THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

---

For Immediate Release

July 8, 1998

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
IN PBS DIALOGUE ON RACE


WETA TV, PBS Studio



2:00 P.M. EDT

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Welcome to an hour of conversation with President Clinton about race in America.

And welcome to you, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: The President's conversation will be with eight Americans -- four NewsHour regulars, essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service, Roger Rosenblatt and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, and regional commentator Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution; plus four others; Roberto Suro of The Washington Post, author of a recent book on Hispanic Americans; Kay James, dean of Regent University's School of Government, Elaine Chao, former head of United Way of America, now at the Heritage Foundation; and Sherman Alexie, novelist, poet, and screenwriter.

Keep in mind, please, that whatever their affiliation and most importantly, their race, each is here as an individual speaking only for him or herself.

Richard Rodriguez, what do you think is the single most important thing the President could do to improve race relations in this country?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I think, Mr. President, I think America is growing more and more complicated and it seems to me that our conversation is not keeping up with that complexity. This year began -- this year of dialogue began with John Hope Franklin, the head of the Race Commission, saying that the unfinished business of America is black and white. But it strikes me that after this year, what we really need to do is to understand how complex this country is, with Samoan rock groups and Filipinos and Pakistani cab drivers. And the racial relationships now in America are so complex and so rich that it seems to me we don't have a language even to keep up with that complexity.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I basically agree with you about that. As a Southerner like Dr. Franklin, I think that there are unique and still unresolved issue between black and white Americans, and there are some conditions in America which disproportionately involve African Americans. Some of them are not old. Today there was just this Journal of American Medical Association story saying that African Americans metabolize nicotine in a different way than other races as far as we know, and therefore, even though blacks smoke fewer cigarettes, they're more likely to get lung cancer -- interesting thing.

But to get back to your main point, I have tried to emphasize that America is becoming a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious society, and therefore it would be more important both to understand the differences and identify the common values that hold us together as a country.

And I often cite, since we're in Northern Virginia where this program is being filmed, I often cite the Fairfax County School District, which is now the most diverse school district in the country, with people from over 100 different racial and ethnic groups with over 100 different languages, actually, in this school district. And I think that's a pattern of where we're going. I've got a friend who is a Southern Baptist minister here, he used to be a minister in Arkansas. He's got a Korean ministry in his church. That's just one tiny example of the kind of things you're going to see more and more of in the country.

MR. LEHRER: Cynthia, is the unfinished business still black and white?

MS. TUCKER: Well, I think that there are, as you just said, Mr. President, some issues that are unique to black Americans and white Americans, and some conditions, especially, that disproportionately affect black Americans, and the most striking is poverty. In fact, I think that what many people think of as racial differences are often class differences. I worry not just about black poverty, the disproportionate amount of black poverty, but also about the growing wealth gap.

There are blacks who are disproportionately poor, and that causes them to resent whites, because they blame whites; but there are also working-class white whose incomes are stagnating or declining and they blame blacks and immigrants. So it seems to me that the wealth gap has at least something to do with continuing racial problems in America.

THE PRESIDENT: There's no doubt about that. And I think that whenever possible if you think that there is a class-related or income-related element in the difficulties we have with race, we ought to have income-based solutions to it.

A lot of things that I've asked Congress to do over the last five and a half years, a lot of things that are in this budget now are designed to address that, with greater incentives for people to invest in inner cities and Native American reservations and other poor areas; tax systems, which would disproportionately benefit working people on the lower income of the scale. I think those things are very important because -- and there is, by the way, some evidence that in the last couple of years, the income inequality has begun to abate some.

But I think it's very important not to confuse the two. I mean, I believe the primary reason for income inequality -- increasing inequality in America is that we have changed the nature of the economy. That is, if you go back to 100 years ago, and you see when we moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy, we also had a big influx of immigrants. There was a huge increase in inequality, not so much because the immigrants, but because the way people made money changed. The whole basis of wealth changed. That's what's happened in this computer-based information economy, and the premium on education these days is so much greater than it's ever been, that there's a lot of stagnant incomes out there from people who have worked hard all of their lives, but aren't part of the modern economy. And I think that we need strategies to identify the people that aren't winning and turn them into winners. And at the very least, turn their children into winners.

MR. LEHRER: Kay James, class or race?

MS. JAMES: You know, it's interesting to me that when we have conversations about race, how quickly it turns to class, and I guess one of my experiences in America is that no matter how middle class you become, if you're still black, you're still discriminated against in many areas. And I guess I would also want to make the point that it's very important for us not to immediately go there, it's not immediately important to go the issues of poverty and class, because race is so important that it bears us spending some time there, I think, to talk about racism in America. Class is a very important discussion, and poverty is a very important discussion, but they don't necessarily immediately go into a discussion of race.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, obviously, I agree with that, or I wouldn't have set up this initiative. I think that the point I wanted to make is to whatever extent you can have an economic approach that embraces people of all races, if it elevates disproportionately -- racial groups that have been disproportionately depressed, you'll help to deal with the race problem.

But there is -- no one could look around the world -- if you forget about America, just look at the rest of the world -- no one could doubt the absence of a deep, inbred, predisposition of people to fear, look down on, separate themselves from, and when possible discriminate against people who are of different racial and ethnic groups than themselves. I mean, this is the primary factor in the world's politics today at the end of the Cold War.

