[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 32 (Monday, August 11, 1997)]
[Pages 1184-1188]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Interview With Tavis Smiley of Black Entertainment Television

August 4, 1997

    Mr. Smiley. Mr. President, thanks for joining us. I'm glad you could 
take some time to talk to us today.
    The President. Glad to do it.

Balanced Budget Act of 1997

    Mr. Smiley. Thank you. Let me start by asking you whether or not--
let me rephrase that. I know I'm preaching to the choir when I tell you 
that African-Americans still lag far behind white Americans in every 
single leading economic indicator category. As you well know, some of 
your African-American critics have accused you, so to speak, of talking 
the talk but not walking the walk when it comes to your budget 
priorities. I'm wondering specifically what's in this budget that you're 
set to sign tomorrow, I suspect, specifically for African-American 
families that will help them shrink that economic gap.
    The President. Well, there are several things. Let's look at a few 
of them.
    First of all, this budget has $24 billion in it for health insurance 
for families, for children, for families of modest means--
disproportionately minority families. We're talking about people here 
who are working for a living but don't make much money, don't get health 
insurance for their children at work, but aren't poor enough to be on 
Medicaid. And it's the biggest expansion of health care for needy people 
since Medicaid passed in 1965--the single, biggest one.
    Second, the bill has a $500-per-child tax credit that goes even to 
working families that get the earned-income tax credit, that is, that 
make modest incomes. It may come to $30,000 a year, which the vast 
majority of African-American families have children in the home, police 
officers, nurses, firefighters, folks like that, they'll get $500 a year 
per child.
    Third, this bill has the biggest increase in spending for education 
from Head Start through college since 1965, in over 30 years, and the 
biggest increase in help for people to go to college since the GI bill 
passed 50 years ago, the biggest increase in Pell grants in over 20 
years--and that's going to really help--college tax credits, all kinds 
of other financial provisions to help people to go to college.
    Fourth, the bill remedies everything I promised to fix in the 
welfare bill. It restores benefits to legal immigrants who are hurt 
through no fault of their own. It keeps children who are no longer 
classified as disabled eligible for Medicaid. It expands food stamp 
benefits to single men who are looking for work. It provides $3 billion 
to the cities, to help the cities put people who are on welfare to work.
    And finally, the bill has a huge, broad array of economic incentives 
for people who invest in the inner cities. It triples the number of

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empowerment zones. It more than doubles the funds for community 
development banks to loan money to people who start business in the 
inner cities. It provides tax incentives and other investments to clean 
up 14,000 so-called brownfield sites in urban areas that are otherwise 
attractive for development but have environmental problems.
    So it's a stunning budget. It's been at least 30 years since a 
budget this good for working Americans, lower income Americans, and 
minority Americans has passed.

Welfare Reform

    Mr. Smiley. My time with you is limited, and there is so much I want 
to talk to you about, but let me follow up very quickly if I can. Since 
you mentioned welfare, I suspect tomorrow around here at the White 
House, there will be handshakes and smiles tomorrow as the Republicans 
and Democrats come together to watch you sign this bill. But I'm 
wondering what specifically you're going to do to follow up on what the 
Republicans have already threatened to do; that is to say, they want to, 
on Wednesday, I suspect, come after you in terms of gutting the welfare 
provisions that you insisted be a part of this bill. They specifically 
do not want to pay minimum wage to welfare workers who you want to move 
from welfare to work. How are you going to deal with what their next 
strike is going to be? And they've already indicated what it is.
    The President. Well, I think some of them are upset because of the 
stories which indicate that we got about a hundred percent of what we 
were looking for out of this budget. But they got what they wanted. They 
got a capital gains and the changes in the estate tax and things of that 
kind.
    I believe that everybody who works ought to get the minimum wage. 
And I'm going to hang tough, and unless they can get enough votes to 
override a veto, then the people that go to work are going to get the 
minimum wage. I don't think there's a problem with that.
    Now, to be fair, they say that the Governors are saying that some 
employers, even community nonprofits, which you might consider liberal 
employers, are reluctant to hire people off welfare who may be hard to 
place and may have--take time to train, if they also have to pay all the 
accompanying costs of employment like the unemployment tax and the 
Social Security tax and all of these other taxes. And they say they're 
looking for help on that. Well, I expect we'll have some dialog about 
that, but I simply don't think that they ought to be able to take the 
minimum wage away from working people. I just don't.

