Race in America: New Approaches to Bridging the Divide

Transcript

M. Armacost: Good morning, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this national issues forum on race in America. Some of you were able to join us last evening for a wonderful dinner and concert by Rachel Barton. Now we turn to the issues.

This forum was conceived by Robert Katzman. At the time he was serving as acting director of our government studies program while Tom Mann was on sabbatical leave. Happily, Joyce Ladner and Chris Foreman have brought it to fruition today.

In the course of the morning we'll have two panels. One moderated by Gwen Ifill, NBC News; the other by Juan Williams, a well-known commentator. Then we'll have some remarks at the close from Ben Johnson who is the assistant to President Clinton on race issues and director of his Initiative for One America.

First, it's my great honor to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, the Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton. As you all know, Congresswoman Norton has been elected five times to the House of Representatives. She's been a tireless advocate on behalf of the citizens of the District during her time in the Congress and before. She's a prolific legislator. She's been a genuine leader in the Congress as chairperson of the Congressional Women's Caucus, a member of the executive committee of the Democratic Study Group, and a leader in many of the caucuses on the Hill. She was a graduate of Antioch College. She holds a Masters degree and a law degree from Yale University. She was the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during President Carter's administration. And she's been a civic leader who's accomplishments have been honored by countless groups around the country. One mark of the extent of that recognition has been the fact that more than 60 universities have accorded her honorary degrees. I guess we could say that Congresswoman Norton has been getting educated by degrees. [Laughter] I don't know of anybody with more than 60.

It's a great honor to have her as the lead speaker this morning and please join me in welcoming her to our platform. [Applause]

E. Holmes Norton: Thank you very much, it's a great pleasure to have the opportunity to think about race. [Laughter] I spent a little of my time doing that. [Laughter] In point of fact, I spend too much of my time thinking too superficially about race so the invitation to speak here this morning did for me what commencement speeches do for me. That is to say, you dare not take them lightly because you figure at least somebody in the audience may be taking it seriously.

Let me begin with an apology, I was able to come only on the condition that I'm able to leave as soon as I finish speaking. It's impolite to eat and run, and it's more impolite to talk and run but in Southeast Washington this morning the ribbon is being cut on something called the Walter E. Washington Estates. It's part of an extraordinary renaissance in Southeast Washington where there are 13 different housing developments in Ward 8 where as few as two or three years ago people thought it would be only a wasteland forever. These single-family homes are named after Washington's first mayor, who will be in attendance, and one of the features of this opening is a $5,000 home credit which I got for the District in the '97 tax bill, which has had an extraordinary effect in keeping and bringing taxpayers to the District. So, I want to be there to celebrate this event with the city.

Brookings deserves credit for being apparently undeterred by the reality that race in America is the most examined issue in American life. But that's all right, we haven't gotten it right yet so let's keep going. Otherwise, race will finally achieve the lethal potential we have always denied to our very own original sin. Race has always had the potential to bring the nation down. In each century of our existence as a nation, race has threatened to destroy us like no other issue has. Each time we have met the challenge, however imperfectly, writing race into the Constitution so that the nation could be born at all in the 18th century, keeping race from splitting the Union in the 19th century, and preventing race from undermining American world leadership in the 20th century.

Race in America today, of course, is far more complicated than Blacks and Whites. Indeed, the emergence of the United States as a truly multiracial society is the most important change in our racial dynamic since slavery was introduced in the 17th century. However, for purposes of my remarks today, and in order to avoid too complicated an analysis, I will speak about race, as it has shaped our country, in Black and White.

I want to begin by trying to explain what I think the racial divide is today. Then I will say something about why there would be a racial divide after finally achieving a national consensus that racism and racial discrimination are wrong. Finally, I will indicate where I think at least two of the macro solutions lie. What I have to say, therefore, comes down to three questions. What is the problem? Why do we still have a problem? And, what should we do about the problem?

There certainly is still a race problem in this country but there is very little agreement about what the problem is today. During the years when we made the most progress on civil rights, between 1947 and 1980, we easily defined the problem. The ability to put our hands on the problem accounts for why we were able to achieve our foremost goals: the overthrow of legal segregation and the enactment of laws against discrimination.

Today there is not a single piece of major race legislation pending in the Congress because that part of our work is done. The major work of government, on the part of the problem that involves discrimination today, is enforcement not legislation. Lacking a single, large and recognizable target--traditional, overt discrimination--we have been unable to define what our race problem is today.

For almost 300 years racial isolation has been at the root of our problems with race and this remains our problem today. Racial isolation persists but it is very different from what it was before. Until recent decades racial isolation was detested and enforced. Today, racial isolation is largely voluntary and often preferred--is often voluntary and often preferred. Enforced isolation was palpably oppressive. Voluntary isolation can appear benign yet many black children today are left virtually imprisoned in ghetto culture and unexposed to the diverse richness of the larger culture and the possibilities that can only be obtained there. With little exposure or aspiration to go there, too many retreat from the opportunities that exist outside their own isolated world.

Along the age spectrum, the comfort of racial isolation among many black college students and workers steers them away from the interaction necessary to succeed in settings dominated by whites and paralyzes the will of some to compete, that is necessary for the equal opportunity laws to be effective.

At the height of the fight against segregation in the South, and discrimination in every state, there was a far stronger national urge among whites and blacks to fight the problems raised by race by engaging one another. The law can place the races together but it cannot assure that each will partake of whatever benefits could result. The benefits are greatly underestimated amidst our comfortable isolation. These benefits include far more than the reduction of racial polarization and hostility that the nation so desperately needs. Without greater interaction, whites will not easily lose the stereotypes and the racism that are still widespread. And a parallel racism, that correlates with racial isolation, will continue to rise even among blacks.

With growing voluntary isolation, blacks may find themselves no closer to the benefits of the larger society than their parents and grandparents who fought compulsory isolation. Whites have less incentive to do what the law requires, or what is necessary to bring blacks into schools and jobs, if blacks opt out before or when they get there. It has been too easy to view racial contact as some version of 1960s integration. Neither integration nor assimilation is the same as natural, unintimidated contact and interaction.

This much is certain: genuine equality without genuine contact is impossible. The reality is that isolation leads to polarization that can stiffen the very resistance to equal treatment the law now requires and can make enforcement more difficult to achieve. Thus racial isolation not only prolongs and broadens the racial divide, it slows progress toward greater equality. In its present voluntary form, racial isolation is a new and most serious unattended racial problem in our country today. Few people even discuss it.

Let me move from what I think the problem is to why I think it is so. I believe we have made perhaps our greatest error on race in America in allowing segregation and discrimination to flourish so very long. Almost 300 years of racial isolation, most of it enforced, has allowed each group to acquire its own version of racial reality. Of course, a significant part of the difference in reality is very real. The difference in economic condition, educational attainment, health, and many other objective indicators, documents the great distance we have to go before ours is a society of equals. We could already have done most of what it would take to have eliminated these objective indicators of inequality.

Many whites are in denial about this objective reality. However there is a deeper sense in which blacks and whites live lives of different, often opposite, perceptions of the same phenomena. Gradually we have become a nation of dual realities. These dual realities are not twin realities, even fraternal twins. If you will forgive the pun, it is as if you see white and I see black. O.J. was guilty, O.J. was innocent.

Nor is class, rather than race, sufficient to explain these differences and realities. It is astonishing how deeply racial these realities are. Educated and middle-class blacks often buy into the same racial realities as poor blacks and whites accept both the good and the bad stereotypes of blacks that are so ubiquitous. A world of such divided realities breeds conspiracy theories and stereotypes, dangerous weapons to let loose in a multiracial society. More important, if most of us do not embrace a similar version of reality we cannot possible agree on the same remedies.

Let me reach the remedies, the third and last part of my remarks concerning solutions. You will hear the details of actual remedies that are working at the local level from a very able panel today. I would like to offer two national remedies. One to address objective racial differences. The other addressed largely to the dual racial realities that could finally bring us down no matter what else we do.

First, the most important national, immediate step that can be taken to bridge the racial divide is to increase--and I mean markedly increase--national efforts to eliminate the remaining social and economic differences that separate the races. These differences are very, very dangerous the longer they are allowed to live and in some cases even grow. These objective differences feed not only real but also perceived racial realities, not only real but also unreal differences. To the extent that we eliminate health, education and economic differences we will at least help close the racial divide.

Second, bridging the rest of the gap is more difficult. The reason is that much of the gap lives in our heads. That part cannot be legislated away. Nor will it automatically disappear with a rise in the standard of living of black people. It has gone on for too long. We have allowed a different version to take root among too many. The extent to which the black middle class and the black poor often perceive the same racial reality surely demonstrates that.

I want to suggest that black and white national leadership today cannot avoid their share of responsibility for the racial divide. But for some years that is exactly what national black and white leadership in this country has been doing. Leadership on racial issues has been transferred or perhaps has floated to the local level, in many ways an admirable float but where, by definition, there is even greater disunity of racial reality across our many boundaries. To his credit, President Clinton is a notable exception but there has been little other determined and honest national leadership on race except for the traditional civil rights leadership. They can hardly do it alone.

Local leadership on race, such as is represented by your panel, is indispensable today and we need to do much more to encourage much more of the same. However, if we mean to bring the nation together and to continue the process of Americanization we must not allow national leaders to continue to abdicate their responsibility either. Race has always required national leadership more than other American issues. Today it is getting less. Leaders with credibility must be willing to say what people do not want to hear, especially leaders who speak credibly to their own groups. And then, importantly, these leaders must speak to one another about race.

For several years, during the 1980s, I was one of a group of black leaders--many of them intellectuals--called together by the Joint Center for Political Studies to discuss forthrightly the black condition and to write about it candidly in short, readable essays published in slick, attractive covers and addressed to the black community in particular. Perhaps the most notable contribution of the group was an essay called "Black Initiative and Governmental Responsibility." We went beyond the discussion we undertook there to update the role of government as we saw it. Because we were black we believed that we could and that we should speak out loud, in the same essay, to the most sensitive issues in the black community, the ones blacks only speak to one another, in private, the ones whites never speak to and have no credibility to speak to, including the importance of recapturing the black value system and the spectrum of community values that have long sustained--that had long sustained blacks in this country. We sorted out candidly what a community must do for itself and what the government must do for the people if it wants a stable democracy. The response to the essay--and to one on the black family--was especially encouraging. The essay was enthusiastically embraced and distributed by the national civil rights leadership to their constituents across the country. They said they were relieved and grateful to have such frank talk from leaders, who were black, on issues affecting black people. However, I have seen no similar effort since from black or white leaders.

Such candid discussion, deliberately calculated to cut through the denial and the alibis and create a national racial reality, is long overdue. It will not come quickly if we are able to achieve it all. We are very far from it, we have never had it. I do not maintain that national opinion leaders can solve our national racial dilemmas, I do not believe--I do believe that if national leaders continue to opt out the field will be preempted by controversial or polarizing leadership and progress toward greater equality will continue to be too slow.

Equally dangerous is the possibility that dual realities will harden into dual cultures with the potential not to enrich but to dismember us. It is simply not true that diversity is an automatic strength--ask the Yugoslavs, ask the Rwandans, ask the Northern Irish--this another great American cliché. Race has not brought our country down. I do not believe it ever will. If we could overcome slavery and segregation, I believe that we will come out of today's version of racial isolation. However, voluntary isolation has no visible enemies. Like termites it can eat at the mind and spirit, at the national culture and the national fabric. To bridge the racial divide we will need to step up the national effort against discrimination and unequal status. We will need to activate local leaders to a much more determined and sustained effort in communities across the nation. And we will need to offer the American people honest guidance from national leaders to whom they look on every other important issue, none more so in America now, or ever, than on race.

Thank you very much. [Applause]

J. Ladner: Good morning. I want to thank District of Columbia Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton for the thoughtful keynote speech on racial isolation. I think it set just the right tone as we proceed into the remainder of the conference.

She made a number of important points I'd like to reiterate here. One is that we must increase our national efforts to eliminate the remaining social and economic differences, that it will be more difficult for us because much of the gap does lie in our heads because each group sees race--its racial reality--very differently and experiences it differently. But I do think that she called on us to develop more credible national leadership as well as to continue the efforts that we have ongoing here today.

Almost two years ago President Clinton appointed a commission to examine the nature and scope of our racial problems and what to do about them. Chaired by historian John Hope Franklin [sp], one of the things the panel did was to identify some of the effective and innovative programs that are addressing ways to close the gap between the races. Today we're pleased to showcase four of the promising practices that were discovered by Dr. Franklin's panel.

I'm pleased to introduce to you Gwen Ifill, who will moderate this panel. Gwen Ifill joined NBC News as a correspondent, based in Washington, D.C., September 26, 1994. Her beat includes covering political issues and national trends for "Nightly News with Tom Brokaw," "Today" and "Meet the Press." Prior to joining NBC News, Ms. Ifill had been a well-respected national reporter for the New York Times. Many of you will remember many of her page-one feature stories on politics. She joined the Times as Congressional Correspondent in 1991 and began covering the Clinton campaign later that year and was named a White House correspondent when President Clinton took office. Previously, she worked for The Washington Post for seven years, writing about the 1988 political campaign and scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She also covered local and state politics on the Metropolitan staff of the Post.

From 1981 to 1984, she worked at the The Baltimore Evening Sun. Before that, she was a general assignment and education reporter at the Boston Herald American. She is a frequent guest on PBS's "Washington Week in Review." She's traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Caribbean, North and South America, and has visited the Fiji Islands. A native of New York City, Ifill received a Bachelor of Arts in communications from Simmons College in 1977 and was awarded an honorary doctorate in journalism, in 1993, by her alma mater.

I now would like to present to you Gwen Ifill and the other panelists. Thank you very much. [Applause]

G. Ifill: I have to say, whenever I hear my bio read I always think, gosh, she can't hold a job. One of the interesting things about being in the media and being of color is that whether your beat is the White House or your beat is city hall you are always thinking and trying to figure out things about race. You can't be a person of color and not be thinking about it all the time. You're thinking about how to sneak it into your stories. You're thinking about how to keep it out of stories. You're trying to find a way to integrate in the mainstream a fair discussion.

By now all of us are used to all the old arguments about race and we all have sore jawbones from rehashing the pros and cons and the old formulas: integration or segregation? Is racism alive? Is it dead? Can't we all just get along? It's funny but we never can agree on any of these issues, and we surely can't agree on the solutions, but the politics of race and the emotionalism attached to discussion about the issue just seems to freeze us in our tracks. But today we have four people, who will join me shortly on stage, who refuse to give up on the conversation. They're working from the grassroots up, instead of from the White House down, in San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York City and Washington, the District of Columbia.

Before I introduce our panelists, however, we have a short bit of videotape which will introduce a little bit about what you're about to hear talked about. Then I will come back and introduce the panelists.

VIDEOTAPE by Oprah Winfrey(?): We are so proud of these kids, called A Better Chance, that help bright, inner-city children who have it, get it, who want to do better in their lives, who are already getting A's in school but just need a better education, that's what A Better Chance does. This is Judith Berry Griffin [Applause], she is the president of A Better Chance which has been--what?--in existence for how many years?

J. Berry Griffin: Almost 35.

O. Winfrey: Yeah, and put how many kids through college?

J. Berry Griffin: Close to 10,000.

O. Winfrey: Ten thousand! [Applause] So, tell us what the organization does.

J. Berry Griffin: The organization works miracles. It finds students when they are 13 years old, it helps them to make the connection to good educational opportunities across the country. I have 193 schools, I have 1150 children--give or take a few--in school right now, going to 193 schools across the country.

O. Winfrey: Okay, A Better Chance has helped over--as Judith just said--10,000 children. These two people show the incredible power of A Better Chance, take a look.