MR. LEHRER: Sherman, does a poor Native American starting out face more hurdles than a poor white American starting out?

MR. ALEXIE: A poor Native American faces more hurdles than a poor anybody.

THE PRESIDENT: Anybody?

MR. ALEXIE: Anybody, in this country, certainly. We're talking about third-world conditions -- fourth-world conditions on Indian Reservations. I didn't have running water until I was seven years old. I still remember when the toilet came. So -- and there are no models of any success in any sort of field for Indians. We don't have any of that, so there's no idea of a role model existing. An Indian has not sat on this kind of panel before. So me being here for the first time is something amazing.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me ask you something. I'd like to start, because I think this will help us to get to the race issue you talked about. Let's just talk about the Native American population. When I was running for President in 1992, I didn't know much about the American Indian condition, except that we had a significant but very small population of Indians in my home state, and that my grandmother was one-quarter Cherokee; that's all I knew. And I spent a lot of time going around to the reservations and to meet with leaders and to learn about the sort of nation-to-nation legal relationship that's supposed to exist between the U.S. government and the Native American tribes.

I concluded that the American Indians had gotten the worst of both worlds -- that they had not been given enough empowerment or responsibility or tools to make the most of their own lives, and the sort of paternalistic relationship the U.S. government had kept them in was pathetic and inadequate. So they literally got the worst of both worlds. They weren't given enough help and they certainly didn't have enough responsibility and power in my view to build the future.

So what do you think the most important thing is for Americans to know about American Indians? And what do you think the most important thing American Indians should be doing for themselves or should ask us to do to change the future?

MR. ALEXIE: I think the primary thing that people need to know about Indians is that our identity is much less cultural now and much more political, that we really do exist as political entities in sovereign political nations. And that's the most important thing for people to understand, is that we are separate politically and economically and should be.

For Indians, themselves, I think we have to recognize the value of education, which is something culturally we have not done. And with the establishment of the American Indian College Fund and the 29 American Indian colleges on reservations and in the communities throughout the country, I think we've begun that process of understanding that education can be just as traditional, just as tribal as a powwow or any other ceremony, that education should become sacred.

MR. LEHRER: Elaine Chao, where do the Asian Americans, what kinds of obstacles do they start out with, compared to white Americans or Native Americans, or black Americans, whatever?

MS. CHAO: I think what exacerbates the relationship between the races is, in fact, the feeling of inequity, that somehow somebody else is getting a better deal through unfair means. And Asian Americans are a much maligned minority. On the one hand, they're sometimes counted as minorities when it's convenient for others to do so, and other times when they skew the figures in a less favorable way, like university admissions, then they're counted as white.

So Asian Americans suffer the brunt of both worlds. But in many ways, Asian Americans are now the victims of being an under-represented minority, which means they are excluded from many of the equal opportunities that are available in this country. And I think this is a very, very serious problem that I hope that your great panel will be able to address.

THE PRESIDENT: Give us an example.

MS. CHAO: Well, there's a single mother by the name of Charlene Lo (sp) in San Francisco, and she's raised two boys. One boy, Patrick, is applying to a school in San Francisco. It is a school system, unified San Francisco school system that has basically implemented a quota system through a consent -- and Patrick has always -- he scored 58 on his testing scores out of 69, was barred admission to the high school of his choice because there were "too many Chinese Americans." They had already fulfilled the Chinese quota. There are different standards in that school system for different students of different color.

If you are white, you have one standard. If you are Asian American you have the toughest standard to meet. And of course, other races have other standards as well. That is a horrible example of preferential treatment and of unfair treatment based on race. And I think something has got to be done about it.

THE PRESIDENT: Let's go back to what Kay said. What do you think the roots of racism are?

MS. JAMES: I think the root of racism, and it's out of vogue and out of style in this country to even use that kind of language, but I believe it, and so, I say it. I believe the root of racism is nothing but a very sinful and a very black and dark heart. I mean, after all, racism is a heart problem, a character problem, an integrity problem.

And that's why I think when we have a conversation about how we overcome race in America, it's important to talk on those issues and on those terms. I think the government and I think you, Mr. President, can do a great deal to end discrimination in America. And that's an important topic to talk about. What can we do to end racism? And I think that's going to happen as relationships are formed in communities, as people come to trust each other, as people come to spend time with one another, get to know one another. And that's when the stereotypes are dispelled. That's when people have the opportunity to set aside their preconceived notions, their prejudice, and they get to know each other as individuals.

THE PRESIDENT: Do you think young people -- and you're a dean of a school of government -- do you think young people are less racially prejudiced than their parents on the whole?

MS. JAMES: Well, that's interesting. I remember when I was a part of the group that integrated the schools in the South and, in particularly, in my hometown of Richmond. And I can remember going into that school and hearing the young people parrot what their parents had said to them. And while the government took the correct and appropriate action of forcing immigration, I have to tell you it was the most segregated integrated environment I'd ever been in.

The good news is that over a period of time, there were relationships that were established. There were individuals that became friends for life out of that. And so I think we break down the barriers of discrimination and then we deal with the human condition and the human heart in terms of stereotyping and prejudice and bigotry.

