Bill Clinton: “Let me go back to something Clarence said at the beginning. You pointed out--we talked about prejudice, discrimination…”

“Let me go back to something Clarence said at the beginning. You pointed out--we 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 schoolplace 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 the 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 into, do they have an equivalent alternative? If they don't, you maybe have hurt them for life. Is it worth it to get--the discrimination? Or in the case--look at Kay's problem. She runs a government department, 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 the cultural environment---- Ms. James. They couldn't get near the education they get at Regent. [Laughter]”