    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [April 6, 1999]
    [Pages 503-505]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Proposed Hate Crimes Prevention Legislation
    April 6, 1999

        Thank you very much. Senator Leahy,
    Senator Specter, Congressmen Cardin and Delahunt,
    Secretary Riley, Acting Assistant Attorney
    General Bill Lann Lee; to our DC Police Chief,
    Charles Ramsey, and the other
    distinguished guests in the audience who are in support, broadened
    support, of the ``Hate Crimes Prevention Act.''
        Let me begin by thanking Attorney General Ketterer and Bishop Jane Holmes Dixon for being here. I want you to know that the attorney
    general got up at 3 o'clock this morning to
    drive down here from Maine. And of course, he got up that early so he
    could stay lawfully within the speed limit--[laughter]--coming down
    here. And he set a good example, and he was wide awake and very
    persuasive on the law.
        Bishop, we thank you for your very
    moving remarks. Remind me never to speak behind you again. [Laughter] It
    was--so much of what the bishop said about the setting of this is many
    things that I have thought. I think you know she and I and those of us
    who grew up in the segregated South are perhaps more sensitive to all
    these various hate crimes issues, because we grew up in a culture that
    was dominated for too long by people who thought they only counted if
    they had somebody to look down on, that they could only lift themselves
    up if they were pushing someone else down, that their whole definition
    of a positive life required a negative definition of another group of
    people. That's really what this is all about.
        And if you--as she said, if you look at the whole history of this
    violence we see in Kosovo, what we went through in Bosnia, this, the
    fifth anniversary of the awful Rwandan genocide, that I regret so much
    the world was not organized enough to move quickly enough to deal with
    it before hundreds of thousands of lives were lost--with the oppression
    of women in Afghanistan, with the lingering bitterness in the Middle
    East--you see all these things. When you strip it all away, down deep
    inside there is this idea that you cannot organize personal life or
    social life unless some group feels better about itself only when they
    are oppressing someone else. Or people at least believe that they ought
    to have the right to do violence against someone else solely because of
    who they are, not because of what they do. Now at the bottom, that's
    what this is all about.
        And I have said repeatedly since I have been President that one of
    the things I have sought to do in our country is to bridge all these
    divides and to get all of our people not to agree with one another, not
    to even like one another all the time--goodness knows, we can't like
    everybody all the time--but to recognize that our common humanity is
    more important than these categorical differences and also to recognize
    that over the long run, America will not be able to be a force for good
    abroad unless we are good at home.
        If you think about the brave men and women who are working with our
    NATO Allies today in Kosovo and you remember that this basically all
    started 12 years ago when Mr. Milosevic
    decided to rally the support of his ethnic Serbian group by turning
    their hatred against the Kosovar Albanians and later the Bosnian Muslims
    and the Croatian Catholics and the others, it is very important that we
    deal with these challenges here at home, even as we continue to support
    the work of our people in uniform in the Balkans.
        I want to say again, the United States would never choose force as
    anything other than a last option. And Mr. Milosevic could end it now by withdrawing his military police
    and paramilitary forces, by accepting the deployment of an international
    security force to protect not only the Kosovar Albanians, most but not
    all of whom are Muslims, but also the Serbian minority in Kosovo--
    everybody--we're not for anybody's hate crimes--and by making it
    possible

    [[Page 504]]