Participant: When I think back about what A Better Chance means to me, I think of a poor, black kid growing up on the south side of Chicago. My worst (memories?) were having to get from the Robert Taylor Home, (eight?) blocks across town, to high school. It was a hairy, hairy experience every day. The number of times that I was shot at or had my life threatened, as far as the gangs, to and from school--if anybody had told me in the summer of 1966 that I would one day would go to a prestigious boarding school, graduate from Harvard, become a correspondent for Newsweek magazine, later for Time magazine, (TV? World), I would never have believed it. But that's what A Better Chance did. It opened the world to me.

Participant: [Inaudible] largely black community in Boston. My parents divorced when I was in junior high school so my mom had always worked, usually as a domestic. Things were a little tight financially after my dad left. What's most important to me about A Better Chance is that it really allowed me to fulfill some dreams that I had and develop some dreams that I didn't know about. It allowed me the opportunity to realize that the world was larger than I knew and I had the right to participate in it. That's a really important gift to give to a 13-year-old.

Participant: Where opportunity presents itself, a chance for success follows. And that's what A Better Chance is all about. [Applause]

O. Winfrey: I love A Better Chance! Love them, love them, love them!

[Musical interlude]

Participant: I wanted to be--I always wanted to be something that was like comfortable. I think about comfortable and making the world a better place by bringing people together.

Participant: Operation Understanding D.C. introduced 12 African-American and 12 Jewish students, selected from 20 different high schools in the District, Maryland and Virginia. These students are about to begin a yearlong journey to dispel stereotypes, promote understanding and cooperation, build a future generation of concerned citizens, and work to eliminate racism and anti-Semitism. It's an ambitious goal for 24 kids but it has to start somewhere and as the new class is introduced the excitement is everywhere.

Participant: We're bringing people together in the finest tradition of the civil rights movement, that people can come together and succeed together for the benefit of all of us, as opposed to dividing up on our own separate turf--zero sum. We're getting out of that, that's a good thing.

Participant: Racism, discrimination, anti-Semitism, are real problems here in this country. We want to fix the problems in our own backyard.

Participant: The first official meeting of the group is an intense, mandatory, 3-day overnight retreat, held very appropriately over Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday weekend. No one is quite sure what to expect but one thing is obvious, it's the start of something big, something like never before.

Participant: What we're trying to do in Operation Understanding D.C. is to get people to look beyond the superficial things, color and other aspects of an individual's life, which are really not that significant. But, rather, the coat of arms, as you saw, gave you such rich detail and invited such questioning from the students: What's that? What's that? You've really got a good sense of what these human beings are about. And I think everyone's a lot richer for it, as opposed to saying, black male, Jewish female, and things like that that you see with your eyes.

END VIDEOTAPE:

G. Ifill: I want to introduce you to a panel of four, fascinating people who are making this conversation happen. As I introduce them, I ask them to come up to the stage one by one. First, the gentleman you just saw is Christian Dorsey. Christian is the executive director for the five-year-old, nonprofit organization, Operation Understanding D.C., a youth leadership group designed to fight racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination by appealing to Jewish and African-American youth. Before joining OUDC, Christian spent four years at the Close Up Foundation as instructor and lead supervisor for civic education programs for high school students and adults. Even while a student at Georgetown University, Christian worked for interracial understanding by co-founding a multicultural housing complex, called COLOURS, that integrated African-American, Caucasian, Asian and Latino students. Christian Dorsey. [Applause]

The second person we just saw profiled is Judith Berry Griffin. Since 1983, Judith has been president of A Better Chance, a 35-year-old nonprofit that provides educational opportunities for children of color. A Better Chance annually identifies, recruits, and places more than 300 gifted children into a network of 200 affiliated academically-rigorous private and public schools. In 1997, Oprah Winfrey gave A Better Chance national recognition by signing on as its national spokesperson. Before joining A Better Chance, Judith served in the U.S. Department of Education. She's also been an elementary school principal--which scares me--and a visiting lecturer and faculty member at Manhattanville College, the Bank Street College of Education, and at MIT. She's also the author of several children's books, the most recent of which, Phoebe and the General, was nominated for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award.

Our third panelist is Yvette Martinez. Yvette is the project manager for the Television Race Initiative, a national program that strategically links public television programs to community problem-solving efforts on race relations. She's also served as a consultant to The California Endowment, advising them on the development of a welfare reform investment area. Prior to that, she designed an anti-handgun public education campaign, for the California Wellness Foundation, aimed at reducing violence against youth--certainly a timely subject right now. Yvette is also cofounder of GANAS, a political organization for young Latinos working in Washington.

Our fourth, and final, panelist is Richard Little. Dick Little is the executive director of the Education and Housing Equity Project, a non-profit organization devoted to engaging the community in public discussions and advocacy. The subject, race and equality, particularly when it comes to schools and housing in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Dick is a member of the Minneapolis City Planning Commission, a research associate with INTER-RACE at Augsburg College, and was co-chair of the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism's education task force. For 20 years, he worked in planning at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

This is all grassroots, this is all taking place in our communities, and I want you to welcome our four guests. [Applause]

We heard a little bit about two of the organizations so I'm going to start on the opposite end of the table and actually ask Dick Little to start by giving us short presentations, a little bit about their work, a little bit about their conversations and how they feel their conversations are moving the subject forward. What I'd like you to do is to listen closely, obviously, but also to be prepared to ask some really challenging questions. We want to have a discussion here, not just a presentation. I'll start first with you, Dick, and Yvette you can follow.

R. Little: The first thing I want to observe is that I think it's very significant that we are a multiracial group up at the panel. You might wonder what a white person--white male--is doing for this panel. I think that--as part of this panel--but I think that it's an important message that all of us need to be part of the solution. And I think a very important part of the solution is getting those of us who are not part of the communities of color to be engaging in this topic.

You'll excuse my voice this morning, I came in on a plane yesterday and I've got a little bit of a sore throat but hopefully you'll be able to hear everything I have to say.

Our project actually is multicultural and multiracial however. The objective of it is to bring people together in community circle--and I'll explain that in a moment--community circle conversations to engage with one another civically about the problems and issues that we're facing in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. It was founded by a nonprofit, that was formed three years ago, called the Education and Housing Equity Project. I'm guessing that if I was to read off some of our board members most of you in this room would recognize many of the names. They asked me to help organize and move the project forward. We decided to use a model, which we developed, called "community circles."

Our focus was on addressing issues of disparity in education and segregation of housing patterns in the Twin Cities area. We felt that the most important place to begin that was with the citizenry themselves rather than focusing strictly on advocacy or on research or on legislative leadership. We did that through community circles which are small groups, from 8 to 12 people, who we bring together. We have about 50 of these community circles that are currently meeting around the Twin Cities area, not just in Minneapolis and St. Paul but in many of the inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs as well.

We partnered with a couple of organizations--the Minnesota Facilitators Network and the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution--to help provide high-quality facilitation and moderation of these circles so that we would be able to create an environment in which people would honestly converse with one another and get down to some of the deeper kinds of understandings with one another. The kind of thing Eleanor Holmes was talking about, we need to get beyond the superficial and we need to be able to have a conversation where we really get to know one another.

We used the issues of schools and housing because we have found--at least in the Minnesota area, which is still largely white, although that's rapidly changing--that if you simply brought people together to talk about race the pattern that Eleanor was talking about, of the dual realities, almost guaranteed that people wouldn't show up for the conversation. What we decided to do instead was to talk about something that groups commonly care about which is the education of their children and adequate housing for our communities. By bringing people together to talk about those issues that are facing the Twin Cities area we then were able to move into--and this was almost a natural consequence in the conversations--a real discussion about race and race relations and racism.

Many of the groups we were successful in getting to be quite diverse racially and socio-economically. Others it was more difficult to do, as you might imagine. In addition to the facilitators, we worked with 32 organizations--both from conservative right think tanks all the way to our most progressive organizations in the Twin Cities area--to develop a model discussion guide that would actually move the discussion forward and help to provide some focus so that it wouldn't be simply a--this would not be a chit-chat conversation or a conversation that rambled, it would have some deliberative qualities to it which I think civic kinds of conversations today very desperately need.

So, with the use of the discussion guide that our group put together, from many different voices flowing from sharing of personal stories to a process of looking at segregation in the Twin Cities and then looking at housing issues and then looking at the gap in achievement in our schools and then moving finally to action: what are the actionable kinds of things that could be happening in the Twin Cities that could make a difference with respect to these issues. The group would actually move from having their own raw, personal opinions, collectively toward some kind of informed public judgment that would come out of each of the circles.

Our hope is that these 50 circles--and more circles keep getting added all the time, various organizations like League of Women Voters or Frogtown [ph] Neighborhood Council, a pluralism council--these very many different groups who are sponsoring these--will then come together toward the conclusion of the circle conversation and we will have a metropolitan-wide sharing experience. A very important part of which is that we will invite people like yourselves to partake in that discussion, people who are in public--positions of public responsibility. We invited many of those people to actually participate in the discussions but, as you might guess, elected officials are very--are very--it's very difficult to get them to commit to something like this. So, we think that the forum at the conclusion is going to be very, very important.

One of the things that we found, with our first round of circles, is that once people get engaged in these conversations and start talking about the issues that we're talking about today, they get hooked. What I mean by that is, they want that conversation to continue. Very few people end up --after they meet for five different sessions of two hours each, very few of the people who go through this process want to just end it there. They want to do something with their conversation or they want to be able to continue their conversation.

We discovered that once you break down--once you create a place, an environment, for people to come together to talk about these issues and get to know people from a different background than their own--which in the Twin Cities is a very real issue, the isolation that Eleanor was talking about is very relevant here--they want to continue that kind of conversation. They want to expand it. They want to get other people in their neighborhoods or communities involved in the conversation. And they're very--they also want to get involved in some way either on the agendas that they created--many creative ideas come out of these conversations--or by getting exposed to existing organizations that are working on these issues.

So the circles have become a valuable form, if I can put it this way, a valuable form of recruitment for groups like the NAACP or the Affordable Housing--Metropolitan Interfaith Council for Affordable Housing. The people we attract to the conversations are not necessarily people who are already activists. In fact, it's the other way around. We get people involved who have somewhat of an interest in these issues but who clearly become more aware, more of a conscience and desire to act after the conversations are over. Then they become much more civically engaged in the community.

How are we doing on time? Okay. I think that gives you a thumbnail sketch of the project. It's very grassroots because we have many different sponsor partners who actually host the conversations in different parts of the Twin Cities, right from Phillips [sp] neighborhood, in south-central Minneapolis, all the way out to Eden Prairie which is an outer-ring suburb in the Twin Cities.

Some of our major accomplishments--I think one of them I already discussed, which is, we are looking at this project in terms of how it is getting citizens to become more engaged in these issues. Perhaps unlike New York and Washington--I'm not as clear about San Francisco--talking about race is not something that happens in the Twin Cities. So, part of the objective of this project was to figure out a way of breaking that barrier down and actually having a place where we could talk about race and doing it in a way where people could and would come together. And doing it in a way--unlike what was stated before--doing it in a way where we're not polarizing, having a--or where we're--with the invectives of talk radio or in the courts or in other kinds of venues that I think lead more to polarization--but in places where there's a potential of really coming together.

I think a couple of very exciting ideas have also come out of these circles, many of which might lead to similar kinds of initiatives as the ones you'll hear about in a few minutes. We have at least one piece of legislation, that's currently before the legislature, on inclusionary housing. And we've also developed a fair housing play which recently was recognized by HUD as the best practice on affordable housing and enabling people to better understand what the dilemmas are for people who don't have adequate resources to have affordable housing.

I think some of the challenges--I'll just briefly discuss a few of them and then we'll end it for now and hopefully it will get into questions with you. I think one of the challenges is that we are still a very highly segregated metropolitan area and, unfortunately, the circle discussion process ends up reflecting that segregation. How do you get a really diverse group out in Eden Prairie? Very tough to do. Even if you have persons of color living out there they're largely invisible to the mainstream public that finds this kind of project appealing. So, certainly, one of the challenges is figuring out how we overcome this and not reflect the segregation but actually overcome that segregation by intentionally bringing people together who, frankly, don't live together. I think that's one of the major challenges.

I think another one is that because we have those different realities, that Eleanor Holmes Norton was talking about, even when you prepare a discussion guide, or when you have a facilitator or bring people together, how do you do that in a way where it can resonate? Many people said that the discussion guide reflected a European-American, educated, upper-middle-class orientation. Certainly there's a challenge of how we create this kind of discussion process in a way where it can work for people coming from different realities and different cultural and economic perspectives.

I think at this point I'll just end it with that. A very important part of this other challenge is, how do you move from talk to action? Everybody agreed that informed discussion was--at the conclusion of the conversation everybody agreed that informed discussion was critical to better, more informed kinds of actions. So I think there was a real value in the discussion but getting leaders and others to take notice of that and do something with that, that's another issue.

[Applause]

Y. Martinez: Thank you. The Television Race Initiative is a national media pilot project. We are attempting to discover how public television and local community problem solving can work together on the issue of race relations. We have partnered with six public television stations around the country. The one that I'm going to specifically get into is the work being done in the San Francisco Bay area but we also have formed partnerships in six other cities, the Twin Cities being one, Boston, Norfolk, Virginia, the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, and Baltimore. We also have partnered with five national organizations who are helping us draw attention to very powerful programs on PBS that deal specifically, and provocatively, on the issue of race.

We are at a time where the media gets blamed for being part of the problem on race relations and our effort is trying to discover how public television and media--a small slice of media--can be part of the solution. I'm going to give you three examples of where we're learning some lessons about how this works and I'm going to make it specific to the San Francisco Bay area.

The first thing that we've discovered so far is that diversity of content, programs, and perspectives on public television is very important. When we showcased a national program on affirmative action, to a local community group in the Bay Area, they said, well that's great, affirmative action, it's very policy heavy, it's the usual suspects talking about affirmative action and race. No offense to the policymakers here but they're boring and you really want to make it real. So what can this public television station do to really bring home the issue for normal folks who watch television and find the issue too heavy?

What the station decided to do was to create a local, one-hour documentary that looked very deeply into the lives of two young people who were applying into UC Berkeley. They profiled these youngsters in such a fabulous way that the community responded to the documentary in unprecedented ways. The community leaders emailed, faxed, called in with all kinds of responses, wanting to volunteer at the high schools where these kids went to school, wanting to volunteer at the public television station. A couple of viewers wanted to contribute to the college education of one of the people profiled. It was amazing. And it was an amazing lesson for the public station to get that sort of response from the community that, I don't think, they normally consider when they shape and develop programs.

The second lesson that we've learned is that television programs can be an excellent icebreaker for dialogue in the community. I think we've heard about that a little bit whereby, you know, people come to a room and they say, okay, where do we begin on this very tough issue? Well, if you watch one of these powerful programs it gives you a very good starting point. If you see the story of someone's personal journey on race relations, it's easier to start from there than from scratch. So, we're excited about the opportunity of that.

One of our programs we took to a library and we opened up the community to come to the library, watch a sneak preview of this show, and 150 people came out and engaged in a very dynamic conversation on race. So that was important.

The third thing that we've learned so far is that public television can bring--can be a catalyst for community as far as developing new partnerships with the community. Some of our stations had never really invited the community inside and some of the people in the community had never really wanted to go inside the public television, they didn't really think that they had anything to, you know, say or that the station would value anything they had to say. So, time after time, by the station bringing in new folks to the table, I think public television is learning--and our station in San Francisco specifically--that the community has a lot to offer and that it is very rich in diversity and opinion, and that those ideas and perspectives and problem-solving solutions can really help the station be more of a convener and thereby be part of the solution instead of the problem, as always.

Public television, you know, the mission is to serve the community. They're all mission-driven. They get government funding to serve the communities and we are discovering that more--especially on the issue of race relations--that when you bring the community in the stations feel better, they're getting back to their mission. And I think there is a lot of need for developing programs that are more local in context, also to shed light on the positive things that are being done in the community instead of media always focusing on the negative and when there's a crisis on race the media running to report on that. Here we've found a way for them to be a little bit more proactive and be more of a player in the effort for racial understanding.

