[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 39 (Monday, September 28, 1998)]
[Pages 1834-1838]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the President's Advisory Board on Race

September 18, 1998

    Thank you so much. Dr. Franklin, the Advisory Board, to the Members 
of the Congress who are here: Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, 
Congressman Amo Houghton, Congressman Jay Dickey, Congressman Ed Pastor, 
Congressman Tom Sawyer, and Congressman John Lewis, whose life could be 
a whole chapter of this report. We thank you for coming. We thank Mayor 
Archer, Mayor Webb, Mayor Bush, Mayor Flores, Governor Thomas of the 
Gila River Tribe, and other distinguished Americans who are here today--
business, religious, community leaders.
    I thank the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, Eric 
Holder, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Housing and Urban 
Development, the Secretary of Transportation, SBA Administrator Alvarez, 
Acting Assistant AG Bill Lann Lee--I hope I won't have to say that 
``acting'' forever--[laughter]--our Deputy SBA Administrator Fred 
Hochberg. Thank you all for being here.
    I'm especially gratified by the presence of a large number of 
Cabinet members, Members of Congress, and local leaders here today. I 
thank the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Janet Yellen, for 
being here. I'll have more to say about that in a moment. Thank you, 
Rosa Parks, for coming.
    I want to say a special word of thanks to all the people who made 
this board possible: to John Hope Franklin for his wise and patient, but 
insistent, leadership; Reverend Suzan Johnson Cook; Angela Oh; Bob 
Thomas; Linda Chavez-Thompson, who was with us in the White House just a 
moment ago but has what I called an excused absence--[laughter]--my 
long-time friends and colleagues, the former Governors of Mississippi 
and New Jersey, Bill Winter and Tom Kean. I thank Laura Harris, who has 
been a wonderful consultant for us on Native American issues. My good 
friend Chris Edley, thank you for what you have done. I thank Judy

[[Page 1835]]

Winston and the staff of the President's Initiative on Race for the 
remarkable job they have done, and I'd like to thank the people in the 
White House who worked with them, but especially Minyon Moore, Maria 
Echaveste, and before her, Sylvia Mathews. Thank you all so much for 
what you have done.
    Now, some time ago, John Hope Franklin said, ``The task of trying to 
reshape our society to bring about a climate of racial healing is so 
enormous, it strains the imagination.'' Well, again I'd say, I'd like to 
thank John Hope Franklin, the rest of this board, and the staff for 
straining their imaginations and finding the energy to take on this 
tremendous task of focusing the Nation's attention on building one 
America for the new century.
    Often, this has meant enduring criticism, some of it perhaps 
justified, some of it I have questioned, because, as Dr. Franklin said, 
no one could solve this problem in 15 months since it has not been 
resolved in all of human history to anyone's complete satisfaction. But 
they have taken on the endeavor. And it has been a magnificent journey. 
They have crossed this country, the length and breadth of America. They 
have seen all different kinds of people.
    For them, it has been a journey across our land, a journey across 
our culture, a journey across our history, and a journey, I imagine, for 
all of them across their own personal lives and experiences. They've 
gone from Silicon Valley to Oxford, Mississippi, to the Fairfax County 
school district across the river here, where there are students from 
more than 100 different national and ethnic groups, 150 different 
national and ethnic groups.
    We knew that no effort could solve all the challenges before us, but 
I thank this board because they have helped America to take important 
steps forward. I also thank Americans--unbelievable numbers of 
Americans--from all across the country who have participated, all those 
who wanted to tell their stories and all those who were willing to 
listen.
    They have brought us closer to our one America in the 21st century. 
Out in the country, they found a nation full of people with common 
sense, good will, a great hunger to move beyond division to community, 
to move from the absence of discrimination to the presence of 
opportunity to the spirit of genuine reconciliation. This board has 
raised the consciousness and quickened the conscience of America. They 
have moved us closer to our ideal, but we have more to do.
    I want to say, I am especially proud of the work that every member 
of our administration has tried to do. When I look out here at the 
Secretary of Labor, the Attorney General, Secretary Cuomo, Secretary 
Riley, Secretary Slater, Aida Alvarez, Janet Yellen, all these people 
who work for me, they know that we care about this, and they have really 
worked hard to do you proud, and I thank them, too. But we have more to 
do.
    You know, for more than two centuries we have been committed to the 
ideas of freedom and equality, but much of our history has been defined 
by our struggle to overcome our steadfast denial of those ideals and, 
instead, start to live by them. It has been a hard road. It is rooted 
deeply in our own history, as John Hope Franklin said. Indeed, I believe 
it is rooted in the deeper impulses that trace their beginnings back to 
the dawn of human society: the mistrust, the fear, the hatred of those 
who are the other, those who are them, not us.
    In the area of race, it has been a special burden because you can 
see people who are different from you. And with Native Americans, it's 
been a special burden because we took land that was once theirs. With 
African-Americans, it's been a special burden because we all have to 
confront the accumulated weight of history that comes from one people 
enslaving another.
    But with every area of racial tension, if you strip it all away, you 
can go back to the dawn of time, when people first began to live in 
societies and learned they were supposed to mistrust and fear and hate 
people who were not in their crowd. We see it manifest around the world 
in our time. We've seen it between the Catholics and Protestants in 
Northern Ireland, going on for hundreds of years--thank God, I hope, 
about to end. We've seen it with the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. 
We've seen it with the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East; with the 
Serbs, the Croats, the Muslims in Bosnia; today, the

