
    international political events. She stated that the American public must
    separate those events from individual minority citizens and see American
    Muslims as being American citizens first.]

        The President. You know, when I was--I made a big point to try to
    make that exact same point, interestingly enough, when I spoke in the
    Jordanian Parliament when we went to sign the peace agreement between
    Israel and Jordan, and how the United States had no quarrel with Islam.
    And it was amazing the impact it had when I went back to the place where
    I was--I didn't stay in this hotel, but I went back to this hotel and
    this public crowd there. It was amazing the impact that it had on the
    young people that were there. And then I got to Jerusalem, and I had an
    Arab Palestinian employee in one of the hotels where I was--came up to
    me and mentioned it to me. So even abroad it's a big deal.
        And here at home, there was a very kind of troubling story here in
    our local press in the last week about a Muslim school that had 50
    students, and they were trying to expand it, and they were looking for a
    new home. And people in the various places where they were looking were
    afraid that this would be funded by people who would be preaching
    terrorism and all that.
        And I think it's exceedingly important that we disassociate
    religious conviction, and particularly being of Middle Eastern or South
    Asian heritage, from some iron connection to all the problems we're
    having there. And we're going to have to work on it more because the
    Muslim population is growing so substantially in this country.

    [Raul Yzaguirre, president, National Council
    of La Raza, suggested using the Advisory Board as a teaching tool for
    the long term to help the Nation build a national identity based on
    respect for all its constituent groups, including victims of conquest
    and colonialism. John Echohawk, executive
    director, Native American Rights Fund, advocated an effort to teach the
    American public about the legal and political status of tribal
    governments in the Federal system and their role in combating such
    problems

    [[Page 45]]

    as unemployment and low educational attainment in the Native American
    community.]

        The President. Let me just say very briefly on this one subject, I
    think it's also quite important--and we've been working at this steadily
    for 5 years, and I thank Senator Daschle,
    particularly--I want to thank him because he knows a lot about these
    issues. But the Native American tribes have a--I don't want to tie the
    analogy too tight, but they have experienced in the last several decades
    a situation in dealing with the United States that is not unlike that
    experienced by the District of Columbia.
        I always tell people, the problem that DC's had--one problem that DC
    has is sort of the ``not quite'' place. It's not quite independent, and
    it's not quite dependent. It's not quite a State, but it's not quite a
    city that we treat like a city. It's sort of ``not quite.'' And we've
    had a policy that, if it had an honest label--an honest label--toward
    Native American tribes, would be something like sovereign dependence, or
    dependent sovereignty.
        And what I have tried to do is not only to recognize the sovereignty
    of the tribes when it came to national resource and environmental issues
    and even issues where I maybe didn't always agree because it wasn't my
    place to decide--some of the gaming issues and other things that the law
    gives it to the tribes to decide. I think there is this whole other sort
    of superstructure of the way the Federal Government dealt with Native
    Americans relating mostly to their economic needs and their educational
    needs, which in my view was not focused enough toward economic and
    educational and health care and other empowerment issues, where I think
    we could--we'll never have the right sort of sovereignty relationship
    until the tools for success are there.
        And I really--we've worked at this for 5 years. We haven't quite got
    it down yet exactly right, but I think we're making a lot of progress.
    And I appreciate the help you've given us.
        Tom, and John--go ahead, John.

    [Historian John Hope Franklin, Chairman,
    President's Advisory Board on Race, noted that affirmative action
    favoring whites operated in the Nation for a much longer time than that
    favoring minorities. He also suggested that the President strongly
    publicize actions and events relating to the race initiative because
    that had not attracted much media attention thus far.]

        The President. Thank you very much. I also want to thank you for the
    extraordinary amount of time and energy you've put into this. It's been
    humbling to the rest of us.
        Tom.