I just wanted to give you a quick snapshot on what we're doing but I really have to say that the six public stations and the community groups that they've linked with are really sort of pioneers in this effort to link media and community together. We're in our first year and I really look forward to where this goes and some of the solutions that they're working on together. Thanks.

[Applause]

J. Berry Griffin: Oprah did most of my work for me. I thought I would start by reading you a passage from one of my favorite books. "The number 14 bus runs east on Kinsman [sp] Road, straight through the steel heart of Cleveland. I stepped on at East 55th Street as the bus headed uptown to Mount Pleasant, that's where the people who worked at the steel mills lived. They were men forged from cauldrons of molten metal. I used to see them coming home in the evenings, gleaming like tin men, glistening sweat and metal sprinklings. And in the summer the black steel men painted the porches of their new homes in shiny coats of red and yellow, blue and green. From my seat in the back of the Number 14, I watched their pretty porches slide by like carnival tents."

That's a passage from a book written by a woman named Charlise Lyles [sp]. The name of the book is Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? From the Projects to Prep School. And, as you might have guessed, Charlise is an alumna of A Better Chance. What's fascinating about this book is that we found Charlise in Cleveland in a class of slow learners. Charlise went on, after we placed her at the Hawkins [sp] School, to graduate with honors from Smith College and is now a journalist--a working journalist in Cleveland--is going to move back there to start--she's been asked to start a new magazine. I just heard from her yesterday, she called to give me the good news.

So, that answers the question of who we are and what it is we do. You know that A Better Chance has placed 10,000 students over the course of the last 36 years. And if we have done nothing else, in our brief history, we have made it possible for people to say with absolute certainty that students of color can compete and they can compete in the most rigorous educational settings in this country. They can go to schools that have educated our presidents, they can become presidents of their class.

Our children are drawn from the inner city. When you look at television and you see pictures of the inner city what you see are children car-jacking, you see drugs, you see all the awful things that people associate with people of color who don't have anything. When we go to the inner city what we see are armfuls of children who only want an opportunity to prove that they can do it if they're only given a chance. A third of my children are either on welfare or living at, or below, the federal poverty line. Sixty-five percent of my children are being raised in single-parent homes, typically by a mom. They are enormously motivated, they are enormously talented. That is the story that A Better Chance has been able to create, very quietly and now more noisily.

A Better Chance, really, is the story of the volunteers that work with us to find our children and who work with us to support our children. When the organization began in the early 1960s, there were 23 independent schools who wanted very much to diversify their student populations but did not know how to do that. So they invited 48 students to go to a summer program at Dartmouth College, that lasted for seven weeks, to learn how to be good enough to go to school at places like Andover and Phillips Exeter and Choate. What has happened in the course of the 36 years is that millions and millions of people have been touched by those 23 schools and those 48 students. The 48 students have now grown into a cadre of close to 2400 in grades six through college, spread all over the country. The schools that used to number 23 now number 193. And, of course, they are all over, in all of the states, and we get students from everywhere.

The other thing that I think is important to know is that the volunteer aspect of A Better Chance is what has made it possible for the organization to not only survive but to thrive. We have 4,000, give or take a few, volunteers who give out our applications at the end of August. They go across the country--[End of Tape 1]

J. Berry Griffin: [cont.] --think would benefit from the kinds of opportunities we offer and they distribute close to 16,000 applications. When we finish with looking at the applications we winnow those down to a group of about 800 from which we draw, typically, 360 to 380 annually to place in our schools. The people that work to place these students look at everything about them. They look at their test scores, which for the most part are low. They look at where they come from, they look at the kinds of schools they are in, whether the courses that they take are courses that would get them into college. They look at what the teachers say, they look at what the parents say. And, in the end, we recognize that of these students who have raised their hands and said, I want a better chance, we are only going to be able to help a few.

The thing that I think is the heart of what it is we do is that we are absolutely committed and determined that we are going to show the rest of the world what is wonderful about each child. Now, frequently because the school system of this country is unfortunately based on things like the SSAT, IQ tests, and the SAT exams, our children fall down when they are being asked to take those kinds of exams. Now, some of our children score very high and when we're trying to place them in schools we have absolutely no shame, we will use that if we have to. We'll say, look at those test scores, can you believe that? But for the most part we have to use other means of trying to show how our students can excel and why we are proud of them.

So, we've developed a technology of assessment that reads around test scores, that takes things such as motivation, what the students say about themselves, whether they tell us they're determined to succeed. And that's what we use to talk them into some of the schools that will not look at them if they did not have a particular score.

Last April I went to have dinner with Oprah Winfrey. She invited me to come and have dinner and I said could I bring six friends. So, I ended up going with six children. We were sitting at dinner and one of the children was talking about his mother and how wonderful his mother was. We later discovered that, as he said to us, my mother has come such a long way because when I was born she was only 13. This child had been president of his class every year since the 6th grade, at the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. He's on the honor roll--he graduated this year, he's on the honor roll. He was president of the football team. He was president of the basketball team. He had won every major award that the school could give him. His test scores were in the third percentile. He told me that he didn't think he could ever get into an Ivy League college but he really wanted to be able to do that. So, after a pep talk, he decided to apply and in the fall he will start at Columbia.

I could stand here and talk to you all day about my wonderful children but I do want to just leave you with the understanding of one particular piece of the program that is not as broadly discussed as the rest. We have what we call a public school program. When we begin to place our children there are three options that they can choose, or that we can choose for them. Two are boarding and one is private day school. So we would ask our parents if they would give permission for their children to board and there are two ways in which they could move into communities that could help. One, of course, is through the traditional boarding school route that we all know of with the northeastern boarding schools, most of them in very rarefied settings. The other is a little known program, there are 23 of them, one of them is Eden Prairie. One of them is Edina, Minnesota. One of them is in Appleton, Wisconsin. The rest are in the northeast. The communities there have banded together, they have gotten a local board, they have incorporated as a 501C3 and they have permitted themselves to raise the requisite 60 or 70 thousand dollars that it would take to get six to 12 children, that we would place there, to live within the boundaries of the school district and go to the high school that is connected with that affluent suburb. So, we have 160 children who are in what we call our PSPs, our public school programs. They come from everywhere, they are simply wonderful. They are just like all the other kids we place but the interesting thing about it is that when they go to live in the home, within the school district, they're put there with the resident director. They come home every evening to talk with each other, to talk with the resident director who has taken on the responsibility of working with six to 12 teenaged boys or girls, and they make an impression on the school and on the community which is absolutely unbelievable.

I went, a couple of years ago, to one of our public school programs in New Canaan, Connecticut. One of the children there was about to win one of our highest awards and we wanted to be there--I wanted to be there to give him the award in person. While I was there, a woman whom I'd never met before came to the house. They were going to have a little reception in honor of this student and they wanted, you know, to have the different people from the school--the superintendent and so on--to visit. And this woman came over to me and she said, I'm just a nervous wreck today. She said, this has really been a bad day for me. So, you know, we were making small talk. I said, why is that? She said, well, my son is getting ready to run for sophomore class president tomorrow and I know that he would be such a wonderful president and I really would hope that all of the students would vote for him. And I said, well, you know, I've been there. You know, the kind of things mothers say to each other. So, she said to me, my other son keeps telling me, mom, this a piece of cake, we're all going to vote for him. And I said, oh, you have twins? She said, no, the one who's running is an A Better Chance student. I said, you mean that's my child, not yours. [Laughter]

The point here, that I'm making, is that there was nothing that I could tell from this woman's demeanor, from the words that she used to describe her son, nothing that I could discern that would let me know that she was not talking about her own child, she was talking about my child. I say that because that is the spirit that pervades the public school programs, all of them across the country. The people that go, day after day, to fix up the house and who build things that the students need, who plant flowers in the front yard, who go to the airport and welcome the children, who take them home on Wednesdays so that they can have respite from the cooking that the person who comes into work as a cook does for them, takes them to track meets, people who do all of those kinds of things. And so it is a volunteer program. It is a program that is not limited by numbers, it's not limited by placements in schools, it's only limited by the numbers of communities willing to make this kind of commitment.

In closing, let me just say that I guess if we have done nothing else, in our 36 years of existence, we have proven that we can make a significant difference by starting with children and learning to look at them differently by broadening the criteria by which we evaluate them, by believing in them, by putting ourselves to the test and not the children, by recognizing that if we go into communities where we cannot find sufficient numbers, we think, of bright, motivated students--that it's our fault for using methods that are incomplete rather than the children's fault for not being able to show us what it is they can do. So, I would urge all of us to think about those things and the ways in which we can encourage our own communities to look at our students differently, to believe in them as we believe in them. We know, we know that they will rise to the occasion. A Better Chance has proven that 10,000 times. Thank you.

[Applause]

C. Dorsey: My whole life's work is based on not making assumptions about people but I think can safely make two about this group here today. One, that we all believe that religious, ethnic, cultural and ethnic differences are very pervasive in American society. I think that's safe to say. And I think for all of us, as well, there are precious few opportunities to come together in a forum such as this to talk constructively and substantively about these differences. And unfortunately for the great many masses out there, there is the unwillingness to get together in forums such as these, and others, to talk about these issues that are so common and so destructive in society.

Now, for sure, some people don't want to talk about because, you know, they're racist and bigoted themselves and of course they don't want to put themselves out there for that type of public consternation. But for the great many more, people don't want to talk about racial and ethnic and cultural and religious differences because they don't feel they've done anything wrong. They look at their lives and say, I'm okay. And, for the most part, they probably are. But it reminds of me of words by Abraham Joshua Heschel [sp], a rabbi very prominent during the civil rights movement, who said, in a democracy when terrible things happen a few are guilty but all are responsible. And in my case the great problem is bigotry and discrimination and in this democracy that is the terrible thing. And while we typically point to the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis and people who do outright bigoted acts--yes, those are the guilty but we are all responsible and it's up to everyone to do something about it if we really want to attack this problem from its core. And that's what Operation Understanding D.C. is based upon, the simple idea that these differences and these problems in society, if they're not talked about substantively will continue to fester.

So we work with high school students locally, here in the Washington metro area, in a year-long program that's designed not to just get people talking about these things but to get them to actively change attitudes and make a difference in our community. We do this not by preaching to the students--lots of folks like to preach to high school kids and, as you all probably know if you have high school students yourselves or work with them, it doesn't work. What you need to do is to show them through experience and through living that this is the way to go. We do this in a program that has worked without fail for the past five years. A program that takes about six months out of every year to educate the students on issues of race and religion and cultural difference, having seminars every other week. We take every other Sunday out of their lives, for six hours, and talk to them about issues like slavery and the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, controversial racial issues in America. And we do this because our whole philosophy is based on knowledge is the key to overcoming misperceived stereotypes and assumptions.

The second part of our program, which is probably the most visible, is a trip for a month in the summer to places like New York, Atlanta, Charleston, Selma, Alabama, Greenwood, Mississippi, Little Rock, Arkansas. A lot of people, when they hear about this trip, they think, oh, that's your hook. You've got this sexy program for high school students and you take them traveling, that's why you're able to keep going every year. Well, I've got to tell you, it's not fun to travel to Greenwood, Mississippi in the middle of July. It's not fun at all. And these students do this not because they get the travel experience but because they believe what I believe and what Operation Understanding believes. And that is, before you can begin to embrace and understand and appreciate someone else, you must first embrace and appreciate yourself. So our trip with these black and Jewish students travels all around the country to places of importance and significance to black and Jewish history, meeting with prominent and activist blacks and Jews, all over America, who have fought to make a difference with these racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural problems.

These educational experiences with the students form the basis for what is the third part of our program where the students take all of this education and experience and go out into the Washington community at large and try to share it with other youth, other high school students who, unlike them, are not engaged in a yearlong conversation, an immersion program to get at the root of these differences.

I'm proud of the students for many reasons. Not just the fact that they are voluntarily going about making a change in America, enduring a program that is awful difficult, long and arduous, traveling away from their family and friends for a month, I'm proud of that but what I'm most proud of is that they continue to go on from this experience and actively try to change communities. We've had four years of students who have graduated from our program, who've gone on to colleges all across the country, starting diversity programs, rallying activists on campus for change in administration policies and procedures. They're living the life that we would all like to see people lead.

This is just but one example of how you can work with folks to make an active difference. I look forward to the questions and comments so that we can get into some of these issues more in depth.

[Applause]

G. Ifill: Okay, I get the moderator's prerogative and that's--I'm going to ask the first question. I'm going to ask two members, and you can decide who you will be to respond to it, and then immediately turn it over to you folks because I'm really curious about what people have to say. We have somebody running with the microphone who will come and find you when your hand goes in the air.

My question is--two people with microphones. I'm--we're in Washington, there are policymakers in the room. We are probably too consumed here with what government can do to address these issues but what strikes me about all four of you is that you're not waiting on that. The question then becomes, I suppose, is government and government's role--I'll ask you each to put on your microphones as you respond here--is government--does it not matter anymore? Is it beside the point? Are the discussions we have and the White House panels we appoint here in Washington, just beside the point? Whoever wants to pop in first.

C. Dorsey: Sure. It's important that this effort begin everywhere but we can't go back to the typical model of looking toward--looking for our political leaders to lead the fight. While it's important to have folks in the White House and at all levels of government--federally, state and locally--embracing this idea of diversity and appreciating difference, what's most important is that everybody else believes it. And if we don't--if we continue to just wait for it to happen at the top we may have a very well meaning and open and appreciative leadership but we have an electorate, a mass, that doesn't embrace this and it's not going to work.

So, I guess the short answer to your question is, we need not wait. We need not expect that government is going to lead this effort. If it doesn't start here it's not going to work at all.

J. Berry Griffin: I would just like to say that A Better Chance was founded with (great society?) money and we were one of the successful programs that was able to make a transition from public to private funds so our last federal money came in 1979. I am not a person who follows rules so working with the government has always been a trial. [Laughter] And I think that while what people in the government do and say and think is important, I'm too impatient to wait for that so we just have to move on.

G. Ifill: Okay, I'll take the first question from the audience. The gentleman right here.

Participant: I'm Peter Tautfest for the German newspaper Tageszeitung. I'd like to address my question to Judith Griffin. Is what Better Chance is doing not what affirmative active was supposed to do? And now that affirmative action does no longer so much in favor, the talk of the town is school vouchers, where does Better Chance fit in between affirmative action and school vouchers?

J. Berry Griffin: We don't really have an opinion on school vouchers. I am in favor of anything that will allow students to get--

Participant: Can't hear.

G. Ifill: Speak up a little bit.

J. Berry Griffin: --no matter can ever hear when I'm talking. Is this better?

G. Ifill: That's better.

J. Berry Griffin: Vouchers--I'm in favor of anything that allow students to have an opportunity to excel and if vouchers is the way we have to do it, fine. If we don't have to do it that way, fine. So we don't have any official position on that.

With regard to affirmative action there are two things I'd like to say. First of all, it's interesting to me, there was a--I don't know how many of you read last Sunday's New York Times article "Affirmative Action is Dead" and what's--whatever--I can't remember the name exactly but what they talked about there was that the University of California at Berkeley had finally figured out a wonderful way to evaluate students and bring them into the school without relying on standardized tests. And they then proceeded to describe what we have been doing for the last 36 years as a brand-new admissions thing that no one had ever heard of before. So I was somewhat bemused by that. I like to think of affirmative action and A Better Chance as really affirmative development. What we are trying to do is to be affirmative in the development of the talent that then will allow for people to be chosen on their merits. I am a firm believer in affirmative action, we all are at A Better Chance, but our role really comes at the point where we are getting kids ready to take advantage of their end of it. Now, of course, that leaves out what everybody else is doing once the students get into situations where they're competing for jobs, whether or not the companies are ready to welcome them and make it possible for them to succeed.