[[Page 1836]]

Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo. In America we see it manifest, still, 
in racial differences but also in religious and political differences, 
as well.
    In whatever manifestation, I think we have to begin with one clear 
understanding: When we approach others with discrimination and distrust, 
when we demean them from the beginning, when we believe our power can 
only come from their subjugation, their weakness, or their destruction, 
as human beings and as citizens, we pay a terrible price.
    Our Founders were pretty smart people. They knew we weren't perfect, 
but we needed to strive for perfect ideals. And they built us a country 
based on a Constitution that was literally made for reconciliation, for 
the honorable and principled resolution of differences, rooted in a 
simple proposition that God created us all equal.
    Now, because they created a freedom of religion, they couldn't write 
in the Constitution, therefore the first and most important commandment 
is this, to love your neighbor as yourself. But what they did write in 
that Constitution is, you are commanded to respect and treat your 
neighbor as yourself. That's still a pretty good guidepost for what we 
have to do.
    On the eve of a new millennium, our country is more free and equal 
than ever before, but we have to keep going until everybody has a chance 
to live out his or her dreams according to his or her capacities and 
efforts; until everyone has a chance at a good job, a decent house on a 
safe street, health care and education for their children; and most of 
all, the chance to be treated with dignity and respect and to reap the 
full rewards of citizenship; to relish what is different about 
themselves but respect what is different about others.
    We know that gaps still exist in all these areas between the races, 
and we must work to bridge them. We must bridge the opportunity gaps. We 
must build an America where discrimination is something you have to look 
in the history books to find. We have to do a lot of things to achieve 
that. Let me just try to say what my thoughts are, kind of following up 
on what Dr. Franklin said.
    The first thing we have to do is keep the conversation going. A real 
gap in perceptions still exists among the American people. Some believe 
that this is no longer really an issue, or it's just something that 
occurs when something terribly outrageous happened, as did in Jasper, 
Texas. But it's not just that. It's an issue in the back of someone's 
mind every time a police officer of one race pulls over somebody else of 
another race. It's an issue in the back of everyone's mind every time a 
perfectly normal child is put in a remedial class because of the color 
of his or her skin or the income of their parents.
    We should not underestimate the power of dialog and conversation to 
melt away misunderstanding and to change the human heart. I am proud to 
say today that the National Conference for Community and Justice, led by 
Sandy Cloud, who is here, will soon convene a group of religious leaders 
to continue this work of fostering racial reconciliation. And I thank 
Sandy for taking on this important job.
    The second thing we have to do, again to echo what Dr. Franklin 
said, is to make sure we have the facts about race in America. A lot of 
us have strong opinions on the subject; not all of us have the facts to 
back them up. As a matter of fact, the more I stay in Washington, the 
more I realize that sometimes the very ability to hold strong opinions 
depends upon being able to be deaf to the facts. [Laughter] That's why I 
am very, very pleased that the Council of Economic Advisers, under the 
leadership of Janet Yellen and Rebecca Blank, has produced a book, 
``Changing America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being by Race 
and Hispanic Origin.'' And I commend it to all of you. It's also not too 
big. [Laughter] You can digest it with some level of comfort. But it's a 
good piece of work. This book will help us to understand how far we have 
come and what we still need to do in our efforts to extend opportunity 
to all our people.
    Finally, we here in Washington have to act. We have put forward in 
this administration and within our balanced budget a comprehensive 
agenda to expand opportunity for all Americans in economic development, 
education, health care, housing, crime, credit, and civil rights 
enforcement. Again, I thank the Cabinet for their leadership on these 
fronts.