MR. LEHRER: Roger Rosenblatt, how would you answer the President's question? Where do we get our attitudes about race? Where do they come from?

MR. ROSENBLATT: Well, they come from fear I guess, and they come from ignorance, and they come from a general sense of otherness, which doesn't only apply to us, it applies to everybody perceiving something different and then backing off in some way. For the worst of those who back off, it takes a form of hatred; for the best, just a kind of shy retreat.

But what Kay was saying about integration came back to something you were saying, too, Mr. President -- what can the President do on this major issue, the deep issue. I would love to see the goal of integration be boisterously set again. You and I and others around this table remember -- they were hard, but the best of times in the early '60s when, frankly, people now at each other's throats, were all on the same side -- most people who believed in that side. Since then, Cynthia mentioned blame; that's all we've had is context of blame since -- or theories, or bigotry, or separatist notions.

If the race issue is a microcosm of what the country ought to be, then the solving of racism ought to be the solving of the country. We are one place; one complicated, broiling, difficult place in which a great deal of progress has been made, and that ought to be said, too. But if you could reaffirm the idea, remind us that integration is the goal, I think that would be a huge first step.

THE PRESIDENT: What about what Elaine said, though? Let me give you a little background, although I don't know about the facts of this case. California, I give them a lot of credit -- California is trying to have within the public school system a much higher performing school by, among other things, going to charter schools, which seek to have the benefits of public education with the strengths of private, standard state education. And San Francisco has a number of schools -- this is probably a part of their school choice program -- where they basically create schools, they get out from under the rules and regulations of central administration and they hold the kids to high standards.

But apparently, they've made a decision also that they think they ought to have some diversity within their student body. And so, is it fair for a Chinese student who may be the fifth best Chinese student, but also the fifth best overall student who has to get in a class, to be deprived of the chance to get in the class? And if it's not fair, if this child was unfairly treated, what do you do with the kids who didn't do very well and what school should they go to and how can you guarantee them the same standards?

MR. LEHRER: How would you answer that, Roberto?

MR. SURO: It's seems to be the sort of dilemma that points up the need to go beyond the black-white paradigm that we've worked with for so long. I mean, it's very hard to apply a matrix of a white majority and non-white minorities when you get to a situation as complicated as the San Francisco schools. And we don't have a language even to describe these situations, let alone mechanisms that are defined to work in situations where you've got -- where the lines aren't so clear anymore as to a group that's in a group that's out; where you have mobility of identity and of economic status, and where racism takes a variety of forms.

You know, it's interesting -- we talked a little bit about history and when you talk about race, you often talk about your childhood memories of the South and how it has formed your views of it. My question is how we take that history and adapt it, move it, evolve it, into a very different demographic situation now than the one in which it was past -- and how you use it, how you take your memories of the black-white situation in the South and apply it to a much more complicated nation now.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the short answer is that I try to do now what I tried to do when I was a kid, when I realized what was going on, because I had an unusual background for a lower middle-class white guy in the South because I had grandparents who believed in integration, and my grandfather ran a little store and most of his customers were black. So I had an atypical background. But I was sort of hungering for contact with people who were different from me. And my theory, going back to what Kay said, is that basically if you would ask me, what's the most important thing we could do, I think it is the more people work, and learn, and worship if they have faith, and serve together, the more likely you are to strike the right balance between celebrating our differences instead of being afraid of them and still identifying common values.

Now, you still have -- you have a separate problem for Native Americans, who literally, many of whom still live on reservations. But there has to be a way -- you cannot overcome what you do not know. And if I could just say one other thing. One of the complicating -- believe me, there are lots of hard questions. I don't think -- one of the hard questions is the education question, whether it's affirmative action in college admissions or what Elaine said, for the simple reason that I believe there is an independent value to having young people learn in an environment where they're with people of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And the question is, how can you balance that with our devotion to merit and then not discriminating against people because of their race, in effect, when they would otherwise, on grounds of academic merit, get a certain situation. That's one of the hardest questions we face.

But I still think the more we are together -- I was quite impressed, for example, when our daughter was trying to select a college. And one of the things that she did, she went around and actually got the composition and make-up of every school to which she applied, because she wanted -- and then she actually went there to see whether those people were actually -- (laughter) -- not just admitted but actually really getting -- relating to each other.

But a lot of the young people in her generation that I spend time talking to understand that this is something they need to do. I mean, they figured out that their life is going to be real different from ours and they better figure out how to live together.

MR. LEHRER: Clarence, does that make sense to you?

MR. PAGE: It makes a lot of sense, Jim. We went around the table and I've exhibited great patience by withholding my comments because I wanted to hear. Everybody here is expressing this dream of integration, but we all have gotten to different questions about the pain we want to pay, the pay we want to experience to get there. Elaine wants, I'm sure, equal opportunity in a corporate world and educational world. But how much equal opportunity are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of diversity, the integration dream that Roger is expressing. Let us get back to Richard's question about the language that we speak.