G. Ifill: Question right here, the gentleman with his hand.

Participant: William Spriggs, with the National Urban League. Judith, I want you to elaborate a little bit more on what you just said about California because I think the real key is that they instituted a correction for misusing the test and the correction got labeled as affirmative action in that case. And you were talking about the type of test scores that A Better Chance students get even in elite schools, even those they are elite students and have proven themselves time and again with great contributions to our society. So, could you elaborate a little bit more on this--on your ability to do a total evaluation of students and to get us back to being able to measure promise. I think people get turned off because they believe these test scores and therefore believe that they truly measure merit and achievement. So if you can elaborate on a total evaluation of the student and how if we totally evaluated students then a lot of what we're calling affirmative action wouldn't be there, this is really a correction for misapplication of some knowledge.

J. Berry Griffin: What we understand is that test scores are really hooked very closely to the kind of teaching students have had up to the point that they take the test. If they are in overcrowded situations, if they are with teachers who are not of the highest caliber, if they are taking courses that are not sufficiently rigorous, they are not going to score as high as somebody who has all of those things.

So since we know that, we say, okay, we're going to just put the tests to the side. What we have developed over the course of 36 years is a 16-page application that asks students to gather information for us from their schools, including transcripts and references and that kind of thing. Importantly, the students have to rate themselves on how they feel they rank against their peers. One of the things that we have learned through a study done by Sylvia Johnson [sp], who's editor-in-chief of the Journal of Negro Education at Howard, is that one of the ways you can tell how smart a student is, is to ask them. If they say they're smart, they probably are. I know that sounds simpleminded [Chuckles] but that's what has been borne out with all the research that's been done on our students.

So, we look at what they say about themselves. We look at how they rank themselves against their peers. We look at their handwriting. We look at the way in which they fill out the application, does it show a lot of effort? We look at the grades that they've had and the things that their teachers say about them. We ask them to write an essay, we don't worry about the punctuation and the spelling and the grammar. We try to get through to what it is they are saying to us, what do they want us to understand? And when we finish with that we generally wind up with a very good intuitive feel, which is what teachers are supposed to do. I mean, this is not rocket science, good teachers can do this.

Recently, Dr. Johnson and a team of researchers looked at all of our students, they looked at all the anecdotal evidence as well as the other evidence we had that showed that our students, even with the lowest scores--like our third percentile tester who became a Rhodes Scholar. What they found--that is, if they take the pieces and parts of the A Better Chance application process, each of those pieces and parts is more highly predictive of success in school than any of the standardized measures that are currently being used. That is available in a research brief that I try to paper the universe with. I think people read it and they say, yes, right, and then go on to the test scores. So, I mean, it's not--it's not hard to do.

G. Ifill: Next question? Yes. [Off mic] One second.

Participant: Hi, I'm with Reuters which is, you know, an international wire service. One of the things that I'm kind of interested in is this relationship that we have with the media kind of only focusing in on racial issues when there's a crisis. Listening to the descriptions of the programs that you have going, which are very hopeful and optimistic and where you actually see change happening at a local level, it makes me feel sad that we don't do a better job in the media of covering, you know, the good news. I mean, you know, that's sort of a chronic problem in national media generally but I think along the racial lines it's particularly bad. So that people--I have a--my cousin is visiting from Germany right now and he had arrived and said--I've just taken on this new job with Reuters as diversity coordinator so we were talking about it and I said, you know, I'm so excited about this opportunity to really kind of make a difference with this one company. And he said, yeah, but you know when I'm in Germany and I watch the newscasts of Washington all I ever see are white people, I don't see--

G. Ifill: Tell him to write a letter.

Participant: Pardon?

G. Ifill: Tell him to write a letter, it would help me. [Laughter] If I can just form your question for Yvette because actually it touched on something that I was thinking about which is, you've had some success in the six cities working with public television. I wonder if there's a way to expand that in anyway to local commercial television or whether that's biting off too big a chunk too soon.

Y. Martinez: I think that we're hopeful on that. I think public television is a natural place to start and I think that we're learning some really important lessons. For example, if at the public television station the leadership and the higher jobs are all with primarily whites, what does that say when you bring the community in to talk about race relations? So, by the fall we are planning to have a one-year model, lessons-learned plan to share with the media and organizations around the country to show how comprehensive working with the media can be, what kind of plans work. So, inside the station you need to be diverse. You need to work outside with community organizations. And that you need to draw attention to the positive things being done in the community, the people who are chipping away incrementally, every day, on this issue, who are often ignored. And, like I said, bringing those people into the station for once is proving to be an incredible force. For public television to get that kind of feedback from local programs, as I explained, where we looked at two young people with very different backgrounds applying to UC Berkeley, one young woman--her family had never been to college and that was a plus factor as UC Berkeley was evaluating her application. She worked 18 hours a week, that was a plus factor to the UC Berkeley campus. For a lot of the primarily white, upper-educated audience that the station has, that was news to them. They had never really--they loved that information and that is what public television is all about.

G. Ifill: Dick?

R. Little: I would just like to make an observation about the subject because we work--our project also works very closely with the media. Part of the success of our project is that we have many different kinds of partners and partner organizations. And the media is part of that. My observation is that we're getting a lot of good civic journalism kinds of work done--the kind that I think your project represents and I work with Robin Hickman, who you work with at KTCA in St. Paul. But I think where the media has yet to go is, they're doing it very well through their own specialized civic journalism projects but it is not pervading the media organization as a whole. So, when we have held forums out in the community we've had great difficulty in getting a response from KTCA to come out and be a partner with us in that. When we get--they will invite us down to their station for something that they'll put together where they're in charge of it. But I think that they still are on uneasy ground when they have to share that power with other groups and then maybe come out and collaborate on something that was not so much of a civic journalism project but a civic engagement project that came from other than the media. So, I would just make that observation.

G. Ifill: I saw a hand--I see a lot of hands. I'm going to actually just take two more questions. I'll start with the gentleman here and then this woman here.

Participant: I noticed a problem when you have dialogue on race relations and that is this extreme information--I guess, extreme asymmetry in terms of the dominant view of race is it's not a problem and--or something's wrong with the people who are not the dominant people, who are not in power, who are not white. So people who raise issues of race are looked at as the problem. I'm wondering, how do you deal with that? Because when you have serious, frank discussion on race you need to have both parties open to discuss how they really feel. Do you really get that? I'm very cynical as to the levels of honesty.

G. Ifill: We can tell. [Laughter] Who wants to tackle that?

R. Little: I'll start. I think part of it is that we've got to frame it in terms of the well-being of the whole community. There are differences and, actually, I think one of the things that's coming out in the community circle conversations is the other way around, that the dominant society has been the problem if you want to talk about what is the problem. We try to get away from blame or--and I know what you're talking about in terms of how that--they are the problem. And we talk a little bit about that in the--that comes out in the conversations. But we really are bringing people together emphasizing the notion that we need to start building a whole community and the notion that Eleanor Holmes Norton, I think, really got across well, which is that we've got two societies. We've got different worlds and somehow or another we've got to figure out how we cross some of those boundaries.

The other thing that we do to keep the conversation clear about that issue is that all of our facilitators--it's not necessarily the message that they're there to preach this but all of our facilitators, that we use in the project, get in-depth training on understanding community and institutional racism from a number of organizations that are really well-versed in this. I don't know if you're familiar with the Crossroads Ministry or the Minnesota Churches Anti-Racism Initiative or the People's Institute down in New Orleans. We use these resources so that there's an in-depth understanding of this by the facilitators so when these kinds of questions come up in the discussions they can deepen the conversation by asking the kinds of questions that will get people to reflect on that very issue that you're bringing up.

C. Dorsey: Just to attack it--and I'm sorry to use a black-white paradigm analogy but during the ?80s it was very popular, particularly among African-American youth, to wear shirts and hats that said "It's a Black Thing, You Wouldn't Understand." While it's true that many won't understand it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. And the problem therefore becomes one of both the dominant and the inferior groups. But when it comes to dialogue, sitting around a roundtable and just talking about your pain and your feelings and your hurt is very likely not going to make the breakthroughs that are necessary for change to really take root.

You know, what we do with our students, for example, is not start off the program telling them things are bad for blacks and things are bad for Jews and you ought to change. We let them live it. We let them see what's going on in America, in various circumstances and environments, and make the decisions for themselves. We can't underestimate that people who have that fundamental desire to see things more clearly can understand information if it's presented to them in such a way that they can assimilate it into their own experiences.

So, I share your sort of skepticism about dialogue groups that convene once a month to just talk about things. It needs to be something a little bit more in-depth that goes to the root of really understanding someone else before you can make those changes.

G. Ifill: Last question.

Participant: Sort of a follow-up to what you just said--

G. Ifill: We have a mic coming your way so everyone can hear.

Participant: Following up on what you were saying, when you work with teenagers, how do you go about selecting the kids that you pick? Because I would imagine that they are very excited about getting involved in a program like this and probably underestimate what's involved--

C. Dorsey: Definitely.

Participant: --either because of the time commitment, you know, the first time it's a Sunday and there's an exam on Monday, do half your kids want to drop out? Do half of them drop out? You know, how do you get them and how do you keep them?

C. Dorsey: All right. A lot of people are attracted to the program for many different reasons. You know, a lot of our kids think that they are already converted, they are already the choir. You know, they believe in open and free society and all that jazz. We find out they don't. They have deep-seated stereotypes underneath that, all very common out in society. That's what we love. We recruit openly at every school, church, synagogue, youth organization, in the D.C. metro area. The only way we determine that they are able to deal with the rigors of the program is by a four-page application and a personal interview.

You know, I can't say enough about meeting with someone face-to-face to really tell whether or not they're doing this for their college resume, whether their parents told them to do it, or whether they really mean to do it. As far as people sticking with it and not dropping out, in the five years that we've done this no student has ever dropped out. There have been a couple of students who couldn't complete all the rigors of the program and were asked to leave so that someone else could have the opportunity. But no one has said, this is not for me, I'm finishing it. Because, you know, they think in the beginning, oh, this is going to be an interesting thing. But as they go on, each step of the program, they really see changes in their life that they're proud of and they're proud of the people that they become at the end compared to where they are in the beginning. It's a wonderful thing to see.

G. Ifill: A wonderful thing. Well, Joyce gets the prerogative so she gets to ask one more question.

J. Ladner: I wanted to ask Judith, how difficult was it to get Oprah Winfrey to become your national spokesperson? And what has been the difference since she took on the role? I believe I read someplace that she is donating the royalties from her exercise video to A Better Chance.

J. Berry Griffin: It was fairly difficult to get to her and then we were given, I think, 15 minutes to talk with her. I just had the feeling that if I could just get there, and sit down and look in her eyes, I would be able to convince her that she had to help us. So after two and a half hours she finally turned to me and said, would you like me to be your national spokesperson? And I said, yeah, that would be a great idea.

Her involvement with us has really made a tremendous change in the organization. I think primarily because we had gone as far as we could go with the resources that we had. The dreams that we had to expand and the things that we wanted to do had been established. We had been able to get pro bono help from McKinsey and Company to give us a planning statement. We had changed our board to be able to do some of the things we needed to do. But we needed that one little kick into the next level. We talked about ourselves as being in a spin cycle, that we couldn't break out.

The appearance on the Oprah show, that one and then a subsequent one where she presented me with a check for $1.2 million--in front of the world, I could not believe it. It was--it has meant a great deal to us. Not only the finances but the issue that somebody who has the wherewithal to help or do something with anyone would choose our organization to work with has been great. Our students have been helped to understand what we keep saying to them, that they're not complete human beings unless they learn to give back as well as all the other stuff that they've done. And, of course, she is the ultimate example of giving back. So, people call us all the time having seen something or heard something. It has made a wonderful difference and I would hope that other celebrities, such as Oprah, would choose something like A Better Chance to really work with because the difference is enormous. I can't even begin to describe to you what it's done.

G. Ifill: Please thank our four panelists: Christian Dorsey, Judith Berry Griffin, Yvette Martinez, and Dick Little. [Applause] There is additional reading material about their programs in the back outside and we're going to ask you to take a five-minute break and then return for the next session. Thank you very much.

[Off mic conversations]

C. Foreman: Before I introduce the moderator for the next panel, I wanted to take this opportunity, as the son of a schoolteacher from Baltimore, to put in my own pitch for something that I think we all know intuitively but haven't really mentioned explicitly and I thought we ought to make it explicit. That is, something that came to me as I watching "60 Minutes," I guess about three weeks ago, and I saw a profile of media magnate Robert Johnson of Black Entertainment Television, local entrepreneur, businessman, very successful person. I certainly don't want to be disparaging of Mr. Johnson, particularly since the Brookings Institution--well, first of all, because he is a very successful gentleman and I'm very proud of him as an African American and secondly, I don't want to be disparaging of anyone who might someday be a source of revenue for this institution. [Laughter]

But I caught in passing something that I thought was rather striking and I thought I would bring it up here, which was the statistic that African Americans watch 30 percent more television than other Americans. I thought that was striking because I think it is important to emphasize something that, as I said before, all of us know or accept--certainly in an institution like this we accept it and I think all of you do too--and that is the importance of something that I once heard Kenneth Clark [sp], the eminent psychologist, talk about by way of a prescription for our black children some years ago.

Kenneth Clark, asked what he would recommend for black children on a macro-level and micro-level basis, had one thing to say on this particular occasion: get them to read. I think we need to emphasize that. It's something that's so obvious and so straightforward that we forget it sometimes. Reading enhances opportunity. Reading raises income. Reading reduces isolation. Reading fertilizes the mind's capacity for critical and analytic thought. Reading is essential for anyone who wants to write. Reading is a buffer against pain. Reading provides armor against racism. And reading--if I may invoke my friend and mentor, James Q. Wilson--reading, or at least the right kind of reading, can build character.

I want to introduce to you a reader. Juan Williams, a reader and a writer, graduate of Haverford College, started his career at The Washington Post in 1977. Evolved through the years as a White House correspondent and an editorial writer and columnist. He is a regular contributor of Fox "Sunday Morning News," CNN "Crossfire," and other programs. He is the author of the acclaimed book, Eyes on the Prize, which as most of you know was the companion volume to the much acclaimed series, "Eyes on the Prize," a few years ago. His most recent book, of course, is the riveting biography of Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, entitled Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. It is my pleasure to introduce our moderator for this panel, Juan Williams.

[Applause]

J. Williams: Thank you very much, Chris. It's a pleasure for me to be here this morning and have the opportunity to moderate this panel, "Race in America: An Overview." We'll be hearing from Orlando Patterson, professor of sociology at Harvard. From Elijah Anderson, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania where my daughter will soon be attending, so, Elijah, look out for her. My hero, Bill Raspberry, the columnist at The Washington Post. And Elaine Jones of the Legal Defense Fund who's been delayed but I'm sure will soon be joining us.

One of the interesting aspects of having such an illustrious group of people to talk about race in terms of an overview, here this morning, is that it seems to me that we have a moment in time, a moment in history to consider, in terms of options, in terms of solutions--some of which we heard about in the previous panel. In doing Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, I came across a solution that was put forward earlier in the century. We've had many solutions put forward, everything from people like Marshall, who followed the legal track, to those who were more interested in protest, in marching, in sit-ins. But one of the quirkier solutions ever put forward was put forward by Walter White who was head of the NAACP in the middle of the century. Walter White at one point wrote an article that appeared in Life magazine saying that he had discovered a chemical--a chemical--that would turn black people white. And he suggested, with quotes from many illustrious black Americans, that maybe this was the cure, the solution to all of America's racial ills.

