Bill Clinton: “Well, interestingly enough, first of all, my Cabinet--they've all been doing things. When I did my townhall meeting in…”

“Well, interestingly enough, first of all, my Cabinet--they've all been doing things. When I did my townhall meeting in Akron, my Cabinet that week, they were all doing different things around America. And Andrew Cuomo has, in particular, been very active in HUD in the last few months largely, I'm sad to say, because there is still a lot of housing discrimination in this country, a lot of old-fashioned discrimination in this country in housing. And he's done a lot on it. We're trying to do more and more visible things. But let me say, we're trying to achieve--let me tell you what we're trying to achieve with the race initiative. First, we're trying to make sure that there is an honest dialog in every community--community-based approach to this-- about how each community is going to deal with whatever their racial composition is and whatever the challenges of working together are. And the evidence is clear that the answer is to get people to work together, learn together, and serve together in the community. The second thing we're trying to do is to catalog promising practices of really exhilarating things that are going on around this country now, put them on our homepage, and make them widely available. And we now have a lot of them at our website, and we have huge numbers of people tapping into that and then getting in touch with others around the country to learn what they can do in their own community. The third thing we're trying to do is to recruit leaders. I sent a letter to 25,000 student leaders and asked them to get involved in the race initiative, and we've gotten literally hundreds of replies from young people telling us exactly what they're doing. Some of them are fascinating, including a young white football player, star football player, who involved athletes in an interracial initiative in the Washington, DC, area. And the fourth thing we're trying to do is to identify specific governmental policies that will help to not only address race problems that disproportionately affect minorities but will do it in a way that will bring people together, like the initiative we had to give scholarships to people who go teach in inner-city schools. So we'll keep trying to turn it up. But I think it's been quite a productive thing, and I think the American people are actually quite interested in it. You know, people know--they pick up the paper every day. They see that there are tribal warfares in Africa. They know that we're still having trouble resettling the Croatians and the Muslims and the Serbs in Bosnia. They know that the Irish just had another round of killings, right on the verge of breaking through the Irish peace process. They know that there's still trouble in the Middle East. And they know there's still trouble in America. In the Washington papers, we've been living through the efforts of a Muslim school that wants to expand trying to find a location in a community that feels comfortable accepting it. And a Muslim symbol was defaced on the Capitol during the Christmas season, and Jewish leaders came out and condemned it-- interesting. So we're trying to work through this stuff. I think being explicit and open about it is helping us to get it right. In some ways the most important thing--if we can prove that along with all of our economic strength and our native political system that we can figure out how to be bound together and still celebrate our differences, but say what unites us is more important, that may be the most important meal ticket to the 21st century we have. Asian Economies”