I've heard us go from prejudice to racism, get over to diversity and integration, thinking we're talking about the same thing, but we're not. You know, racism is institutional. We're talking about history here. And that is why, if you want diversity in San Francisco's schools, you want that virtue of having your kids exposed to other kids of different races and backgrounds, then you've got to be willing to say, we've got to put a ceiling on some people. And I've told the same thing to African Americans back in Chicago, with housing. Because we want desegregated housing, but you've got to tell black folks, as well as white folks, hey, we've got enough of you right now. And that's a hard thing to do.

But integration, desegregation does not come by just good wishes. You've got to work at it. You've got to take some mechanical steps to get from here to there. And until we can do that, we can't have an honest dialogue until we're willing to talk about how much are we willing to pay.

MR. LEHRER: Somebody has to get hurt in order for other people to be helped?

MR. PAGE: That's right. There's got to be some pain involved. And everybody talks about -- this is why affirmative action is so tough. And, Mr. President, I have written this, so it's only proper that I say this to you personally -- I feel like one problem with the race dialogue was that I think you were reluctant to deal with the question of affirmative action. It is the most divisive question that we've got along the lines of race in this country right now, besides crime, which is another question for a dialogue. But we need to talk -- and, of course, I agree with you fully, we need to mend it, not end it. We need affirmative action. But how do we define it and how do we deal with those people who feel like they're sacrificing?

And I think the sacrifices have been over-rated and the polls seem to bear me out. Most white folks don't feel that pained by affirmative action or so-called quotas, et cetera. That is a great political tool, and until we deal with it effectively and have a real dialogue about it, it's going to be exploited politically by various people in a positive or negative kind of way. And I guess I'll have to say, how do you feel about that in terms of the kind of tiptoeing around the --

THE PRESIDENT: See, I believe, I frankly -- I believe that the real reason it's a problem -- it's more a problem in education now than in economics because the unemployment rate is so low and because the jobs are opening up, so most gifted people feel that if they're willing to work hard, they can find a job. We don't have the anxiety about affirmative action we used to have when the police department and the fire departments were being integrated and promotions were being given. Every now and then you hear something about that, but most of the controversy now is about education. Why? Because people know education is really important and if parents and children make a decision about where they want to go to school -- in the case of Elaine, a public school -- that they believe is good, or a college, they're afraid if they don't get in where they want to get in, they'll get a substandard education.

I have a different view. The reason I've supported affirmative action, as long as you don't just let people in who are blatantly unqualified to anything, is that I think, number one, test scores and all these so-called objective measures are somewhat ambiguous and they're not perfect measures of people's capacity to grow. But secondly and even more importantly, I think our society has a vested interest in having people from diverse backgrounds.

When I went to college in the "Dark Ages," one of the reasons I applied to Georgetown was they had foreign students there and they had a policy of having a kid from every state there. Maybe I got in because there weren't so many people from Arkansas who applied, for all I know. I think that there are independent educational virtues to a diverse student body, and young people learn different things in different ways. And I don't think objective measurements are perfect. So I don't have a problem with it.

But I think the most important thing is that we have to understand that this is one of the hard questions. And it is best worked out, in my view, by people sitting around a table trying to work out the specifics, like in San Francisco. And when people feel like they have no voice, then they feel robbed. But there will never be a perfect resolution of this.

MR. LEHRER: Richard, do you agree? No perfect resolutions to this?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: No, I do agree. I think generally no perfect solution. I left the university affirmative action -- I was so appalled by it. I considered myself a Hubert Humphrey liberal. When it came time for me to get a position over you because you were white, and because America perceived me to belong to this new brown race, this complete fiction of the Hispanic race -- it does not exist, there's no Hispanic race left or right of Cuba. We -- my father is very light skinned, my mother looks very Indian. There are white Hispanics, there are black Hispanics. But the university didn't care about any of that. I was this new brown race, this new Hispanic race.

At a point in the American political discussion when the only person who was not a minority was people that you came from -- poor whites -- particularly poor white males in this society, who, in the language of affirmative action, is that they are somehow represented in the public society -- like hell they are. Where are the Appalachian white represented? Because there are white men in front of the airplane? And it came to me at a time when I was middle-class, Mexican American, perfectly capable of dealing with the competition for jobs, and the jobs came looking for me because I was their brown man. And I threw the jobs back and them at them. I didn't want those jobs. And if that's the way we are going to discuss race in America, with these bureaucratic understandings of who is a Hispanic, without even knowing what a Hispanic means, we are in real trouble in this country.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me ask you -- let me ask everybody -- first of all, I'm glad you said that, because we're in the business of defining stereotypes tonight, so that's good. I think all of us who have worked hard to get where we are are sort of proud of that. I mean, when I was a young man, I was the only person on my law school faculty that voted against our tenure policy because I never wanted anybody to guarantee me a job. I told them they could tell me to leave tomorrow and I'd go. I mean I really identify with what you -- I'm proud of that.

But suppose you're the president of the university, would you like, other things being equal, to have a faculty that were reasonably racially diverse? And even more importantly, would you like, other things being equal, to have a student body that reflected the America these young people are going to live in once they've graduated? And if you believe that, and you didn't want to infuriate people like you've been infuriated and make them feel like you've felt, how would you go about achieving that?