It reminds me of a joke I once heard about two black men walking down the street. One of them sees a sign and the sign says, "Black Men Turned White, 99¢." So one guy says to the other, "this is great, this is wonderful!" He says, "I've got a dollar, I'm going to try it." The other guy says, "well, I don't have a dollar, I only have 98¢." So the other guys says, "well, look, brother, I'll tell you what, I'll go in and when I come out I'll give you the change and you can go in." So the first guy goes in. He comes out and, in fact, it worked. He has turned white. So the other brother says to him, "well, give me the penny, give me the penny." And the guy says, "you'd better go get a job, boy." [Laughter]

Solutions to race relations and problems, as you can tell, vary by time and place. And often have been put in terms of black-white relations. Today there still are, in terms of black-white relations, solutions that need to be considered, that have to be reviewed. But increasingly, race relations are a very complex subject impacted by everything from economics to shifting demographics to immigration to political considerations. And that's why we've drawn together people here this morning who really span the range of studies, of issues, of ability in looking at the racial issue at the end of the century.

So, let me start by saying that each of the panelists will speak for about five to seven minutes, after which time we will sit here at this table and I will go about pestering and bothering and asking questions about some of the remarks that they have made during their presentations. We're going to go in this order: Orlando Patterson, Elijah Anderson, Bill Raspberry, and Elaine Jones.

Let me start by introducing Elijah Anderson who is the Charles and William L. Day Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. You should know that Mr. Anderson is the author of what I consider a truly important book called Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in Urban America [sic]. It was published in 1990 and I would recommend it to you if you haven't taken a look at it. He was honored for that work with a Robert E. Park Award by the American Sociological Association. He is the author of the forthcoming Code of the Street, which will be published in August by Norton. Please welcome Mr. Anderson.

E. Anderson: Good morning, it's good to be here. Rosa Parks' decision not to move from her seat in the front of that Montgomery bus began a new day for black Americans. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. took over and formed a bus boycott that brought the city and the bus company to its knees, Negroes around the country took careful note. This victory launched the modern civil rights movement, sit-ins and marches took place throughout the south. Blacks in the north later joined in the ranks as Reverend King marched through hostile white neighborhoods of Chicago. Shortly, in Oakland, the Black Panthers began following the police around with unloaded guns. They called their action, patrolling the police, whom they considered an occupying force in the black community. The symbolic impact of all this was tremendous. These armed, young black men, following and watching the police, presented themselves as symbols of black identity. And young blacks schooled in passive resistance took special note.

The urban ghettoes around the country began to boil. Many of the most alienated blacks began to riot. Watts exploded. Significantly, their assaults were primarily against property and not other communities. These were race riots in the traditional sense--these were not race riots in the traditional sense, they were property riots. This form of social protest, as Tom Hayden [sp] called it, or rioting for fun and profit, as Edward Banfield called it, caught on all around the country. San Francisco burned. Detroit burned. Chicago burned. Cleveland burned. South Bend burned. And Ben Johnson, whom I knew from the old days, literally worked to cool down the fires. Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., all these places had their riots.

While many were willing to define these riots as riff-raff opportunism, others viewed them as full blown urban rebellions. Young leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were accused of crossing state lines to incite these riots. Meanwhile, blacks around the country, most of whom did not engage in rioting, underwent a (social learning?) process. In particular, the young urban black population moved away from a moderate, even docile, presentation of self and assumed a more aggressive and militant posture. Many moved from integrationist and accommodationist orientations toward black cultural nationalism, extolling the virtues of blackness and identifying more closely with their African heritage. This view spread throughout the cities and even into isolated rural areas. Black leaders, locally as well as nationally, were required to inspect their views and postures on race and politics.

While many disparate theories and opinions and ideologies existed and competed within the black community, one commonly held proposition exhorted blacks not only to look inwardly and take stock of themselves but also to value themselves and their blackness in the face of white oppression. The most extreme elements encouraged blacks toward separatism and racial particularism. From this emerged a new sense of racial pride. Many black leaders joined the follower in pursuit.

Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad were fired up. And Jesse Jackson exhorted his followers, on numerous occasions, to say out loud, I am a man, I may be poor but I am somebody. A best-selling record by James Brown was entitled "I'm Black and I'm Proud." Young blacks often accepted this theme as a kind of license to be (?) and to loosen the bonds of dominant social institutions throwing out the symbolic forms such as conventional dress and hairstyles. Formal and informal agencies of social control, socialization, came into question. Many young black people began to dispute the authority of the police, educators, their elders, and others.

To be sure, there were many blacks, usually of middle income status or at least simply employed, who represented the old school, old guard. They felt a commitment to the status quo, if not the status quo ante, especially in the light of the often caustic assaults against it. They were the ones who often prided themselves on their own decency and respectability. They often felt relatively successful, that they'd done all right in their place, the old way. They were proud and felt fine, some would say, in their place.

Their place had been achieved through a large amount of hard work in menial jobs in the manufacturing sector, through accommodation and even docility, viewed from the perspective of the now critical young. To many this was the way they had to survive in the face of racial prejudice and persistent discrimination. Now the young militant blacks castigated the old for being toms, for being repressed and even obsequious in the presence of whites. They saw these older blacks as being too constrained to speak up for their rights. The old school tolerated treatment that younger blacks said they would not endure but later, as the movement persisted, even they began to come around infusing the movement with a certain legitimacy. Once they understood, the older, more established members of the black community began to accept being black rather than Negro. Many quieted their call for the old "go slow" approach to social change and muted their criticism of the younger people, thinking maybe they've got something to say.

But the militants continued to chastise the olders, often blaming them and their docility for the inequities currently at work in society. They exhorted the old, stand up and be a man. Among themselves they would say, concerning the white problem, I wouldn't take that stuff, I would hit back. While many older blacks were thought to believe this too, it took the younger militant people to give it the fullest expression consistently.

Dashikis appeared and the afro became the fashionable black hairstyle, taking on even political significance. And special handshakes were developed, elaborated and used by young blacks to show group solidarity and commitment to the movement. The clenched fist salute became a symbolic greeting among blacks even of only casual and passing acquaintances. At the same time, a red, black and green nationalist flag became a symbol of black commune, if not black nationhood.

This change in attitude--the emerging militancy--encouraged, even required, blacks in general to re-inspect their political and social values, to reexamine their relationships with whites, especially whites on the job or in school, with whom we often have the closest personal contact. As blacks began looking at themselves, many young leaders worked hard at reevaluation and revision of their self-concepts, adjusting with the demands of the movement.

Numerous issues and questions presented themselves, resolutions of which involved not only an inspection of self but also attention to black group position in relation to that of other groups of the social order. For young militant blacks, the most blameworthy were not only a specific ethnic group, or even a particular class, but whites in general and blacks who allowed themselves to be oppressed.

Black chauvinism ruled, as Orlando Patterson documented. Correspondingly, the white allies of the movement often found themselves in difficult positions. Many who [Inaudible] black opportunity were faced with a young black constituency that publicly rejected anything associated with white America, especially white authority. Lines hardened, people became polarized because of racially particularistic black attitudes as well as many, deeply engrained white prejudices. Racial integration was put on a backburner. The ethos of black separatism became more attractive to many young blacks.

Increasingly, social mobility and middle-class orientations were viewed as white and, thus, not to be (harbored?) let alone emulated. In their confused attempts to be black, many young blacks proudly and often affectedly spoke black English and stigmatized those who spoke standard English, labeling it as the language of oppression. At times, education itself came under attack as white. The most militant proudly embraced blackness, everything black was praised and everything symbolic of white society was eschewed, if not condemned outright. Intolerance and hostility surfaced in public encounters with whites and white liberals became increasingly disenchanted with the movement.

Nonetheless, the riots and the turmoil and the geopolitical situation, white liberal allies of blacks turned their attention to pushing for change in the white community and brought a lot of pressure to bear on the government to do something. The now blatant lack of--

[TAPE CHANGE]

E. Anderson: [cont]--civil disorder and riots ensued. It was in this context that President Johnson pressed Congress for affirmative action so as to incorporate blacks into American society. His purpose was to deliver on the promise of America. A form of reparations, affirmative action was to undo the bonds of social and economic exclusion that were the result of centuries of negative action.

However, the mandated inclusion of blacks had consequences for the social order that were not immediately recognized. The American ideology of merit and egalitarianism, the belief that anyone could get ahead on the basis of talent and hard work, was shaken. This opened a Pandora's box of claims against the system from representatives of other groups that felt excluded. Those who would make the most effective claims were white women, Hispanics, Native Americans and, increasingly, new immigrants. But, as a result, policies that were originally directed exclusively at blacks--at second-class citizens locked away in ghettos--were modified through the political process so that affirmative action was transformed into a policy for the attainment of diversity through the inclusion of many groups. This was the political price required for black incorporation.

As affirmative action policies provided blacks with representation in the workplace, people appeared in jobs that had previously been restricted to white people, including low-skill jobs such as grocery checkout people and bank tellers. Students of color appeared at universities that had been bastions of white privilege. Even television commercials began to show blacks with Excedrin headaches. The effect was the easing of racial tensions, of the bitterness and anger that had once been seen in the ghetto communities and had preceded the riots and the marches.

With the advent of such initiatives, in the wake of affirmative action, including fair-housing laws and set-asides, many people believed that the system had opened up and the black middle class grew. As a result, however, a split began to develop between the black middle class and the poor. Affirmative action benefited primarily middle class blacks but did little for the persistently poor. At the same time, the persistently poor were buffeted by winds of economic change as a result of the industrialization and the growth of the global economy. Factories in inner city neighborhoods began closing down and moving to the suburbs and rural America or to developing countries.

Predominately white satellite cities formed and grew, leaving inner city communities increasingly destitute, partly in response to the decreasing quality of urban life. And partly as a result of the general social trends of the middle class, black as well as white began leaving the cities, further undermining the viability of the inner city economy. The underground economy, with its cottage industries of drugs and violence, picked up the slack. And an entrenched, welfare culture also emerged as an alternative to inadequate, mainstream social and economic arrangements.

A particularly important aspect of the debate over affirmative action is the implications for race relations. Affirmative action is a tool to incorporate black citizens as full citizens in American society. The cornerstone of the process of incorporation was the dismantling of segregation but that was only the beginning. Society must continue to address the problems of inequity that still cause alienation among those who cannot get a foothold in the occupation structure and those who hit the glass ceilings. Without affirmative action, the recently created black middle class would shrink.

It is also important to understand that the incorporation of blacks into the middle class has a ripple effect. Most middle class blacks continue to have social connections with relatives and friends who are still among the ghetto poor. And those who make it are, thus, potent role models for those in the inner city who have the option of striving for success either in mainstream society or on street in the world of drug dealers and other, often armed, hustlers. Their example works to hold in check the destructive forces that discrimination and alienation engender by allowing blacks to continue to dream for a place in the system for themselves and for their children.

At the same time, it is important to extend the ethic of incorporation directly to those still in the ghetto. Cases such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York and Dante Dawson in Philadelphia--this could go on and on with people being shot and harmed by the police in various places around this country--work to undermine, if not invalidate, the model of inclusion that middle class blacks represent. And the racial profiling that has been shown to occur on the highways of New Jersey directly fuels disaffection of all black people. One wonders how the attitudes underlying the state troopers' actions are expressed in the workplace and various other areas of American life.

It is clear that race relations in America still have a long way to go. In the words of Robert Kennedy, we can do better. Thank you.

[Applause]

J. Williams: Thank you very much, Elijah. Now that we've heard from the anthropologist, I'd like to bring forward a sociologist, Orlando Patterson, who is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Mr. Anderson [sic] explored the problems of race and ethnicity cross-nationally in his 1977 book Ethnic Chauvinism: the Reactionary Impulse. The first of a two-volume history, sociology of freedom, entitled Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1991. He's presently completing the second volume of that series and this time will deal with the modern world. At the same time, he's shifting the focus of his research to contemporary America with a special emphasis on the intersecting problems of race, immigration, and multiculturalism. Please welcome Orlando Patterson.

[Applause]

O. Patterson: Thank you. It's impossible to say anything meaningful in seven minutes so I'm going to take more like ten or fifteen minutes, following the example of the previous speaker. [Laughter]

We're invited here to explore new approaches to bridging the divide and that's what I'm going to very briefly attempt to do. First of all, what's the basic problem? The basic problem facing Afro-Americans now is one of isolation: social isolation, spatial isolation, cultural isolation, informational isolation reflected in the skill gap, the test-score gap. That isolation is both external and internal. It's external, reflected in the still growing segregation of Afro-Americans including middle class Afro-Americans. It's social in the sense that Afro-Americans are still cut off from crucial networks, social capital, that are essential for success in this society.

Externally, too, they're cut off from the cultural capital. This is ironic, in many ways, in light of the fact that Afro-Americans have contributed extraordinarily to the broader expressive aspects of the culture--the popular culture and many areas of the elite culture. One should not, however, mistake that really unusual civilizational role with the fact that they are nonetheless isolated from other areas of the culture, what one may call the tacit culture, the sort of knowledge of patterns of child-rearing, modes of interaction. The kind of knowledge which comes from intimate involvement with (success?) culture.

But they're also internally isolated. What do I mean by that? I mean, contrary to the popular view which Afro-Americans put out about themselves--they have soul, that is true but, you know, you can have a lot of soul and still be isolated. Most of life is the morning after. [Laughter] Afro-Americans are, quite simply, the most isolated and unpartnered group of people. Afro-Americans are the loneliest group of Americans, believe it or not. And by that I mean they're unpartnered, they'll spend most of their lives isolated, alone, as adults. This is due to the low marriage rate, the lowest among all groups in America. When they do get married they have the highest rate of divorce and when they divorce they have the lowest rate of remarriage, resulting in the fact that the typical Afro-American will spend most of his adult life alone. So they are isolated on an individual basis from each other as well as isolated as a group from the broader culture. That's a fundamental problem.

In exploring new ways, we should address these problems. The kind of ways we've explored before focused on problems of discrimination which still persist, the external sort of problems of integration in the work force. No denying that those problems, while the country has sort of done a great deal, as I tried to document in The Ordeal of Integration, more to be done. But, in exploring new approaches, in exploring the fundamental, nagging, persistent problems--I think what I just laid out, the problems of isolation, the critical ones. And in asking about new approaches we should ask how we solve those problems.

Well, in asking how we address the problem of isolation, both external and internal, we should begin with some broad, strategic questions. Are we going to pursue essentially an identity-enhancing approach which--Elijah just emphasized the background to that development, a quite understandable one. Or, are we going to emphasize integration? This is critical. In a way this particular problem came to the fore of the NAACP last year over the question of what position they're going to take on school integration. But it's broader than that because there's a sense in which Afro-Americans are now deeply divided about which direction they want to go. Do they want to go in the identity path, the go-it-alone path or, at any rate, one which emphasizes more separate development? Or one which emphasizes integration? And by integration one means integration in every sense: economic, social, cultural and physical.

Secondly, a second broad kind of question which one has to begin by asking has to do with whether one is going to recognize, without denying the structural and economic problems but recognize, the cultural behavioral aspect of the problem as opposed to the structural one. The two are not incompatible but I think it's important. America is the only country where when one mentions culture everyone reaches for their revolver, symbolically anyway. Or fails to recognize that it is not conservative to point out the ways in which a disadvantaged group victimizes itself.

When I lived in Britain, almost everyone--I moved among left-wing circles, it was common, it was common that, you know, the working classes get nixed not only externally in terms of class oppression, and so on, but that they also victimize themselves. One of the standard, classic works in the left-wing dialogue on British working classes in Britain is Willis's book, Learning to Labor. Now, that's a work about how British working class, in a sense by their own behaviors, their own notions of masculinity, and so on, develop notions in which they end up making themselves good, little working-class lads....

When I try to--or any other one attempts that kind of analysis, that is, they go beyond the external constraints to, if you like, the internal constraints--a pattern of self-victimization--one tends to be condemned immediately as a reactionary. Now, are we going to get away from that ridiculous rhetoric or not? This is one of the fundamental questions.