    for all the refugees to return and to move toward a political framework
    based on the accords reached in France.
        Now, as I said, we can't continue to organize ourselves to try to
    stand against these things around the world--which I firmly hope we
    will. I applaud the women in America who have done so much to bring to
    the world's attention the terrible treatment of women in Afghanistan,
    for example. And we have worked hard in Africa to work with other
    African forces to build an Africa Crisis Response Initiative so that
    something like the Rwanda genocide cannot happen again. We have to keep
    working on these things.
        But first of all, we must always be working on ourselves. That's
    really what this is about. Because we know this is more the work of the
    bishop than the President, but we know that inside each of us there are
    vulnerabilities to dehumanizing other people simply by putting them in a
    category that permits us to dismiss them or that permits us to put them
    in a category so that on a bad day, when we're feeling especially bad
    about something we've done, we can say, ``Well, thank God I'm not
    them.'' And it is a short step from that--a short, short step from
    that--to licensing or even participating in acts of violence.
        As I said, it may be--I was standing here looking at Secretary
    Riley and Bishop Dixon; I was thinking about all the years that Secretary
    Riley and I worked together. It may be that the three of us are more
    sensitive to this because we grew up in the segregated South, but it is
    very easy to get into a social system where you always get to think a
    little better of yourself because you've always got someone that you can
    dehumanize. And that's really what this whole issue with gays is today
    in America.
        We're not talking about everybody agreeing with everybody else on
    every political issue. We're talking about whether people have a right,
    if they show up and work hard and obey the law and are good citizens, to
    pursue their lives and dignity without--free of fear, without fear of
    being abused.
        And this should not be a partisan issue. I want to thank Senator
    Specter for showing up here today. This ought
    not to be anything other than a basic, simple statement of American
    principle.
        But I would like to say one other thing, just as a practical matter.
    Isn't it interesting to you that we are on the eve of a new century and
    a new millennium, which will be largely characterized by globalization,
    the explosion of technology, especially information, and the integration
    of people, and the number one security threat to that is the persistence
    of old, even primitive, hatreds? Don't you think that's interesting?
        So what I worry about all the time is whether terrorists can get on
    the Internet and figure out how to make chemical and biological weapons
    to pursue agendas against people of different ethnic or religious
    groups. And so it's very humbling, I think, for those of us who think we
    have brought the modern world and prosperity and rationality to all of
    human affairs, to see what is going on in the Balkans and to see these
    terrible examples of violence here in our own country. It's very
    humbling. We should remember that each of us almost wakes up every day
    with the scales of light and darkness in our own hearts, and we've got
    to keep them in proper balance. And we have to be, in the United States,
    absolutely resolute about this.
        That's why I think this hate crimes issue is so important. That's
    why I convened the first White House Conference on Hate Crimes a year
    and a half ago. Since then, I would like to say, we have substantially
    increased the number of FBI agents working on these crimes. We have
    successfully prosecuted a number of serious cases. We have formed local
    hate crimes working groups in U.S. Attorneys' offices around the
    country.
        But this is a significant problem. In 1997, the last year for which
    we have statistics, over 8,000 hate crime incidents were reported in the
    United States. That's almost one an hour--almost one an hour.
        So, what are we going to do about it? I would like to mention--we've
    already talked about the law and I'll say more about that in a minute,
    but first of all, let me mention three other things. I've asked the
    Justice Department and the Education Department to include in their
    annual report card on school safety crucial information on hate crimes
    among young people both at and away from schools, not only to warn but
    to educate.
        Secondly, I'm asking the Department of Education to collect
    important data for the first time on hate crimes and bias on college
    campuses. Another cruel irony, isn't it--college, the place

    [[Page 505]]

    where we're supposed to have the most freedom, the place where we're
    supposed to be the most rational, the place where we're supposed to
    think the highest thoughts with the greatest amount of space. We have
    significant hate crime problems there, and we need to shine the light on
    that.
        Third--I'm very pleased about this--we are going to have a public/
    private partnership to help reach middle school students to discuss this
    whole issue with them and talk about tolerance, why it is a moral, as
    well as a practical imperative. And the partnership includes AT&T, Court
    TV--good for them--[laughter]--the National Middle School Association,
    the Anti-Defamation League, Cable in the Classrooms, as well as the
    Departments of Education and Justice. I would like to thank them all,
    because we have to not only punish bad things when they happen, the
    larger mission is to change the mind, the heart, and the habits of our
    people when they're young to keep bad things from happening.
        Finally, let me join the others--the attorney general and the bishop--in
    saying, Congress should pass this law this year. The Federal laws
    already punish some crimes committed against people on the basis of race
    or religion or national origin, but as the attorney general made so
    clear, not all crimes committed for that purpose. This would strengthen
    and expand the ability of the Justice Department by removing needless
    jurisdictional requirements for existing crimes and giving Federal
    prosecutors the ability to prosecute hate crimes committed because of
    sexual orientation, gender, or disability, along with race and religion.
        Now, again I say, when we get exercised about these things, in
    particular, when someone dies in a horrible incident in America or when
    we see slaughter or ethnic cleansing abroad, we should remember that we
    defeat these things by teaching and by practicing a different way of
    life and by reacting vigorously when they occur within our own midst.
    That is what this is about. And we should remember, whenever we,
    ourselves, commit even a small slip, where we dehumanize or demonize
    someone else who is different from us, that every society must teach,
    practice, and react, if you want to make the most of the world toward
    which we are moving.
        Our diversity is a godsend for us and the world of the 21st century.
    But it is also the potential for the old, haunting demons that are hard
    to root out of the human spirit. The ``Hate Crimes Prevention Act''
    would be important, substantively and symbolically, to send a message to
    ourselves and to the world that we are going into the 21st century
    determined to preach and to practice what is right.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:51 a.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to Andrew Ketterer, Maine
    attorney general; Rt. Rev. Jane Holmes Dixon, Suffragan Bishop of the
    Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC, who introduced the President; and
    President Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
    (Serbia and Montenegro).