    [Senator Thomas A. Daschle stated that the
    Democrats in Congress need to amplify the President's leadership. He
    noted the extremely negative statistics on reservations throughout the
    Midwest, citing an 85 percent unemployment rate on reservations in North
    Dakota, as opposed to a 1.9 percent rate off reservations, as an example
    of the great need.]

        The President. Before we go I'd like to just leave you with this
    thought, just sort of food for thought to keep you churning on this.
    First, I'll make a request. I would like anything you can do to help us
    get more things that work in to the commission staff, so we can put it
    on the Internet and get it out, let people see that there are--people
    always write or they E-mail us and they say, ``What can we do?'' We'd
    like to say, here's something that's working somewhere; why don't you do
    it? That's important. Anything you can do to help us recruit any kind of
    new leadership to enlist in this cause, we'd like to have your help on
    that.
        But anyway, let me finish. Here's the thing I'd like to leave you
    with, just sort of as food for thought, to continue this discussion and
    try to narrow it further. And I may be unfairly summarizing someone
    else's work, so I'll try not to--I hope I'm not being unfair. Bill
    Raspberry had an interesting column the
    other day in which he said this race effort is a big deal, and there's
    three things involved in it, and maybe nobody could ever deal with all
    three things. He said, first of all, there's the feeling of racial
    prejudice, how people feel about each other. And secondly, he said,
    there is the existence of illegal discrimination that our laws prohibit.
    And thirdly, there is the existence of outcomes which are dramatically
    different by race; your life chances and education, income, employment,
    and ownership and health care, among other things, are dramatically
    different based on your race.
        He said, ``I once thought we could fight all three of them in the
    sixties because we had an enemy, the Southern white people, and
    everybody else was on the same side.'' Now, at least when it comes to--
    maybe everybody feels some discrimination towards somebody else or--

    [[Page 46]]

    he says now the problem is if we're all responsible for all this, it's
    hard to get enough allies to work on what really counts, which is
    changing the life experiences of the people, in terms of their outcomes.
    Most leaders of any group would give anything just to end whatever the
    disparities are in education, in health care, and in employment, income,
    and ownership. And I'm sort of amplifying, but I think this is a fair
    representation of what he said.
        So he made the suggestion--he said what we need to do is get
    everybody on the same side, start out, and then see if we can work back
    to--so the logical extension--this was not in there, but the logical
    extension of the argument was if you could get everybody working on the
    same side on what to do about job outcomes, maybe you would come back
    and have a broader consensus on an affirmative action program than you
    think, or at least the people who are against it would then recognize
    their moral responsibility to put something credible in its place.
        I thought that was an interesting argument, when you deal with--if
    you just deal with the three things I mentioned. It doesn't get you out
    of the primary obligation to enforce the laws against discrimination
    adequately, but it was an interesting way to think about it. If you ask
    everybody--for example, if you ask everybody who is on both sides of
    this English-as-a-second-language issue in California to start with the
    disparate educational outcomes and work back, you might get to a
    different place.
        One of the things that always bothers me about all these litmus test
    issues--and I'm not innocent in this, so I'm not casting a stone--is
    that depending on which side of the litmus test you're on, once you
    figure out your crowd's winning, then you go on and worry about
    something else. Then when you figure out--when you realize your side's
    losing, you can't worry about anything else; but you can't have an
    honest conversation, because you're trying too hard to keep from getting
    killed in the next referendum or whatever.
        In terms of the affirmative action referendum, all I can tell you is
    that I made a couple of statements in California in 209, and maybe I
    could have done more, and I think if the thing had gone on 3 more weeks,
    it would have come out differently on 209. I'm glad I was asked to be a
    part of the effort against the repeal in Houston, and it succeeded; it's
    the only one that has. But the real issue is if you left it alone and no
    one ever debated it again, we've had enough experience to know that it
    is insufficient to change the disparate outcomes. So what if we started
    on trying to figure out how we could close the gaps and work back; we
    might find that we had a lot more agreement than we thought.
        Now, in the initial polling--I think this will change a lot, as the
    referendum is debated. And I confess, I have not read exactly what--the
    initial polling in California, on the English, the bilingual education
    initiative, is deeply troubling to defenders of bilingual education
    because the initial polling has 70 percent of Hispanic voters voting for
    the initiative.
        Now, what does that mean? That doesn't necessarily mean that they
    understand the implications of this initiative and they want to vote for
    it. But what it does mean is that Hispanic parents are concerned about
    whether their children stay in the programs for too long, or whether the
    programs are sufficiently effective to let them learn everything else as
    well as they need to learn.
        So instead of getting into the fight, could we at least start with
    dealing with what people's perception of the problem is, and then work
    back to the solution; then if you do that, you've got some alternative
    to put in place if you want to fight the initiative. In other words, you
    don't have to play their game; you don't have to let it be a wedge issue
    if you decide to articulate it in a way that forces everybody else to
    come talk to you about what the real issue is--which is, you want all
    these children whose first language is not English to be able to learn
    everything they need to learn, on time as much as possible, and to be
    English-proficient, if they're going to live in this country, as quickly
    as they can be.
        But there are--depending on what age you come here and what your
    situation is and what your native language is and how difficult it is
    and what the subject is, it is more or less difficult to learn certain
    things in English within certain time periods. In other words, it's a
    complicated issue. But there is a broad perception that the bilingual
    services have become, if you will, institutionalized in a way that carry
    kids with them longer than they should be and may make them too
    dependent on it.
        So why don't we analyze the facts and find out what they are, and
    then try to work back to that, instead of immediately joining the issue;