The third, fundamental strategic question you have to ask, if you're going to have any kind of new approach, is whether we're going to move from a place-oriented to a people-oriented one? That is a strategy. That is whether we're going to continue emphasizing the fact that Afro-Americans somehow belong to certain areas and that any kind of planning and strategy involves how can we get the jobs to where they are, how can we improve the ghetto. The assumption being that the ghettos are always going to be there. The assumption being that Afro-Americans are always destined to live in a certain place so you bring in enterprise zones, and so on. Are we going to continue with that kind of strategy? Or are we going to think that perhaps, maybe, Afro-Americans might do what other Americans have done in the past, which is to go where the jobs are, which is too move out, which is to spread out within the broader population, to integrate.

These are the basic kind of questions you're going to ask if you're going to go beyond the usual kind of issues which--look, we're wasting your time. You guys here at Brookings have spent years and years looking at the (old?) problem and the only ways of solving them. I'm suggesting that these are the kinds of questions you're going to have to start asking if you want to have any kind of new approaches. Otherwise we're wasting time here. Okay? [Laughter]

Now, with those kind of strategic questions, where do we go? What kind of approach--policies--new policies might be in the offing? Well, I distinguish between short-term, medium-term, long-term. But I'll just throw them out helter-skelter. New approaches to schooling: as one of the short-term or one of the more--the (processes) which we could begin pretty soon. Starting earlier, extending the school year and day, and, more important, most important of all, broadening the function of school. I think if we're going to solve the problems of low-class Afro-American kids we just have to accept the fact that there's a serious problem of child-rearing, for all sorts of complex reasons which you know about here. And, while surely we will continue with the kind of support strategies to help families--the ones that exist--to bring up their kids, we have to consider a more radical approach to schooling and to other ways of our rescuing kids if we are not to lose a whole generation. With respect to school, I suggest that we go beyond counseling to think of a school in which a teacher is a kind of co-parent, in which schools are seen, in fact, as not just educating in a formal sense but also very much involved with the child-rearing process.

Beyond that, secondly, I want to propose beginning to work on the possibility of a radical new form of--way of dealing with the large number of children who are wards of the state, an increasing number of kids who simply are not being parented. There's people aware of the problem and you've had old-fashioned suggestions about orphanages and so on. I think instead of laughing at these proposals one should think that they're addressing a problem. A problem with a possible radical solution, something like a sort of American version of a kibbutzian arrangement in which men and women--of course, adult men and women--are trained in parenting, are brought into a rather radical kind of arrangement the details of which I actually explored in a paper I wrote many years ago and have gone back to. But something of this nature is going to be essential if we are not to lose a whole generation of kids.

Third, in keeping with all of this, again, easier strategies--really shift those strategies on trans-racial, trans-ethnic adoption. It really is a ridiculous situation we're in right now where trans-racial adoption is defined as genocide of some sort. Afro-Americans in particular have got to rethink this seriously. Of course, it's consistent with the idea of greater incorporation so any laws against such adoptions should be removed and what's more there should be positive incentive towards this on a massive scale.

Fourth, a massive, national, nation-wide extension of the (go through?) program in Chicago, programs of that nature in which the shift--we've got a shift away from concentrating on the ghettos and more moving people from the ghettos to the communities, to the areas--the suburban areas where jobs still exist, moderately decent jobs for people with low skills. It worked in the case of (go through?) and it worked, of all places, in Chicago which is hyper-segregated and which is supposed to have the highest concentration of racists in the country. A similar kind of program in all the major cities I think would go a long way towards solving part of the problem, by no means all of it. And would be consistent with this shift towards people and away from place.

Fifth, immigration policy. I'm an immigrant. I love America's great tradition of immigration. I'm not calling for any radical change in immigration but I'm saying it's absurd, it's absolutely absurd that we're flooding the low-income labor market with unskilled immigrants. Why is America introducing to precisely areas where Afro-American, low-income people exist large numbers of illegal immigrants? We should have laws. We should have more sensible immigration policy which doesn't (hurt?) the program by any means. I want to see more people of color coming in here. I mean, I think it's good for the country that you have all those, you know, Indian and Asian members of the elite now in Silicon Valley and so on. But there's really no need to flood the labor market of our low-income Afro-Americans. Strict policies which enforce laws against illegal immigrants as well as a more sensible approach to bringing unskilled labor. It's been shown by Woorhaus [sp] and others now what every economist may say about the net effects, that this negatively influences the wages of Afro-Americans.

Sixth, a shift from identity politics to a more coalitional one. Look, there was a time when we needed this. There was a time when we needed to see people of color in the Congress and so on. We've done that, we've solved that problem. I think we're in a situation now where the system is working on behalf of the elite against the interest of the masses. It's been shown, in repeated studies, that it's always in the interest of Afro-Americans, the mass of Afro-Americans, to be in a swing-vote situation in which they're voting for candidates--whether white or black or Asian American or what have you--in which they are the critical swing vote rather than be concentrated, gerrymandered into separate seats. The result of that is good for the elite who are elected. You elect three or four new members of the elite but, in fact, usually at the expense of the mass of people as we saw in Georgia.

I think that's sort of semi-symptomatic of the broader problem of the need to shift thinking away from an emphasis which benefits mainly the middle class. Identity politics and identity emphasis promotes the interests of the middle class. It doesn't necessarily promote the interests of the mass of people. And, by the way, the mass of people know this.

We've got to separate the poverty agenda from the race agenda. We don't know how we got into this (lock?). Terrible. As late as the early ?60s when people talked about poverty they meant poverty as a national problem, quite rightly so, most poor people are white. I mean, they think about Appalachia, they think about other places. And so a guy in Congress won't bracket it as some special kind of program for a special group, it was a national problem. That changed somewhere about 1970 and has remained--mention the word, do a free association anytime with anyone on the street. Say, poverty, what word comes to your mind? Blackness. Even though the vast majority of people who are poor are not black. We've got ourselves into this situation where we've targeted--for good reasons early on but now reasons which are no longer necessary. We've got to shift from that if we're really serious.

Afro-Americans some must--I have two more. We've got--this is an internal one, government can't do much about this but some way or the other Afro-Americans have got to start marrying each other more frequently. [Laughs] It's ridiculous to have to say this now but it's just a fact. We are the most unpartnered group of people in the world. We've turned the causal direction around by saying poverty causes this, ridiculous! If poverty was the cause of this problem then most of the world's people would be unpartnered since most of the world's people are poorer than Afro-Americans. The reason poverty is involved, therefore, is because we're unpartnered. Take two people, two poor people in the streets in Washington city, you know, on the poverty line, getting welfare--alone, they're out on the streets. Pool their resources, simple economies of scale, they can find shelter. They can support each other emotionally. It's bad being unpartnered. It's bad for mothers who are bringing up kids alone. It's bad for the kids who often end up as delinquents. Most of the studies of gangs show that the reason why kids end up in gangs is they're looking for family. Every sociological study, why are you in a gang? It's family. It's bad for men. One reason for the high crime rate among men is that they don't have women controlling them. Marriages are important for grown men. Marriages are absolutely important for me. Or partnered--it doesn't matter, call it what you want, partnered, being partnered, it prevents--women prevent men from getting into high-risk behavior. You control from marriage and in fact you can reduce the crime rate among blacks by something like 80 percent. Somehow Afro-Americans have just got to start marrying each other and when they divorce, as the rest of the nation will do--that's okay, marriages do break up, people have problems--they should remarry.

Now, this again has nothing to do with poverty. Do the simple statistics, there's no relationship between the propensity to marry and income among Afro-American men. High-income men behave in the same way as low-income men. The problem is not poverty or income, it's the other way around. It's because people are unmarried why they're poor.

Finally, they should marry each other but I think Afro-Americans should out-marry more. They're the only group of Americans who have not joined the great national process of intermarrying, of sharing what I call cultural dowries. What you share when you marry someone in your (out?) group is that you widen your networks, you widen your range of cultural contacts. What do you think happens when a Jewish person marries an Italian-American? I mean, you see it in a Woody Allen movie. But a lot more is going on there, they're acquiring the (tacit?) culture of the other group. Everybody knows this. The Asians know this, that's why they're out-marrying over 50 percent. The Latinos know this. Afro-Americans are the only group in the history of the nation that doesn't join in this process. They should start.

[Applause]

J. Williams: Now that's energy for you. [Laughter] Now, you know, you can see that I was sitting there, I was being very, very polite to our academic visitors, our sociologists and our anthropologists. But unfortunately for the two speakers yet to come, my behavior pattern will now shift. In fact, we are literally--if you're thinking in TV terms--going to go from PBS to headline news because we're going to have summary presentations. Our next speaker, who's going to try to hang in there for five to seven minutes, in part because he's a journalist and he knows how to keep it tight, is William Raspberry. My friend, my colleague, my hero, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the hometown paper, The Washington Post. His work has won numerous journalistic awards but I think what many of you in this audience might not know is that since 1995, in addition to writing his column twice a week, Bill Raspberry has been a chaired professor of public policy at Duke University. And has told me that he enjoys teaching and enjoys the academic life greatly--putting the fear of god into all his readers and to his colleagues and friends at The Washington Post. Bill, please join us.

[Applause]

W. Raspberry: Eli Anderson never promised that his remarks would be short. They weren't. Orlando promised that his would not be. They weren't. I promise you that mine will be shorter than both of them put together. [Laughter]

Let me, so I don't run on too long, do some judicious stealing. I was fascinated by Eli's recounting of our learning, early in the sixties, of coming to feel that we were licensed to be black. We still feel licensed to be black and we remind ourselves of that license in countless ways. But it seems to me we have not always felt licensed to be American. And I think that may account for some of the difficulties we will be talking about today.

What do I mean by that? Think of America as comprising a group of racial and ethnic and religious islands. Assimilation--Americanization in this analogy is the act of leaving the islands and joining the main. We've watched over the years as residents of one island after another go through this process. The Irish island, the German island, the Scandinavian islands, the Mediterranean islands, all have become essentially depopulated. They remain, if at all, as a sort of vacation home to visit on special occasions like St. Patrick's Day or Columbus Day, Oktoberfest. Go get renewed, sample the food and the beverages, the sights, sounds, smells, a little bit of the language, and then come quickly back to the mainland.

This process hasn't always been as encouraging as it might have been, however. After all, most of the depopulation we've seen was of islands with European labels. Which is to say, islands populated by people with white skins and whose white skins made them largely indistinguishable, one from another. But in recent years, we've been seeing the gradual depopulation of islands bearing such labels as Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese, islands whose inhabitants do have a distinctive non-white look. We still see the Chinatowns, of course, but we imagine they exist primarily for the old folk and to add a little local color, you know, and some good restaurants and to do their thing on the Chinese New Year. But we also imagine that when the old folk die so will these particular ethnic islands die.

Why don't we believe the same thing can happen for us or will happen for us? Well, sometimes we do believe it and act as thought we believe it. And sometimes, with equal and ample justification, we don't believe it. We look at a Clinton administration, a Clinton cabinet, we look at the number of African Americans in the Congress, we look at those successful individuals for whom it's enough to mention only a first name--Oprah, Vernon, Colin, Michael--and we dare a tinge of optimism. But then--I mean, I was looking just yesterday at a poll that the Shell Oil Company people just commissioned. It looked at a lot of things about the morality and all those things in America, but they asked one question of this broad section of Americans, who is it you look to to set moral standards--high moral and ethical standards? And guess what? The only white person in the top five was the pope. Colin Powell led the list, handily. And then it was Oprah and there was Michael and, you know. So what I'm saying is sometimes we do dare be a little optimistic about where we are and where are likely to be going. But then we look at the worsening condition of our inner cities, the slaughter of our children, sometimes at the hands of our children, sometimes at the hands of outsiders. God, do we welcome it when it happens at the hands of outsiders, makes us feel a little more innocent, doesn't it? And we wonder if our progress is an illusion. The thing about wondering whether the progress is illusory is that it may kill the energy and the courage you have to try to change things, to try to get where you sometimes you think you need to go.

Orlando mentioned spending some time in Britain and I remember being struck, on a couple of short visits there, by the Cockney--sort of out of it, not fully measured up, sort of limited to their working-class, or worse, status. And as far as I could see, the only thing that identified them was the way they spoke. And I said, well, why don't they stop speaking that way? They have ample example. I'm there for a week listening to the BBC and introducing myself as [Uses a British accent.] Raspberry. [Laughter] It doesn't take that long. [Laughter] I got over it. But what finally dawned on me is that while the Cockneys are identified by the way they speak and where they live, in the East End, there's also something about reaching out beyond that--you know, the shadow of the valbells (?). It is the fear that you will reach out and not be successful as Eliza Doolittle was but that you will not quite make it and become ridiculous. That you will wind up neither what you were nor what you sought to be and you will simply be nothing and nobody. When that hit me I instantly understood the kids in America's ghettos who refuse to try to become acculturated, to speak well and to become more fully American. Suppose I don't make it? I can cling to--I'm licensed to be what I am. I'm not sure about the license to be what I would--in my deep, deep secret dreams--like to be. It's very powerful for me.

What's happening is more than just the ebb and flow of optimism. It is something fundamental, I think. Suppose that the blacks who have made into the main are a select--even if self-selected--few. One hears it all the time, of course, the system--you know, white America--can let a few blacks in if only to help perpetuate the notion that the system is open. So, you're in--they let a few in. Oh, wow, what is that? Hmmm. It's true that those blacks who do make it tend to be well educated, talented, thoroughly qualified. But is it necessarily the case that all talented blacks who get educated and qualified will be allowed off the island? And if that isn't the case, then will the island--our island--ever achieve depopulation? Worse, it could grow in population and decline in quality at the same time.

Imagine that major league baseball had never had any purpose of real integration but only wanted to admit enough black players to sell us a few tickets and to keep the rest of us from raising hell. You know, suppose they'd gone for diversity instead of real integration. In such a case, would Jackie Robinson and the first dozen black players who followed him out of the old Negro Leagues be heroes? Or would they be traitors for devastating the Negro Leagues?

Some of us are as torn about where we are and what we ought to be doing today as Jackie Robinson must have been when Branch Rickey tapped him to do this thing. He wasn't the greatest. He was very good but he knew he wasn't the best in the Negro Leagues. He was the most tractable, perhaps. He was the one they thought would fit in. And there are one or two of us in this room who found ourselves in that position, being okay, talented, qualified, but chosen as much for that as for the fact that we would fit in. I'm sorry, I won't go on any longer or press this analogy too far.

My point is a small one but I think it's a vital one for understanding some of the attitudes and seemingly contradictory behavior that we from time to time manifest. We don't fully feel licensed to be Americans. And some of us, sensing this denial of license, will pretend we don't want, really, to be Americans anyhow. We are so comfortable being ourselves we won't lay claim to the general culture, the American culture. But we do get a little ticked when we see white people singing the blues, that's ours. Well, you know, I like to lay claim to all of it. I think it's all mine. And I think I've got a bigger claim on the American culture than I have on anything that happened in the shadows of the pyramids. [Applause]

We have our (space?). We've seen the Americanization process taking place, depopulating islands that are newer than ours and no more deserving than ours. And some of us are wondering whether the process will be just a little slower for us or is our island America's indigestible lump. Let's talk about it some.

[Applause]

J. Williams: Thank you very much, Bill, for that presentation. It was powerful. Our next speaker, having now heard from the sociologist, the anthropologist and the journalist, will be a lawyer. Elaine R. Jones, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the nation's oldest education dedicated to fighting for equal rights under law. When Ms. Jones took the helm of the LDF in 1993, she became its first woman leader. She brought with her two decades of experience as a litigator and a civil rights activist, as well as--I think you're going to see shortly--a passion for fairness and equality that dates back to her childhood. Please welcome Elaine Jones.

[Applause]

E. Jones: Thank you, Juan, thank you very much. I have heard my fellow panelists and so I'm ready for the discussion. There's one thing that is clear to me and it's become clearer and clearer as I have been director of the Legal Defense Fund. I am a lawyer, a civil rights lawyer. And I have spent almost the past 30 years in the courtrooms of this country dealing with these issues of race and justice across the spectrum.