I think this is tough stuff. I don't pretend that my position is easy or totally defensible. How would you do it?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I think you would start at the bottom of the social ladder. You would start at first grade rather than in graduate school and trying to decide which ones of us get into law school. You would make sure that America had a system of education that saved children in first grade because we lose it there.

MR. ROSENBLATT: I think that's absolutely right. And I think that even though it sounds like a distinction without a difference, goals are better than quotas. And if you know what you want in a particular situation -- be it a workplace or a college class -- then you're not stuck in the exact situation Elaine mentioned in which you're doing something patently unfair. Also, the nice thing about goals is you don't always have to reach them. The idea is to keep your eyes on them and hope that you get the proper and reasonable mix in a group.

THE PRESIDENT: Let's go back to this. I want to ask you to come in because I want you to go in here. (Laughter). What exactly was it did you resent? Did you resent the fact they were going to guarantee you a job whether you were any good or not? Or did you resent the fact that they were looking for Hispanic faculty members?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: I resented two things. I resented the fact I was being rewarded with the exclusion of other people of my ethnic group. In other words, I was a numerical minority at a point in which I was not a cultural minority. And the absence of those people -- because my people were not there, I as the 10th person became their minority. And I resented it for all the political, liberal reasons that I have and that there was something that didn't

play on my soul -- the notion that I was entitled to the shot, and you weren't because I had darker skin, and it didn't play on me.

I was never a primary victim of racial discrimination in this country. I belong to California, but I grew up among Portuguese and Irish kids -- never, never a primary victim. In the name of the primary victims, I was advanced to graduate school.

MR. SURO: I've had some of the same experience, not quite as explicitly, but there are times when I have consciously not wanted to be regarded as a Hispanic journalist and define that as a central part of my definition or qualification. And even in doing reportage, I hope that I can deal with anybody. When I went overseas looking for -- I very consciously didn't go to Latin America.

It draws this distinction that Richard raised, I think, between primary victims of discrimination and people who have different kinds of history. And we're dealing with, now, how do you determine whether -- affirmative action was started as a historical remedy. Lyndon Johnson's speech here was about the foot race, was a reflection on history. And the question is, what do you do when you have people who don't have the same history, but belong to a minority group. Among Latinos now, you have people who have experienced real discrimination and have a real history of discrimination in places like South Texas, and you have people who arrived yesterday. Yet, our system of looking at them puts them all together in one group.

MR. LEHRER: Cynthia, the differences -- in other words, dealing with people differently.

MS. TUCKER: Well, this may be one of those places where, in fact, the black experience in America is distinct. I did grow up suffering discriminations -- real, in-your-face. I grew up in Southern Alabama under Jim Crow. And now, I am not offended by affirmative action programs at all. I happen to think, a, that that does not mean that the person is unqualified, but I also remember only too well when people that I knew were denied jobs because they were black. And so that is one of those places where the black experience is different, perhaps, from any other experience in this country with the possible exception of Native Americans.

MS. CHAO: Clearly, the history of this nation, as it went through the racial stages, has been very tragic; no one would dispute that. And it's clear, also, that we don't live in a perfect world in which there is equal treatment for everyone. But I think it's absolutely incumbent upon all of us to remember that this is the ideal, that equal opportunity must exist for everyone in this country, regardless of color or race or creed or whatever.

And when we talk about diversity, what a wonderful notion it is. Of course, most of us support it. I, for one, definitely support it. But the issue is, how does one create this diversity and who gets to sacrifice, as Clarence mentioned, and who gets to suffer?

As far as diversity is implemented right now, it's basically implemented through a numerical quota, goals, whatever they're called. Basically, the touchstone word is we want it to be representative of America, which means that it's 13 percent African American, 8 percent Latino Americans, 3 percent Asian Americans, and perhaps -- a certain percentage of Native Americans, and the rest white. When we don't evaluate things, and when we don't offer opportunity based on merit, how do we decide otherwise, and who becomes over-represented minorities? Who becomes under-represented minorities? And that just snowballs -- differential treatment, preferential treatment for one group versus another. I think we should hew to the overall core value of this country, the equal opportunity of rights for all. And there should be same standards for everyone.

Q Well, how do you define merit? Does there seem to be an equal opportunity to get into Berkeley and UCLA? But how do you define merit -- is it SATs or ACTs or other criteria?

MS. CHAO: No, I think clearly, merit.

MR. LEHRER: Let me ask Sherman, where do Native Americans fit into the affirmative action debate?

MR. ALEXIE: You know, I get this question asked a lot. I always say, if we were taking the jobs, and we were taking the spots in college, then why aren't we having jobs and why aren't we in college. (Laughter.) I mean, people worrying about medical school -- people worrying about blacks getting into medical school or law school, and I walk through the hospital and the brown people are mopping. So I think all this debate about affirmative action and about quotas is delusionary and anecdotal. There's never been a black person who's been denied a job who's won a lawsuit against a company for not hiring him because they were black, and yet were determining national policy based on anecdotal lawsuits.

Q It's not anecdotal.

MR. ALEXIE: On one example, Texas, we changed the whole entire admissions system at universities in Texas based on one person losing a spot because of their job and it was one lawsuit that decided that, that turned the tide. And so if you want to talk about affirmative action, that's sort of a legal affirmative action, where a white person has more power in the courts, bringing a lawsuit against the university, than a black person would have bringing a suit against the university for not getting in.