[[Page 1837]]

    Just today, Small Business Administrator Aida Alvarez launched two 
major initiatives to streamline the application process for loans 
guaranteed by the SBA for less than $150,000, to make this credit 
available on more flexible terms. The size and kind of financing many 
minority- and women-owned businesses so desperately need, as well as 
many other people in inner-city and rural areas where the unemployment 
rate is still high. Through these efforts, we estimate more than one 
billion dollars in loans will be available to help businesses expand and 
create new jobs. We have to make this opportunity available for more 
Americans.
    I also would like to say I am still hoping that in this budget fight 
in the next few weeks, we can pass the economic opportunity agenda put 
forward by Secretary Cuomo and the Vice President to provide more 
community development banks, more job-creating initiatives in the inner 
cities and the isolated rural areas where the economic recovery has not 
yet hit.
    Second--[applause]--thank you. Every place we went, from north to 
south to east to west, all the people with whom we talked recognized 
that in the future education will be even more central to equality than 
it has been in the past. We have to do a great deal to set high 
standards and increase accountability, to eliminate the gaps and 
resources and achievement between the races, to give our children the 
opportunity to attend schools where diversity will help to prepare them 
for the world in which they will live. We know too many schools are not 
as good as they should be. We know too many students still are caught in 
a web of low expectations, low standards, poor teaching, crowded 
classrooms.
    The budget that I have sent to Congress proposes new education 
opportunity zones to reward poor school districts that follow Chicago's 
lead and introduce sweeping reforms, to close down failing schools, 
promote public school choice, eliminate social promotion but make sure 
students get the summer school and after-school help they need. Today, 
the summer school in Chicago--the summer school--is the sixth biggest 
school district in the United States, and over 40,000 kids are getting 
three square meals a day there. So it's fine to say no more social 
promotion, if you give children the chance to learn and grow and do to 
the best of their ability. [Applause] Thank you.
    I am also committed to providing 35,000 new scholarships to young 
people who will agree to become certified teachers and then teach in our 
neediest areas.
    Finally, I think it is very important to fund our initiative to 
provide 100,000 teachers to lower the average class size to 18 in the 
early grades. It is clear from all the research that children who come 
from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are most likely to have 
permanent learning gains when small classes are provided so they can get 
individualized instruction in the early grades. And I think it is very 
important.
    Today the House rejected that idea and instead passed a block grant 
proposal that would eliminate accountability, reject the idea of 
national responsibility for helping communities to raise standards, 
improve teaching, or bring the benefits of technology to our students. I 
also believe we have to pass this proposal to connect every classroom 
and library to the Internet by the year 2000. Otherwise, the poor kids 
will be left further behind.
    Now, I think we should be doing more in education, not less. 
Governor Kean said to me today, he said, ``I like this proposal to build 
or repair 5,000 schools. The problem is it's way too small. You should 
be doing more.'' So that voice coming from a distinguished Republican 
former Governor, I hope will echo loudly on Capitol Hill today. 
[Laughter]
    We have a lot to do here. We have a lot to do in the country. We've 
got to keep the connection between what we do here and what we do in the 
country, and that is a lot of what this board has recommended. So even 
though the work of the board is over, they have given us a continuing 
mission.
    I will say again: If you look at the life of Rosa Parks, if you read 
the book that John Lewis has just produced about his life, if you 
consider the sacrifice of two people who--one just came to visit me--
Vaclav Havel, the President of the Czech Republic, and one will be with 
us in a few days, Nelson Mandela, if you look at all this, you see that

[[Page 1838]]

a people's greatness only comes when everybody has a chance to be great. 
And it comes from, yes, opportunity. It comes from, yes, learning. It 
comes from, yes, the absence of discrimination. But it also has to come 
from the presence of reconciliation, from a turning away from the 
madness that life only matters if there is someone we can demean, 
destroy, or put down. That is the eternal lesson of America.
    We are now given a future of incomparable, kaleidoscopic possibility 
and diversity. And somehow we have to implant in the soul of every child 
that age-old seed of learning so that the future can be ours.
    Thank you all. God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 3:40 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive 
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Dennis W. Archer 
of Detroit, MI; Mayor Wellinton Webb of Denver, CO; Mayor Gordon Bush of 
East St. Louis, IL; Mayor Elizabeth G. Flores of Laredo, TX; Gov. Mary 
Thomas of the Gila River Indian Community; President's Advisory Board on 
Race Chairman John Hope Franklin, members Suzan D. Johnson Cook, Angela 
E. Oh, Robert Thomas, Linda Chavez-Thompson, former Gov. William F. 
Winter of Minnesota, and former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, 
consultants Laura Harris and Christopher Edley, and Executive Director 
Judith A. Winston. These remarks were not received in time for 
publication in the appropriate issue.