I started out with the death penalty. Most African American men were on death row in the prisons of this nation for rape convictions of white females. That's when I became a lawyer, that's what the rule was. Employment, education, political participation. When I listened to Orlando describe how the voting rights act is really--is passe because it only benefits a few black elites who are able to get assured seats and it does nothing for anyone else so we just need to move beyond that. The problem with that is sometimes facts get in the way and, you know, the problem on the voting issue is that we're dealing with--in many segments of the nation--with what is called racially polarized voting. In the south where you have 56 percent of the African-American people living, we still have pockets where race trumps politics. It doesn't have anything to do with the best-qualified candidate, can't see any other issue. You know, this thing about race.

And so in a case like Mississippi where Sonny [sp] Montgomery was in the legislature, he had 44 percent African Americans and voted against every civil rights initiative for the past 25 years. Why? Because race trumped. They didn't care about what the 44 percent thought because it was racially polarized. You know, the 56 percent of the white voting population made sure they elected him every time.

There are real problems that we have to find ways to deal with. Voting rights act is not a panacea. All of these civil rights laws are really transitional in many ways but the question is how do we get from here to there? Now, what my co-panelists have--I've known it but it becomes clearer and clearer, is that those of us who are on the front lines in dealing with the legal system--you know, I wish we didn't have to deal with courts, wish we didn't have to do it because at the time we're litigating the case the issue is already (gone?). It keeps us from being proactive when you have to be reactive or have to use the courts to resolve a problem that we really should be solving in some other arena.

What we learn, though, through these cases is what these problems are and what we need--one of the things we need, we need our academics, we need our scholars closer to us. We need our scholars looking at issues that we see evolving because we need applied thinking, applied thought, so we can be more proactive in the solutions that we're seeking.

The courts. Brown v. Board of Education was an aberration. The courts historically have been a brake, B-R-A-K-E, on the vestment of African Americans in this country. Historically. The courts trumped the 14th Amendment of the Constitution when it was adopted in 1868. It was the 14th Amendment that made black people citizens, not the 13th. We get our constitutional rights through the 14th. And the courts started on that amendment in the 1870s and 1880s, and ran us out of it.

The courts--the same thing that the Supreme Court began in the 1870s and the 1880s, it has revisited in the 1970s and 1980s. The 14th Amendment--

[TAPE CHANGE.]

--was passed to give rights to the newly freed slaves. That's what it was. It applies to everybody. We all have due process and equal justice but it was passed. Cal Sumner introduced it and the 39th Congress passed it to give full citizenship, and all of the rights accorded to white citizens, to the newly freed slaves. Now the court is using that amendment, that was put in the constitution to open up opportunity, to clamp it down. It's using it as an ax. It's saying we now have to--it hasn't said it yet but it's moving in that direction--that--it's moving toward a direction that is being pushed, quote, colorblind. The constitution has never been colorblind. It's not that we want it to get there, but it's not there. It is not now, nor has it ever been, colorblind. Wherever the constitution talks about property, in the original document, it's talking about slavery. And so we have a disconnect between our present and our past. And the whole notion of the role of law--we cannot afford to leave the courts to do what they will with these basic issues of social and human justice.

Now, these issues are complex. And too often they're well-meaning simplistic approaches that put us in jeopardy, in legal jeopardy. Who was it? H.L. Mencken said, when you get a simple, neat solution to a complex problem it's usually wrong. And colorblind is that. It's simple, it's neat, and it's complex and right now it's wrong. Because when we have--we do in this country continue to have color-conscious issues. If you have color-conscious problems often, not always but often, a color-conscious remedy is required. But sometimes in the use of that remedy it's been abused.

Take an example, just a quick example, the Piscataway case in New Jersey. The black teacher, the white teacher, remember? You know, and the black teacher was kept on, the white teacher was fired and the school board said, you know, we did it because of the affirmative action that has never been used before. You know, and so, boom, it's race. On those facts, it goes all the way up, you know, to the Court of Appeals and everybody's indignant. You know, how can you say race when you've got equally qualified people? That's wrong, it's against the American way. You look at that case and you say, no way in hell this case can be won anyway. Even I looking at that case, I say, wait a minute, this abuse of the system. This is not affirmative action. This is not the way it was meant to be applied. Here you have a situation though where the white teacher had the master's degree. You know, the white teacher had superior qualifications. But was that anywhere in the record? Nowhere. Nowhere, because you right away go to the question of race. Don't take time to look at the person. Don't take time to look at the qualifications. We see race first, black teacher, white teacher, affirmative action, boom, black teacher. Ridiculous!

Affirmative action has nothing to do with lack of qualifications, it never has. I mean, it was white judges in the cases who came up with it. I wasn't sitting on any court. White, male judges who saw the wrong in particular fact situations sought ways that the society could be proactive to keep ourselves from getting in a litigation posture. That's why the Supreme Court said, in 1978 in Webber [sp], look, voluntary affirmative action under these guidelines is permissible.

Now, here we go, Berkeley today. Legal Defense Fund, we sued Berkeley last month. Sued them because people get an idea that, all right, there's prop 209. Prop 209 means, oh, we can't use the cookie-cutter approach to race that we've used in the past. You see, we can't use that anymore so, oh, that means no black and brown students. No Filipino, you know, no Latinos, no blacks, because, you know, they are racial minorities and that's using race and we can't use race so they don't get a chance to come to Berkeley.

Well, you look at that and you see Berkeley turning away students--black, brown and Filipino students who have 4.0 averages, 1300 SAT, and they can't go to Berkeley. The fact that they are black and brown trumped the whole thing. Then you say, well, what is going here? Here we have a situation where Berkeley has decided that Advanced Placement courses means that a student can have above a four point. So a student--because of a certain number of Advanced Placement courses, the student could get 4.5 or 5 point. So, that's factored into the admissions scheme. Also, the number of Advanced Placement courses is another factor that puts the thumb on the scale in favor of admissions. So you've got Advanced Placement courses playing a huge role. Yet, you look across and you see that more than 50 percent of the admits at Berkeley, UC Berkeley, are coming from less than ten percent of the high schools in the state of California because the rest of the high schools don't have the Advanced Placement courses. But the students who are in those schools, who have taken the part-time jobs, you know, who have survived the parenting, who have done all of this, these kids have taken the best that their institutions had to offer, four point averages, make 1300 on the SAT, and they can't get in. Uh-uh, something wrong with that system. These students are not unqualified by anybody's measure.

We--coalition on projects is very important. In Berkeley our lead plaintiff is Latino, Jesus Rivera . Because we come together with the Filipino community and the black community and the Asian community, we see our similarities. But also, one thing the Legal Defense Fund has straight, when we sit at the table in the coalition of politics our interest has to be African Americans otherwise there's nobody at the table to talk about what's happening to black people. So, when MLDF and ALDF--Asian American Legal Defense Fund, Mexican Legal Defense Fund--sit at the table their interest, Latino population, Asian population. Mine is the African American population. And then we can come together and do coalition politics. Talk about minority as a policy, fine, but you also have to disaggregate that thing and look very closely at what's happening at insular minorities.

One other example about race trumping the markets and everything else too often. You think if you've got the money, you ought to be able to do and move and go where your money takes you. We can look at housing in this country and see what's happening in the housing industry, the insurance industry, the redlining. We just got a $16 million judgment the other day in Wisconsin. They're suing Coldwell Banker. What these folks are doing, I mean, the redlining. Your money can't get you in certain neighborhoods because in many instances the real estate agencies, the insurance companies are making sure that it doesn't. In places like Prince George's County, because of the insurance rates, the businesses won't even go out there and do business. So you have these middle-class neighborhoods whose properties are devalued because they can't build community.

Another quick example and then I'm going to sit down. The last issue, I look at the question of transportation policy. LA, LA, you said poor people, sure, I would love to say poor people. Where's my statutory basis for protecting the rights of poor people? Where's my constitutional basis for protecting the rights of poor people? It's not there, it doesn't exist. If you're going to get the jurisdictional basis of going to court and asserting a right on behalf of a group, you've got to have--it's got to be a statute, a constitutional (provision?) or something. And no way this Congress is going to give poor people a right to litigate anything. Now, an example, though, is LA The community comes to us. Black, brown, whatever color, the bottom line is economics. No buses in LA Have you ever tried to get anywhere in LA on a bus? LA is a city of freeways, no buses. So they come to us saying, look, the transit authority has a $348 million surplus. Ms. Jones, can you please see if we can get a few buses? I mean, that's the community. A reasonable request. What do you do? You know, you don't--you don't sue right away, you (use?) the public policy. You represent the community. You go to the meeting. You sit down and try to negotiate with these folks and you tell them $348 million, let these people be mobile and the few coins that they have, they can spend it at the drugstore, they can go to the supermarket, they can take their kids to daycare. If they have jobs they can get to work but they need transportation. Uh-uh, six rail lines being built to Pasadena, that's where the money was going to go. But then what does it mean? Then you've got to go to court? Sometimes you don't mind going to court. So, you got to go. And so we went. And so we (win it? went?). Now we're defending the order. Special (masses?) ordered them to spend nearly $1 billion over the next ten years in putting buses on the streets of LA. But now we have to defend that. So, what the law gives it can take away. That's constitutional, that's statutory, whatever it is.

So, in this framework we're talking about, and how we approach this future, we've got to remember that the courts are there and they're looking at everything we do. Every civil rights policy we have had, it hasn't gone into full effect until the Supreme Court has said it was constitutional. Everything, every statute from day one, beginning with the 1866 civil rights statute on up to and including the present, the 1991. So, it's complex, it's difficult. You know, I really enjoyed listening to Bill because he's grappling with some very real issues that I see with our kids. You know, this whole idea of this prison-industrial complex and criminalizing our kids who are non-violent and who have harmed no one, and given them automatic 5-, 10-, 15-, 20-year sentences. No. But we're doing it and now we've taken the prison system and we've put it on the stock market, (Rock and hut?) Correction Corporation of America, and we're making money off our children's pain. So, we've got real issues. Thank you for the opportunity to come.

[Applause]

J. Williams: Let me ask the panelists to put on their microphones up here on the table. Michael, I think we can go on for a little bit. Do you have at time limit in mind?

M. Armacost: We've got Ben Johnson to speak, why don't we take 15 minutes?

J. Williams: Why don't we take 15 minutes. Ben, please bear with us. Give me a second. I'm going to ask the first set of questions and then I'm going to throw it open to the audience so we can all get involved.

I think if there's one thing that we've accomplished this morning it's certainly putting to bed the notion that all black folks think alike. [Laughter] And I wanted to start off, though, on one common theme that emerged from the discussion today. As I was listening to everyone I could hear, from Eli's conversation, talk about satellite cities being formed over recent generations--satellite cities of whites that have concentrated black people and isolated black people. As I listened to Orlando talk, again I heard about isolation of black people and minorities. I listened to Bill talk about islands that have kept people away from the mainland in terms of integration. And even in Elaine's discussion about the bus situation in Los Angeles, again you have a sense of people who are pushed off to the margins.

The orientation of this panel really is now looking towards the future and where we're going. I wanted to ask the panelists if we could, in a conversational way, think about whether or not resegregation is taking place. In fact, whether or not people are at this time--maybe even voluntarily--deciding that they will pull away from the mainstream, that they want to live apart, that they want to be isolated. Is that the case? Is it that we are living at a time when the black community is choosing to be isolated or the white community is enforcing a new isolation? Or is that a misperception?

O. Patterson: Well, the facts are quite clear that there's growing segregation especially of the poor population but also, surprisingly, of the middle class population. You pose a very interesting question, to what extent is this the old pattern where it was imposed upon Afro-Americans or to what extent it's an element of choice involved. I think it's both. I mean, obviously, poverty is a form of constraint. Very often people just cannot afford to live elsewhere. But it's also significantly, I think, a matter of choice because of the many reasons mentioned earlier. I think that's one of the--in terms of new approaches, that's one of the issues which Afro-Americans will have to take a hard look at, make up their minds.

J. Williams: But you don't have any suggestions the way things are going.

O. Patterson: Well, I think it's a disaster. If you want--

J. Williams: No, no--I mean, what do you think is the future? Do you think it's more segregation or less segregation?

O. Patterson: My sense is that there's going to be a divide. A significant proportion of middle class Afro-Americans will wise up and recognize that if you want to get in on the networks, the crucial networks, you have to live in integrated communities. And, look, we're only 13 percent of the population so even if half of our Euro-American neighborhoods don't want Afro-Americans, the point is there is--even if a minority of only 30 percent of Euro-American neighborhoods are willing to accept Afro-Americans it means that there are always neighborhoods available which Afro-Americans can live in. The problem then is a matter of trust. What I think will happen is that a significant proportion of Afro-American middle class people will choose that direction. There's going to be a real divide but with low-class Afro-Americans increasingly be segregated in the ghettos. And our policies are enforcing that which I think is disastrous.

J. Williams: Elijah, let me just quickly ask you, if you see that as well. You spoke about generational divides inside the black community and isolation there. But as Orlando was saying, we see even middle class blacks choosing, in some sense, self-segregation.

E. Anderson: Yeah, I think it's certainly complicated and the whole thing is mixed, from what I see. I'm an ethnographer, which means I kind of look at people and can't help but observe neighborhoods that I go to and visit around the country. I'm intrigued by Prince George's County, really. My sister lives in Prince George's County and I come down and barbecue and hang out and jog and really kind of get to know the area around Indian Highway. It's a peculiar kind of segregation of volition, as it were. And if you--and I've talked to people in the community about how it used to be, it wasn't always that way. I mean, the original inhabitants were not necessarily banking on segregation, if you will. But as they moved in other blacks came and the place became more and more segregated until people came for that reason. But, of course, the people living in Prince George's County are operating in a relatively limited housing market compared with Montgomery County which is across the way. With Montgomery County being more majority, so to speak. It's an unlimited housing market so that a person moving into Prince George's is really moving into a limited situation where the price can only go so high. Whereas the other one can go in unlimited ways. So it really is a very complicated (piece?) and it's not something that people, with all their economic wits about them, would really move into. Yet they move in and are trapped, in a sense.

J. Williams: And we see more of those around Atlanta, around New York City, out west. I'm just wondering if you see that trend continuing, that the black middle class makes the choice to self-segregate. Or do you think, in fact, that it's the social structure that prompts that decision?

E. Anderson: I think a lot of people have given up on the idea of integration. And I think you see these places around the country--you see it in Columbus, Ohio. You see it in Teaneck, New Jersey--all black communities. They're destined to stay that way, it seems. Listening to what Eleanor said earlier about social isolation and the problems of that and how we're, in a sense, shooting ourselves in the foot by sort of buying into a racially particularistic situation. It seems as though we're in for some hard times. I agree with Orlando that this particularism is really going to be quite limiting. And I agree, too, with what William had to say, we seem not to be ready to buy into the idea of America, if you will. We don't have a license.

J. Williams: Bill, let me just quickly jump to you. And that notion you talked about, it seemed to me, almost from a white perspective, whether or not blacks would be allowed off the island. And I wonder if, in fact, when you say that sometimes, from your perspective, people say, well, since I don't have license to be American I'm not going to strive to be American. It's interesting, from hearing these two men, the notion that in fact there are people who are the Jackie Robinsons--who would be welcomed in the mainstream--who choose to withdraw. So, do you think that is voluntary? Or do you think that is structural.

W. Raspberry: The easy answer is, both. I think an interesting amount of it is voluntary. An interesting amount of it is--you know, may stem from a kind of attitude not expressed quite so crudely as this but, they don't want me, I don't want them. And, I'm perfectly okay where I am and I'm okay with that. But for lots of reasons we are less sure about the whole integration idea than we used to be. I mentioned the word assimilation in one of the classes I teach at Duke and the reaction against the very idea is palpable.