Q Jim, I have to answer that, if I could, because it's not anecdotal evidence. There is a great database of differential standards that do exist for different racial groups. That is common practice in the admissions of university today all across America. That is common practice for many of our educational facilities, institutions, at the lower levels as well. There is definitely no question that it's just not anecdotal. At the Center for Equal Opportunity and many other think tanks have compiled a substantial database that do show this is part of the racial policies of America today.

I do want to say one thing about --

THE PRESIDENT: Do you want to answer Clarence?

Q I was going to say -- I think education -- Richard has a good point -- education is important. We ought not to talk about equal opportunity at this late stage, but how do we get back to K and 12? Our schools are falling apart. How do we fix our schools? How do we slash crime in our neighborhoods? How do we create economic opportunity for everyone? I mean, that's a real goal for our country.

THE PRESIDENT: What are you going to say about this?

MS. JAMES: I was just going to say, Mr. President, I think the operative phrase was, in your question, "all things being equal," wouldn't we like a diverse community, particularly in the academic arena. And I was looking around the table and thinking, gee whiz, I bet I'm the only one here at the table that has to make admissions decisions.

THE PRESIDENT: You've got to make these decisions. (Laughter.)

MS. JAMES: And you're right, all things being equal, wouldn't we like to have a diverse community. And I think that's where most people in America are. Most people in America, of course, acknowledge and have high esteem for diversity and recognize that their lives are much more enriched in that environment. But what they have a problem with is feeling like there are set-asides or preferential treatment for some class of people that exist for them only because of their race.

As an example, I guess I run across so many middle class African American students who don't deserve to have preferential treatment based solely on their race. They've had every opportunity, they've been given every chance in America, and so it makes no sense to give them preference for purely race-based -- that maybe we should look more at some of the programs that exist in America that give treatment and preference to people out of poverty, that give preference and treatment for a variety of reasons. But to purely have race-based solutions in America today doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me go back to something Clarence said at the beginning. You pointed out we've talked about prejudice, discrimination, then we started talking about diversity and all that. I think you need -- if I could go back to the very first thing that all of you started talking about -- we need a vocabulary that embraces America's future, and we need a vocabulary that embraces America's present and past on this race issue. And we need to know when we're making distinctions. And then we need to fess up to the fact at least when it comes to Native Americans that if we don't do something fairly dramatic, the future is going to be like the past for too many people.

For example, I think most Americans, whether they're conservatives or liberals or Republicans or Democrats, would support, for example, my budget proposal to give more resources to the EEOC to get rid of the backlog. Because all of the surveys show that 85 percent of the American people, or 90 percent or something, believe that actual discrimination against an individual person in the workplace is wrong based on race.

Now, the real problem is that affirmative action, I think now, since there are a lot of middle-class blacks, middle-class Hispanics, that it's almost -- people are not so sure in the workplace and the school place whether it is furthering the goal of getting rid of the lingering effects of discrimination, which is Cynthia's experience, and mine as a Southerner -- ours -- you know, or whether it is now being used to create a more diverse environment which people feel is a good thing, but not a good thing if it is sticking it to this hard-working Chinese mother in San Francisco and her children, who is raising her kids under adverse circumstances.

And I guess one of the things that bothers me is that a lot -- we need to make these kinds of discussions practical and institution or community-based, because, I'll say again, I think that we want our children to grow up to learn to live in a world that they will in fact live in. Therefore, if you forget about discrimination for a minute -- you can't ever do that, but let's just assume there is no discrimination -- America has a wonderful system of higher education. There are hundreds of schools I think you can get a world-class undergraduate education in. And I believe that, therefore, it's worth having some policy to try to diversify the student body.

It's interesting to see what Texas did when the Hopwood decision came down. They said, well, we don't want to have a totally segregated set of colleges and universities in Texas, so we'll just say the top 10 percent of every high school can automatically go to any Texas institution of higher education. That looks like a merit-based decision, but, of course, it's not any more merit-based than the other decision because there are segregated high schools and there are differences in test scores and all that.

So we need to kind of -- we need 10 hours to discuss this and I'd like to listen to you. But the only thing I want to point out is, the American people have got to decide, do they want a housing project in Chicago -- in this case, only the people from Chicago have to decide -- that's integrated. If so, the people who don't get in there, do they have reasonable alternatives? That's one realistic thing. If a child doesn't get into a good school that he or she wants to get in to, do they have an equivalent alternative? If they don't, you maybe have hurt them for life. Is it worth it to get rid of discrimination?

Or in the case -- look at Kay's problem. She runs a government department that makes these admission decisions in a school that has a certain religious and value-based approach to life. So if a child gets deprived of going into there, even if the kid goes to Harvard, it may not be cultural environment --

MS. JAMES: They couldn't get near the education they get at Regent. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: But let's assume it's equivalent. The child may lose something non-educational. So all these things are -- I just want the American people to start talking about this in a way that's real here.