President's Advisory Board on Race

    Mr. Smiley. You've said, and you've, of course, undertaken--put 
together a commission to undertake getting this country to have a 
conversation about race, the issue that you've called America's constant 
curse. In the first public meeting of your race commission, a small 
dispute erupted in that the commission Chairman, Dr. John Hope Franklin, 
and commissioner Angela Oh, a Korean-American commissioner from Los 
Angeles, had a dispute about what the focus, what the mission, the work 
of the commission ought to be. Dr. Franklin believes that the focus and 
the mission ought to be around the black-white conflict, which he sees 
as the nucleus for every other race problem this country has endured and 
continues to endure. Angela Oh, commissioner Oh suggests that the work 
of the commission really ought to be about multiracialism and 
multiculturalism.
    As the leader, the President who put this commission together, what 
kind of leadership are you going to provide? How are you going to get 
them on the right track? If the commission can't have a clear-stated 
mandate, how do we talk about it as a country?
    The President. My sense is that the division was not as great as it 
appeared. First, I agree with John Hope Franklin that if you don't 
understand the black-white issue, you can never understand how race 
works in America. If you don't understand the history and if you don't 
know what the facts are now, you can never understand the rest. So I 
think--and I think that's really the only point he was making, and I 
think that's important. I think we have to deal with our unfinished 
business, if you will.
    There are some other issues. If you don't understand that Mexican-
Americans first came to this country, if you will, by annexation because 
of the war we had with Mexico,

[[Page 1186]]

it's hard to understand the unique history of the United States with its 
Mexican-American population. But there is something special about the 
whole legacy of slavery and all of that, and we have to understand that. 
So I agree with that.
    On the other hand, I also believe that one of the most important 
things this commission can do when there is no riot in the cities, when 
there is no real social dislocation, when unemployment is coming down 
and incomes are finally going up again, and we seem to be making some 
progress on crime and other issues, I think that it's time that we say, 
``Gosh, we're going to be in this new century in only 3 years; within 5 
years California will have no majority race; within 30 to 40 years, the 
United States will have no majority race. What does that mean? What do 
we want America to look like in 35 years? How are we going to get along? 
How are we going to avoid these problems that have so bedeviled other 
countries when they didn't have a majority race, these tribal fights in 
Africa or the religious-based conflicts of the ethnic groups in Bosnia? 
Or what's going on in the Middle East; how are we going to get around 
that?''
    I think that if we think about it now and we sort of make it a part 
of our project as we start the new century and we kind of empower our 
young people especially to talk about it and work through it, my guess 
is that when we do become the first truly multiethnic, multiracial 
democracy in the world, it will turn out to be a huge advantage for us, 
a huge advantage, because of the global society we're living in, as long 
as we say we respect, we even celebrate our differences, but we're still 
one America. I mean, that's the trick. And I think that ought to be the 
future focus of this.

Affirmative Action

    Mr. Smiley. You mentioned California. As you well know, you gave a 
race relations speech at UC-San Diego. And as you probably know, 200 
African-Americans have applied to med school in San Diego; none were 
accepted. In Texas, at the University of Texas, admissions of African-
American students are down 26 percent. It's an ugly picture, and I can 
make it uglier if I had more time, but I won't do that. But the question 
I do want to ask is----
    The President. They shouldn't have passed that 209.
    Mr. Smiley. I totally agree with you on that. The question I want to 
ask is, there is a bill that's pending in the Texas Legislature that 
suggests that if scores--test scores are going to be the sole criteria 
for all students being admitted to college, why not include athletes in 
that regard? I'm wondering how you feel about that. I actually think it 
may help the Razorbacks, because the kids that can't go to school in 
Texas may go up to Arkansas. [Laughter]
    The President. What a low blow. [Laughter]
    Mr. Smiley. Well, no, I just--it may help the program. But what do 
you think about including athletes, though, seriously?
    The President.  I think if you did it, people would bring back 
affirmative action. I mean, that would make the point. I couldn't help 
thinking, when they explicitly excluded athletes, that you could have, 
let's say an Hispanic young athlete who was a C student out of high 
school get in the best university in the State, and another young 
Hispanic who was an A-minus student in high school that wore Coke-bottle 
glasses and was an academic, who couldn't get in. I mean, the whole 
thing is bizarre. It's all mixed up.
    Mr. Smiley. You think it ought to include athletes?
    The President.  Well, I think universities ought to have a right to 
develop their athletic programs, but I think that it is ridiculous to 
say that a great university needs to have different academic standards 
for athletics so you can have diversified athletics but doesn't need a 
diversified student body when it comes to race and ethnicity. I think 
it's just an absurd argument. It is completely absurd, I think.
    So I would say you've got to--you can pick one. You can have it one 
way or the other, but you can't have it both ways. That's kind of what 
I--it's like these people who put this together saying, ``Well, if these 
folks can entertain us, we'll let them come to school. But if they're 
not entertaining to us, never mind that they're going to be a big part 
of our

[[Page 1187]]

future; they can't come to school.'' I think it's a mistake.
    Of course, I believe--I don't think there was ever a constitutional 
problem with affirmative action in college admissions and professional 
school admissions, as long as no one who was unqualified--that is, 
someone that clearly couldn't meet high standards and couldn't do the 
work--was admitted, because there are measures other than test scores 
and grades which are pretty valid indicators of whether people can do 
good work in high-quality institutions. And you want the students 
themselves to have valid experiences when they're going through school.
    And I personally believe, since we're going to live in a 
multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious society, if I were running a 
private university, I'd certainly want one to be like that. And I think 
it's a cruel irony that in some of these States they seem to be moving 
toward putting it all on the private universities to have a diverse 
student body, at least in the graduate level.
    Now, Texas is trying to overcome this now with their so-called 10 
percent solution--you may know about that--saying that anybody who 
graduates in the top 10 percent of any high school can go to any State 
university. The problem with that is it doesn't deal with the 
professional schools, number one, and number two, it might work for 
Texas because of the racial distribution of people throughout the State 
in high schools. It wouldn't necessarily work in other States. I think--
you know, my own view is we need an effective constitutional affirmative 
action program.

