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Remarks in a roundtable discussion on race in Akron - Pres Bill Clinton participates in roundtable discussion - Panel Discussion

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents - December 8, 1997

December 3, 1997

[McHughson Chambers, an engineering major at the University of Akron, stated that he was biracial and described his encounters with discrimination.]

The President. Our second student, Jonathan Morgan. Jonathan, what do you think about what he said? Do you think there is still discrimination here at this school or in this community or in the country? And do you think that most people want to live in an integrated society?

[Mr. Morgan responded that there were still a lot of prejudiced people, particularly in the older generations.]

The President. Maybe we need a panel on ageism instead of racism. [Laughter]

Mr. Morgan. I apologize. [Laughter]

The President. That makes it worse. Don't do that. [Laughter]

[Mr. Morgan stated that he believed that his own generation had worked out their prejudices.]

The President. Do you think it's because of personal experiences, do you think it's because you've had more direct personal experience with people from different age groups? Or do you think it's because you grew up in a different time where the climate, the legal and the political and the social climate, was different?

Mr. Morgan. I think it was because I grew up in a different time. We grew up watching television. "The Cosby Show" was my favorite show. [Laughter]

The President. So, therefore, if you worked at a bank and a black person came in with a check you wouldn't necessarily think it ought to be held because you saw Bill Cosby, and he was a good role model? [Laughter] No, this is important. No, no, this is important.

Mr. Morgan. Yes, I don't think I would give him a hard time. But at the same time, I have my own prejudices, whereas if I'm walking downtown on a street and I see a black man walking towards me that's not dressed as well, I might be a little bit scared. So, I mean, at the same time I have those prejudices.

The President. Do you think that's because of television crime shows, or because of your personal experience?

Mr. Morgan. It would have nothing to do with my personal experience. Just from the media, television shows, and things that I have heard.

The President. Christina Ibarra, what do you think about that? Do you believe that attitudes are better among young people? Do you think that there is still discrimination today? Is it worse for African-Americans than it is for other minority groups; is it different? What do you think?

[Student Christina Ibarra agreed that older people were more prejudiced but said that young people raised in prejudiced environments changed after they interacted with a more diverse group of people at the university.]

The President. So do you believe - let me ask you this - do you believe that having an integrated educational environment is the primary reason that young people have better attitudes, more open attitudes than older people - because they have been able to go to school with people of different races?

Ms. Ibarra. I feel that that benefits them, but I feel it's all by choice as well. Older people, obviously, interact with other minorities in everyday life as well. It's just a matter of choice whether you're going to love and to accept - whether you're going to allow yourself to accept these people into your lives or whether you're not. I feel it's all choice.

The President. Let me ask you just one other question. Then I want to go on to - back to our moderator who's here to talk about the next group of folks. There's a big difference, even in college campuses, between the racial composition of the student body and the daily lives of the students, at least in a lot of places. That is, there are a lot of places where the student body is integrated but social life is largely segregated.

Is that always a bad thing? What about that, what about that here, and what do you think about that? Our institutions of worship are largely segregated on Sunday. Is that a bad thing, or not? Is it a good thing? What should be our - in other words, one of the things that I want to try to get America to think about is, how do we define success here? I don't personally think it's a bad thing that there is - that people in many ways like to be with other people of their own racial and ethnic group any more than their own religious group. But on the other hand, it could become a very bad thing if it goes too far, as we've seen in other countries. So how do you know whether the environment is working for you and for other people? How much integration is enough? How much - what kind of segregation is acceptable if it's voluntary? How do you deal with all that? Have you ever thought about it in that way?

Go ahead.

[At this point, the discussion continued, and moderator Dave Liebarth introduced three authors who were the next participants in the discussion.]

The President. I'd like to just start very briefly by giving the authors a chance to comment on how what they've heard from these students today meshes with what they heard when they were preparing their recent books.

And David, maybe we ought to start with you.

[David K. Shipler, a former reporter for the New York Times and author of "A Country of Strangers: Black and White in America," stated that discrimination had become more subtle and gave several examples.]

The President. Let me just briefly - first of all, thank you very much. The reason that I wanted to do this, and a lot of these things, is that I believe there are in any given community literally millions of instances like this where we're not ever fully aware of the motivations behind what we do or where other people will perceive there may be a racial motivation where there isn't one, which is also just as bad because you have the same net bottom-line result, which is the drifting apart of people. And I don't think there is any legal policy answer to this. I think that this is something we've really got to work our way through.

Jonathan, I was really proud of you for saying that if you were walking and spotted Bill Cosby - and all of your classmates - you were walking down the street alone at night and you saw a black man coming at you and you were better dressed than he was, you might be scared, because that's a pretty gutsy thing for you to admit, but that's the kind of stuff we've got to get out on the table. We need to get this out.

But just parenthetically, David, I had a group of African-American journalists in to see me a couple of months ago. Every journalist, all of them with college degrees, all of them quite successful - every single man in the crowd had been stopped by a police officer for no apparent reason, every one of them, 100 percent of them - I asked them. So these are things we have to get out there and discuss.

Abigail. She has a rosier view, and I hope she's got the guts to say it out here now, [Laughter] Come on.

[Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who coauthored "America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible" with her husband, Steven, the Winthrop professor of history at Harvard, stated that she disliked racial preferences or racial classifications and said that African-American progress was here to stay and gave examples. She concluded by quoting Coretta Scott King that Martin Luther King's dream of equality had become "deeply imbedded in the fabric of America."]

The President. Thank you. Let me just say, I believe that it's a lot better. I grew up in the segregated South, so I have personal experience of how it's changed, since I'm one of those older people Jonathan talked about. [Laughter] I've actually gotten kind of used to it now.

But to me, that makes this effort all the more important because what I want the American people to do is to have confidence. We know now we can make our economy work. We know now we can have the crime rate go down. We know now we can actually reduce the number of people on welfare and have more people at work. We know things that we didn't know just a few years ago, and we do know we can make progress on this whole complex of issues.

But I think it's also important to point out that there is a lot of residue there, like what McHughson told, the little bank story, and that progress should give us energy for the work ahead, not put us into denial about it. That's the only thing that I want to make sure we don't do.

Go ahead. What would you like to say about this?

[Beverly Daniel Tatum, a psychologist and professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, and author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, and Other Conversations About Race," stated that she teaches a course on the psychology of racism, trying to establish an honest discussion on race, and described the role fear plays in hampering that dialog.]

The President. Abigail.

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