MR. RODRIGUEZ: Mr. President, one interesting -- I think we need to do as Americans is also wonder whether these terms we're using mean anything anymore. The fact is, we have been falling in love with each other for over 200 years in this country -- from Pocahantas to Thomas Jefferson's children. The fact is we care -- in America. The fact is that increasingly now I'm meeting young people who don't want to define themselves as belonging to a race.

And the two largest Hispanic groups in this country -- mulatto Puerto Ricans, mestizo Mexicans -- are entering in this country and injecting a kind of complexity into the whole way we understand race as a singular thing, and beginning to teach us that, in fact, we will belong in some future to many races.

When I said that there is not a vocabulary for this -- I also in San Francisco, I know this young woman who is -- I asked her what her racial identity was, and she said her father is African American and her mother is Mexican. And I said well, what are you? And she said I'm a "Blaxican." (Laughter). She said she's a "Blaxican" because there wasn't a word for it yet.

You asked that question of why young people -- I think American young people are going to be redefining the very stolid, old Crayolas that we have been calling Americans.

THE PRESIDENT: That's good.

MR. LEHRER: Cynthia and then to Roger -- on this question that the President raised, the new dialogue. And to Richard, what are the new words we use? What do we talk about in this new world?

MS. TUCKER: Well, I think one of the things we had to do is to simply acknowledge how much the world has changed. Richard is right. I have a Mexican brother-in-law, and my sister and he are about to have a baby. And she, too, I suppose will be "Blaxican" or whatever. (Laughter).

And so I think, first of all, more Americans need a stronger sense of history. I think there has to be an acknowledgment that African Americans and Native Americans especially have suffered burdens others have not. But I also think that all of us, including African Americans, need to acknowledge how much the world has changed. I think one of the reasons we hear so many interesting things from California, Elaine, is because California is cutting edge. Some days I look at California, and I think that's the wave of the future, and I think, oh goodness, no. But some days -- Chelsea chose to go to school there -- maybe California's doing okay. But I do think that the struggle among the various ethnic groups in California are a cautionary tale, quite frankly.

MR. ROSENBLATT: Now, when you think about how much the world has changed -- I don't want to flip to a Pollyanna-ish mode for the moment, but one way it's changed is that a lot of things have gotten better. Not only have they gotten more interesting, not only have they gotten more complicated -- all of which is true -- but you grew up in a world in which hatred was a useable instrument; where people couldn't go to same schools, you couldn't vote, you couldn't do this and you couldn't do that. And not only that, it was an instrument that was in some dark and deeply stupid way approved of by the silence of the majority. Now, as you say, that majority does not approve anymore.

We talk about racism in a country -- I'm not sure if we're talking about anything like the same racism with which you two grew up in and of which we were apprised. It isn't that I'll say that everything is getting better or good as fast as we could want it, but I sometimes wonder how important affirmative action as an issue for debate really is because I think, eventually, it's going to be phased out anyway. It's going to get there, and that, to go back to Richard's irrefutable point, to get down to the youngest people and the best education for them and all social programs into that would seem to be part of the new vocabulary you called for.

Q Roberto, how would you define the new vocabulary?

MR. SURO: We've talked a lot about how trying to describe the population and how it's changed. Roger touches on an important point. We have to have a new vocabulary to describe our attitudeS. Discrimination is a different thing in this country than it was 20 years ago.

THE PRESIDENT: In what way?

MR. SURO: Well, I would say if you take the African American example, I'd say a young black male who lives in an inner city experiences being black differently than a middle-aged, middle-class female who lives in the suburb. It's a different experience of what it means to be a black in this country. And when you're talking about remedies of discrimination, when discrimination isn't simply based that all black people be excluded from certain institutions, as was the case earlier in our lifetime, you need more subtle remedies, more complicated remedies, and more complicated vocabularies to describe attitudes. More people are classified according to multiple markers, not just skin color but a variety of different things establish status in this country, and so the remedies have to address each of those different things, I believe.

Q I could beg to differ. I'm a middle-class black who lives in the suburbs, and in my suburb right now there are numerous complaints about black youths being stopped by the cops unfairly, just as they're stopped by the cops in the inner-city. And, Jim, you know, after the L.A. riots in '92, we had this discussion on this program, and I talked then about my three year old son that everybody thought was quite cute -- he looks just like me, naturally -- how else could they --

MR. LEHRER: I don't remember that coming up. (Laughter.)

Q But I was saying then, where will he be 10 years from now? Well, my son is now nine, and now I have to say four years from now, because he's going to be a teenager. And when -- and today the most feared creature on urban streets today is a young black male. And that is the future I am looking toward with my son. I want a better life for my son like everybody else does, and the new vocabulary of race to me is very much like the old vocabulary, except it's got some new terms, like the gilded ghetto. The gilded ghetto is what middle-class blacks find themselves in out in the suburbs now because the white folks who used to be their neighbors have moved further out --

MR. LEHRER: What do you tell your son? What do you tell your son about why this is happening?

Q We treat race talk like sex talk around our house, Jim. We don't bring it up unless our son brings up a question, and then we answer the question he brings up. But we live, fortunately, in a desegregated, integrated neighborhood. Our son is very well aware of racial difference, has been since he was four years old, as all children are. But he doesn't see racial value; he doesn't see one race being better than another -- I hope. I mean, certainly, by associations he has, he doesn't reflect that. I hope that is our future.

