[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 14 (Monday, April 12, 1999)]
[Pages 587-590]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Proposed ``Hate Crimes Prevention Act''

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

[[Page 588]]

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 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

[[Page 589]]

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 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


[[Page 590]]

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).