Cocaine Sentencing Guidelines

    Mr. Smiley. Let me get to a couple of other quick areas before my 
time runs out here. You recently recommended--your administration 
recommended that the disparity between the crack and cocaine--powder 
cocaine sentencing be reduced from 100 to 1 to 10 to 1. I'm wondering, 
why not 1 to 1? And apparently, the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, 
was quite upset that they were not consulted before that decision was 
announced. Your thoughts?
    The President.  On the second issue, I don't know about that, and I 
was surprised because I had just had a very long meeting

with the Black Caucus in which we'd gone over a huge number of issues. And 
we had given them good followup on everything, and I was personally stunned 
to understand that they had not been consulted on this. And I found that 
hard to believe. What I think happened was someone involved in this in one 
of those departments leaked the decision before it was ripe to be made and 
kind of cut off all the consultations before it got in the newspaper. 
That's not an excuse. We should have done better.

    Now, on the merits, let me say, we came to 10 to 1 for two reasons. 
One is all the senior people at the Justice Department and in the office 
of drug control believed that there had to be some difference because of 
the difference in violent crime associated with powder and crack. None 
of them believe that the 100 to 1 was justifiable. They all thought it 
was totally unconscionable. And they all thought it ought to be reduced 
dramatically. So they recommended 10 to 1.
    Secondly, prison sentences are longer than ever now. And it was--the 
conclusion was reached that if they recommended anything lower, what 
Congress would do in reaction would be to try to raise the minimums for 
everybody and leave everyone worse off. And so I think we need to take a 
hard look at that Federal prison population anyway to see whether there 
are too many nonviolent offenders in there. And I think this should be 
viewed for just what it is, a major step forward. Let's see. Hopefully, 
we'll be permitted to implement it, and if we are, we'll see if it 
works.

Slavery and Reparations

    Mr. Smiley. Your challenge to America to have a conversation about 
race has certainly spun off a number of conversations, including 
conversations about slavery and reparations. And I'm wondering whether 
or not, since you've had more time to reflect, you think an apology to 
African-Americans is warranted. And more specifically, what do you think 
of at least having a commission to study the feasibility of reparations, 
regardless to what your opinion is?
    The President. Well, I don't believe that--what I think I should do 
now is let this advisory board do its work and see what

[[Page 1188]]

they have to say about the apology issue and all the related issues. The 
one thing I did not want to do is to define the work of this commission, 
which I hope will be quite broad, as I explained, in terms of any 
particular issue early on. I just don't think I should do that. So I'm 
going to let them have their hearings. I'm going to go to some of the 
hearings with them. We're going to go around the country. I'm going to 
keep announcing special initiatives like our big scholarship fund to 
move teachers into the inner cities and pay for their college if they go 
back to inner cities and teach. I'm going to keep doing those things and 
just see how it comes out. And if the board wants to recommend that--and 
Dr. Franklin, I think, is in about as good a position to judge that as 
anybody in America--I'll wait and see what they say.

Dialog on Race

    Mr. Smiley. Two last quick things and I'll let you go. I'm wondering 
whether or not you think that an apology to African-Americans might 
reenergize this debate. I'm talking to some African-Americans over the 
last few days who think that since your speech in San Diego, the 
conversation has kind of gotten quiet. You don't really hear a lot about 
this race discussion. Don't you think that apology might reenergize this 
debate?
    The President. Well, I don't know. I keep trying to do something 
about every 2 weeks to juice it up. Today I talked to--I gave a speech 
to the Urban League, in terms of what was in the budget for African-
Americans and minorities, just like I did with you a few moments ago. 
And I previously gave a speech saying that we were going to offer 
scholarships to people and pay their way through college if they'd go 
teach in distressed areas. I'll keep trying to do that. But I think 
there will be a lot of interest in it. It's hard to keep the media's 
interest all the time unless there's conflict. You know that. [Laughter]
    Mr. Smiley. Absolutely.
    The President. But I'll keep trying to find innovative ways to do 
it.

President's Future Visit to Africa

    Mr. Smiley. Let me ask you finally--and I respect you and appreciate 
the time you've spent with us today--let me ask you whether or not 
there's any truth to the rumors, and I underscore the word rumors, that 
you may, in fact, be heading to the continent of Africa at some point in 
the near future? Does the President care to confirm that, or do you want 
to disabuse me of that notion?
    The President. No, no. I want to go to Africa next year. And I hope 
it won't be too long into next year. We're looking at the calendar now, 
and I'll just--and we'll have to pick. I've got--I owe a number of 
visits. I'm trying to work out a lot of different conflicts next year, 
but I very much want to go to Africa next year. And I intend to go, and 
if something doesn't happen, I will go.
    Mr. Smiley. Mr. President, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
    The President. Thank you.

Note: The interview began at 5:28 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White 
House.