But I have to say -- and Richard and I always have this discussion and the vision he paints of the future is so beautiful, I hate to throw cold water on it. But I've got to say, in 1998, we are still a segregated society. Blacks and whites still live mostly separate lives. We're better off than we were 30 years ago, thank God, but we are still -- outside of the workplace, outside of the workplace we still live largely separate lives. Why in the workplace have we got this association? Because of affirmative action. That's a big reason.

Q In 1998, we are still unable to say that, in effect, we are part of each other's bloodstream. This is the heritage of racism, where we were never allowed to marry each other. And now we deny it to ourselves. We say that that doesn't make any difference. Well, I get stopped by police in San Francisco when I go jogging early before dawn. The last time I got stopped was by two black policemen, and I think to myself, this is a very complicated society we live in. (Laughter.)

Q Who said blacks couldn't be prejudiced?

THE PRESIDENT: I agree with that. You know, I'm very sympathetic with what you say. And I want it to be as you say. And I agreed that we have all kinds of overlapping stereotypes that we haven't even talked about. One of the things that came up after Los Angeles riots, you know, the attitudes of the African Americans to the Korean grocers and the Arab grocers and the Hispanic customers and all of that -- it's a lot more complicated than it used to be.

But as a factual matter, if you just look at the prison population -- you wanted to bring that up -- if you look at all the unemployment rate among young, single African American males without an education, if you look at the physical isolation of people in these inner-city neighborhoods -- we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years; there are still New York City neighborhoods where the unemployment rate is 15 percent -- if you look at these things, if I could just come back to sort of what I think is practical here, I think it is imperative that we somehow develop a bipartisan consensus in this country that we will do those things which we know will stop another generation of these kids from getting in that kind of trouble.

My best model now, I guess, is what they're trying to do in Chicago in the school system and what they've done in Boston with the juvenile justice system. In Boston, they went for two years without one kid under 18 being killed with a gun. Unheard of in a city that size. And if you look at what they did in Houston, we need to at least adopt those strategies that will invest money in keeping these kids out of trouble in the first place and try to keep them out of jail and give them the chance to have a good life. And if there's disproportionate manifestation of race, then so be it. Then we ought to have an affirmative action program, if you will, that invests in those kids' futures and gives them a chance to stay out of trouble.

To me, it's the kids that are being lost altogether and the disproportionate presence of racial minorities among those kids that is still the most disturbing thing in the world. Because if you get these kids up there, 18 or 19, heck, they'll figure out things. Our kids will figure out things we weren't smart enough to figure out. That's how society goes on. That's what progress is all about. But I think we have to recognize that's still a big race problem in this country, especially for African Americans.

MR. LEHRER: Clarence raised the point, Sherman, about race talk in his family and the President -- Mr. President, you have said you had trouble getting people to talk bluntly and honestly about race.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. We're all too polite about it.

MR. LEHRER: How do you get people to talk about race?

MR. ALEXIE: Just walk into a room, I think. People are always talking about race. It's always coded language. They call it "class," or they use coded language. Nobody actually says, well, that's a black person, let's talk about being black, but it always ends up coming up. Usually what they'll do to me is come up and tell me they're Cherokee. (Laughter.) So that's usually what it amounts to.

Nobody talks about Indians, so I don't have to worry about that. We grew up not being talked about at all, and we're still not talked about. You know, I walked by the locker room out there, and there is a Washington Redskins bumper sticker on a locker. And I said, nobody cares about Indians.

MR. LEHRER: But do Indians talk about race?

MR. ALEXIE: Oh, yeah, we're actually probably a lot more conservative and racist than any other single group of people. We're much more reactionary. It's funny, politically, we give our money to Democrats, but we vote for Republicans. (Laughter.)

MR. LEHRER: I'm going to leave that one alone. (Laughter.)

How do you get honest talk? Do you think there is honest talk about race?

MS. JAMES: All you have to do is get people to start talking out or their own personal experience and it gets there pretty quickly. And everyone has a story to tell. I've noticed around the table even today that as we talk about race in America and the distinctions of being African American and that it's really a black-white issue, I guarantee if we were bringing an Irish American in here, they would tell you they've experienced discrimination in this country. And if you get a -- you know, you talk to people in the Jewish community, and they'll say, well, our experience in America has been this. And so when you get people to talk out of their own experience, it gets there fairly quickly.

Q I think the bottom line is, I think there has to be not allocation of programs based on preferential treatment -- but that there is equal opportunity. And going back to Clarence's issue about merit --

MR. LEHRER: We're talking about talking bluntly about race.

Q Right. I think this is part of it. And I think the President wanted me to answer Clarence's comments, Clarence's question about merit.

MR. LEHRER: Okay, but we have to -- I have to interrupt you all now to say, thank you, Mr. President, and thanks to all the rest of --

THE PRESIDENT: We're just getting warmed up.

MR. LEHRER: I know, I know, I know.

Q It's got to be the same standards for everybody, however merit is defined.

MR. LEHRER: Okay. But from Washington this has been a conversation with President Clinton about race. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night. And as you see, may the conversation continue.

---

To comment on this service,
send feedback to the Web Development Team.