Bill Clinton: “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…”

“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. Saying that African-American progress was here to stay, she gave examples and concluded by quoting Coretta Scott King that Martin Luther King's dream of equality had become deeply embedded in the fabric of America.]”