    [[Page 47]]

    but do it quickly enough so that the people of California have some
    chance of having an honest debate. It isn't just history that people are
    deprived of; very often they are deprived of what the facts are on the
    issues they're debating. So all they can do is go on what they think
    their basic values are and their basic instincts.
        And we get so caught up--and, believe me, I share the frustration
    that Dr. Franklin said about what the
    voters don't know. It's very hard to pierce through the public
    consciousness and to do a sustained public education campaign in the
    absence of some great conflict.
        I'll never forget, 10 days before our congressional debacle in 1994,
    a man I didn't know very well who was a pollster just spontaneously sent
    me this survey he did--or at least I wasn't working with him at the
    time--and I was shocked. He said, ``Here are 10 things that, if all the
    voters knew them, would change the outcome of this congressional
    election, which is about to be terrible for you, if they just knew''--
    maybe there were eight things on the list. But anyway, there were more
    than five things that we had done that absolutely nobody knew about. So
    this is a generic problem in a society as big and complex as ours, being
    bombarded from all edges.
        But I just ask you to think about that. Suppose we did that with
    health care. Suppose we did that with education. For example, on the
    education issue, some people say, well, maybe this 10 percent solution
    that Texas adopted would work on the affirmative action. Well, the
    answer is it might well work in most States for admission to college,
    but it wouldn't do anything on the graduate school front. So what's your
    answer on graduate school?
        There are a lot of these things that I'd just like to see--I'd like
    to see more, instead of just throwing barricades over the wall at one
    another, if we could start with what the problem is and work back, I
    really believe we can make an enormous amount of progress in this
    country, because most Americans who get caught in the middle on these
    referendums, where their values are pulling them one way and you're
    trying to--and the rhetoric is pulling them one way, and you're trying
    to cram information in as quick as you can before election time comes
    and all that kind of stuff. Most Americans really don't like the fact
    that we have disparate outcomes, and most Americans think anybody that's
    working hard and needs a hand up ought to get it, to have a fair chance.
        So I think, to go back to what you said about talking to the Speaker
    on this issue, I think I'm going to try to follow this tack in dealing
    with our friends who disagree with us on so much. Let's see if we can't
    start with that and work back and see how much agreement we can make. I
    think we may do better than people think.
        Thank you. This was great.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:45 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White
    House. The meeting was part of ``One America: The President's Initiative
    on Race.''