Bill Clinton: “I think two things in my long-ago past. First of all, with regard to women, my mother was widowed when I was born, and…”

“I think two things in my long-ago past. First of all, with regard to women, my mother was widowed when I was born, and she was off studying to be a nurse. My grandparents raised me until I was 4. My grandmother worked, as well as my grandfather; my grandmother was a nurse. So I had always been around women who had to work to make a contribution to their family's welfare. And so I think from early childhood I always was particularly sensitive to any kind of discrimination against women or just denial of opportunity. And I was always sort of rooting for them because of my mother and my grandmother. And on the race thing, I think it was because of my grandfather and the fact that when I was a child he had a little grocery store in a predominantly black area of this little town we lived in. Most of the customers were black. And most of what I learned about people and human nature and treating everybody the same and also discrimination, I learned as a little boy just listening and watching and observing and being taught. So, in a funny way, most southerners were at a--most white southerners were at a disadvantage in dealing with the civil rights revolution because they were raised with more explicit racial prejudice. But some of us were actually at an advantage because we had more human contact with African-Americans before others did, and if we were lucky enough to have parents or grandparents that taught us differently, I think it made a difference. So I think those two things, you know, and just in my family--we always had sympathy for the underdog, too. We never believed it was right to keep anybody down. And we were all raised, all of us, never to build ourselves up because there was somebody else we could look down on. And I think that's--if you think about it, if you generalize that, really that psychological problem is at the bottom of a lot of this racial and ethnic hatred around the world. A lot of these groups themselves are deprived of opportunity. They've had economic adversity, had all kinds of diversity, and a lot of them, frankly, are taught as groups that what gives meaning to their lives is that they're not a member of this other group; at least they've got somebody to look down on. And I just thank the Lord nearly every day that I was--it didn't have anything to do with me--I was lucky enough to have grandparents and a mother, a family situation where I was taught differently. Mrs. Cohen. Well, we're lucky that we have a President who feels that way.”