I like to get people sort of riled up and--because I think if I come at them from their blind side they tend to think more. I asked them to imagine, for instance, that they're walking down the street minding their own business and somebody sneaks up on them and injects them with this drug that changes their race, from black to white, from white to black, depending on what they are. It's irreversible but you do nab the son-of-a-gun and you find out he's very rich so you sue. How much is it worth? What does it take to make you whole for having been changed from black to white or from white to black? We go around the room talking about that and the black kids--. I said, you don't want much money do you? Because you've been talking up to now about all the problems that you've got that come from the fact that you're black. We're not going to ask you to pay this guy but you're not going to stick him for a lot of money are you? They want more money than the white kids want. They think that something really fundamental has been done to them that is--because it's irreversible it's just worth more money than the government can print.

What I'm saying is I'm not sure there was ever a time when you would have had the majority of the kids saying, well, being changed to kind of white-looking wouldn't be such a bad thing. What I'm saying now, there's an open hostility to being seen as wanting to be with and like and of them. Assimilation is a terrible, terrible idea they insist, all the while working their asses off to achieve as much assimilation as they can. They don't come to Duke to learn how to be segregated.

J. Williams: It's contradictory, though, very contradictory in the sense that--

W. Raspberry: Life is.

J. Williams: But for these kids they take black identity, identity as a key element of who they are, their persona. Right. But at the same time then would condemn the notion of wanting the fruit of a larger society. And I suppose it creates tensions that you see maybe played out on MTV where the cultural dictate, the cultural form tends to be lower class people who say, I'm authentically black because I think this way, look this way, dress this way. Am I right or am I crazy? What do you think?

W. Raspberry: That's another--it takes a little longer than I think we have but I think you're on to something that's really pretty powerful.

E. Anderson: I think there's a rise in black ethnic particularism, not chauvinism the way Orlando talked about it way back when, necessarily, but a rise in the emphasis on race among black middle class people.

J. Williams: And as the black middle class continues to grow into the next century we'll see more of that racial particularism, is what you're suggesting.

E. Anderson: It seems that way, yes.

O. Patterson: Yeah, the irony is that it's stronger among the middle class people than working class people. All the surveys indicate that ordinary working and lower class Afro-Americans are really not into this identity thing as strongly as their middle class counterparts. Which goes back the point I was making that in a sense much of the identity politics and this emphasis really works to the benefit of Afro-Americans who see--who are increasingly beginning to see a more segregated world as one which works in their own interests because then they become essential middlemen and they get very well paid for it.

J. Williams: All right. Elaine, I apologize for not bringing you into the conversation earlier.

E. Jones: That's all right.

J. Williams: I wanted to ask you, from a lawyer's perspective, how this has changed. Having just finished this book on Marshall, one of the things that strikes me is how Marshall really stood as the great integrationist and someone who believed that integration, if you brought people into the mainstream--onto the mainland, to continue Bill's analogy--black people would be accepted and could distinguish themselves among all other Americans. Today, in listening to you talking more and more about the foolishness of any colorblind approach, is that--should there be an equivalent between saying, integration is also foolish then as we would say colorblindness is foolish?

E. Jones: Thurgood Marshall understood, in 1936 when he started his struggle--and I'm one that believes that he was right--that integration ought to be a national goal. A national goal. Brown was as much about that as about education opportunities. I mean, it was about desegregating and integrating our public spaces and our public institutions. I think when Thurgood died he was bitterly disappointed at what he'd seen because this country has run from Brown v. Board of Education. This is it's 45th anniversary coming up on the 17th but this country has abandoned the principle and the holding in Brown, if it ever fully embraced it. The Supreme Court decided Brown one and Brown two, but the courts have busily--after a period in the sixties, the court has busily, since 1970, been dismantling the rule of Brown and leaving us with what courts can leave us with, a shell. An empty shell which is, you know--when we were given the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal--you know, it was clear that women weren't in there, there was no question about that but, all men are created equal, you know, meant all white men are created equal.

Same thing with the constitution, they give us the lofty sounding principles, they give us the code of law and then strip it of its content and that's what has happened with Brown. Brown is being stripped of its content. You know, the whole question of desegregation and integration--you know, when we lost that case in Richmond, Virginia--Bradley v. (Military?) in 1973. You know, we tired to get that (interdicted?) transportation because, you know, you had to circle around the inner city with the doughnut. And we said, all right, for these kids to be able to have an integrated education, they've got to have transportation across the lines. And we proved to the court the connection between houses and educational opportunity because it's there and it's real. And the court said, well, I'm sorry. And so it just allowed segregation continue to persist because couldn't get a [Indiscernible].

Now, what has happened? I think what you're seeing is, blacks are saying, why should integration fall on our shoulders only? Why is it not in our national interest for all America and white America to start running to turn around and maybe think about embracing African Americans. So, and I think what you're saying is--people say, well, wait a minute. You know, we have pride in ourselves and in who we are. You know, we too are somebody and we are not going to continue to chase you to get your stamp of approval. That's what's going on.

But what we see, in terms of our institutions and our structures, that you get our P.G. Counties and our communities, you know, and we can't get the grocery stores and the shopping malls there. And yet there's substantial purchasing power out there. Everybody's got to have a car to get to it. You know, the failure to offer local banking and insurance in those areas. And all of those municipal and public services that are important, are often very, very hard for us to get. That spatial isolation allows that to happen and [Indiscernible] another fight.

J. Williams: You're opposed to that spatial isolation, is what you're saying, right? Absolutely? Is that right?

E. Jones: Well, I'm not going to be absolute on anything in the question of race. I'm not going to be absolute on anything. I understand that, I do understand it but I don't think it's in our long-term interest.

J. Williams: You don't think it's in our long-term interest. It's interesting, though, to visit a place like Oklahoma City where you see the local black community saying, well, let's go back to neighborhood schools, we don't need this court order, et cetera. And I think it's such a contrast to the time when were--

E. Jones: But see, you can't forget that we've had that period of 30 or 40 years when [Indiscernible]. We have tried and we aren't being met. So, you can't forget that intervening period.

J. Williams: So you think that given residential segregation patterns, school segregation patterns, you're going to see more isolation going into the aught years?

E. Jones: Unless we decide that we want to do something to reverse it.

J. Williams: All right. Listen, I have taken too much time but I'm going to get two or three questions in before I shut it off. Please, Skip Gates.

H.L. Gates, Jr.: I just wanted to respond to Bill Raspberry. I agree with you about the license to feel American, to be American. But I want to know why. I mean, think how absurd it would have been if anyone had said a black women would be running the Legal Defense Fund in 1950. A black man can get a Pulitzer Prize and be a columnist at the Post. And there'd be two black professors of sociology in the Ivy League, one at the University of Pennsylvania and one at Harvard. I mean, for goodness sakes. You know, this idea of tokenism is really the wrong metaphor. There are far more of us in positions of power in the middle class. The black middle class quadrupled since the day King was killed. It's not big enough at all but all I'm trying to say, quickly, is that we have more reason to feel that we a purchase on America--that we have a license to be American today--then we ever did in 1950. Yet our parents got us into the positions that we are in now because they did the most absurd thing of all, they embraced the American ideal. Why, when we have all this success, almost fifty years later, is the ratio reversed? The inverse of what it was in 1950 when it was bizarre and absurd to believe your little nappy head kids could be successful in this system.

W. Raspberry: What you're raising is for me the truly profound question because the phenomenon I see has very little to do--relatively little to do with the objective reality. It has everything to do with what we believe. What we dare believe about ourselves and our future. What we believe has a strong bearing on how we see that objective reality. If we believe that racism will trump everything we attempt to do, we find ample support for that view in our objective reality, it's out there. You know, Luima, Diallo, Jasper, Texas, the black kid that was killed in Littleton. We go looking for these things sometimes so we can grab them and hold them up and prove to the world that we were right all along, the racists will never let us succeed except in small--you know, Skip Gates here is one but not most of us.

If, on the other hand, we believe that what happened for me, I really do think could happen for anybody else with my share of luck and talent and drive and assistance from those who have assistance to give. We have a very different attitude. We point to all the folk that are out there and doing extremely well as incontrovertible evidence that we all could do it. And we don't know from one day to the next which of those things is really true or which we dare announce as true. I think we secretly believe some of these things. I think most of those in this room--this is risky--I think most African Americans in this room truly believe that those young people who do what we did will be very much all right. And we don't dare quite say it for fear that we are saying to white people that anything that happens from here on in ain't your fault, it's ours.

J. Williams: Yeah, but what about the kids, Bill? What do the kids hear?

W. Raspberry: Well, the messages we give the children of our blood, our kids, is different from the message when we talk about other people's kids.

Off mic: Or in public.

W. Raspberry: In public. We speak--our kids hear us speak in public but they also hear us speak at home. The other kids who have really got the problem, hear our public proclamations and don't hear a damn thing of what we say at home. They get a distorted view even of our view. I think it's very dangerous stuff to try to cast what we say, not to tell as much truth as we can muster but to try to leverage politically white guilt that ain't been in play, really, for 20 years now.

J. Williams: So, you think in fact, in a way, we are ill-serving that younger--especially the younger generation that's poor and marginalized--by not being more optimistic.

W. Raspberry: You might as well take a piano wire and tie it around the poor sucker's neck and kill him outright. He's dead if he doesn't believe he's got a chance. And there are thousand upon thousands of kids out there who believe they have not got a chance in this racist society we keep describing to him.

J. Williams: Did you want to follow-up?

H.L. Gates: No, just to say amen. I mean, what you just said was the challenge is--[Inaudible]. [Laughter] The challenge is to find a language in public that does not under appreciate the sacrifices or the suffering that our people still have but that does not understate the success that we've had. We have to find a language that does both things simultaneously. And until we do, we are undermining the people who are not our children. We have two self-perpetuating classes in the black community, the middle class and an underclass, just speaking broadly. Our kids are going to be in the middle class. Everybody black in this room and in rooms like this, and there are zillions of rooms like this all over America, all of our descendants for all time are going to be in the middle class without some cataclysmic race war happening, or something like that, which I don't think is possible anymore. And, unless some drastic series of public policy and internal moral revolutions occur, the black underclass is destined to be in the underclass forever too. And that's a tragedy.

Participant: I want to just follow-up on that. Some of us--John Powell, at the Institute on Race and Poverty, and others--suggest that we make a mistake when we equate integration with assimilation. Now, obviously history makes a pretty strong case that they are one and the same but I would like to be a little bit radical and suggest that there may be another alternative and that a lot of change can happen within the dominant culture as it becomes less dominant in this country.

In other words, I don't think it all has to be on white terms. I think there's a real possibility of change in American culture where we're--those people who came out of a European background are going to start--as we adapt it's not just going to be our ground rules, it's going to be your--it's going to be all the different ground rules that all the groups that are coming into this country are making. And that when you integrate a school, part of the problem with fear of integration is that somebody's coming into that school based on the rules that that school has already set up. If it's a white school, for example, and black kids are moving into that school. I really have a vision for a very different kind of a picture where all of the ground rules are going to start changing and we're going to evolve into something that right now none of us can very easily imagine.

I know that this is not a very correct metaphor to use but I've already seen it as women have taken more leadership roles in our culture. I've started to see changes in the work culture, and in the community culture, among males. Now, I agree, that's not a correct analogy to use but it is a source of hope for me.

J. Williams: Okay, any other questions? Over here.

Participant: I have a question following up on Mr. Raspberry's statements which were very persuasive but I thought about the image of the islands and I thought about Carl Degla's [sp] work about Brazil and the U.S. which is--his work was written in the early 1970s and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His argument was that if you have those islands in any American society that's had slavery, you will have people migrating to the mainland but you will end up with a black residual. And so, writing in the early 1970s, he sort of said, the civil rights approach--that is to have laws which protect civil rights for African Americans and also a certain amount--he assumed a certain amount of endogamy, this would be the pattern. He said, even if you have an escape hatch, what happens is some people escape and some people don't. Therefore, you end up in perpetuity with those island inhabited by certain folks.

Then he turns it on his head and says, if you have middle class folks and lower class folks on that island it's a better place to live. I'd like to get your reaction.

W. Raspberry: We have placed on ourselves a very interesting burden. We have convinced ourselves that we cannot succeed as African Americans as long as any African American fails. No other group has put that burden on itself. No Scots-Irish would ever say that they cannot succeed as full Americans of Scots-Irish descent as long as pockets of poverty and ignorance persist in Appalachia. They wouldn't say that. They don't expect those pockets to evaporate and disappear. They think unfortunately they'll be there. Everybody else thinks that they're group will always have undigested remnants. We are the only group, as far as I can tell, that thinks the persistence of those undigested remnants represents our total failure. We've set what, in effect, is an impossible goal for ourselves. We're sort of like black Lake Woebegon, all of us will be above average.

O. Patterson: Yeah, except that it's a little more complicated with the Afro-American situation because, you know, over 40 percent of Afro-American kids are in poverty. That's not true of Scots-Irish or any other group, maybe Native Americans. And, also, the fact that our problems are concentrated spatially in our urban centers also makes them different. As Bill Wilson, and others, and Douglas Massien [sp] have pointed out, there's a real difference between the Euro-American poor who are scattered among the middle classes, with the exception of Appalachia and so on, but most Euro-American poor are scattered among the Euro-American middle working classes and can expect their kids to be mobile, upwardly mobile.

There's a real problem growing up poor in a neighborhood which is a hundred percent poor because then you're right, you can expect the problem to exist in perpetuity. So, I do think that it's more than just a residue. The question is, however, how do we encourage--what strategies are best for that group? My own--to repeat what I said earlier, I think we're making a serious mistake emphasizing the spatial dimension. In fact, we should go more towards what we find with the white poor which is that they go to where the jobs are and are distributed among the middle classes. Because the middle class Afro-American neighborhoods do not have poor people among them.

W. Raspberry: Orlando, I must say that his question was about the residue. So I think it's important to make a distinction between doing what all of us have tried to do, which is to reduce the size of that residue, to reduce the number of us who are left out. And I think that everybody would agree that there's tremendous work yet to be done and good reason to be hopeful about the success of that work. And still acknowledge the essence of what I took to be his question, that at the end of the day, when you've done all you can do, some will not have been saved.

E. Anderson: It goes back to this old ethnic sociology principle that Italian, Irish, Jews, whoever, come into the system as new immigrants, first generation, second generation, by the third generation people have melted in, assimilated, whether they wanted to or not. But black people don't melt and I think that's the issue, in a way. It may be that black people of privilege and of financial wherewithal have opted not to know, you see, after doing all of this for long, after trying for so long. To become particularist as a defense even and to kind of give up. That's what I see in Prince George's County. I see this in Teaneck, New Jersey. I see this in a lot of places. I see this on Penn's campus.

J. Williams: It's an emotional defense mechanism.

E. Anderson: And I wonder what new immigration has to do with all of this as well because people coming into the system are no longer coming in as poor people who simply live in their ethnic communities and assimilate over three generations. We've got people coming into the system who have human capital and they choose, sometimes, to live apart and separate and to be in touch with their own countries, and to lobby for their own home countries in policies of this government--

J. Williams: Let me ask Elaine for--

E. Anderson: --vis a vis their own country. So these people can hold on to their ethnicity as they become mobile within the system. It may be that blacks are taking a lesson from them. Maybe we're becoming--and this is scary to say but maybe we're becoming more and more Balkanized as a nation.

J. Williams: Let me just ask Elaine for her take on it before we close.

E. Jones: I agree with much of what Elijah just said.

J. Williams: All right. Well, thank you all for joining us. It's been a wonderful panel. And thank you, the panelists, for a strong contribution.

[Applause]

M. Armacost: We'll move promptly to the culmination of our morning. We'll continue if we may. Ben Johnson has been very kind to stay a little longer than we had asked. We've had a fascinating morning with very thoughtful remarks from Eleanor Holmes Norton, we had two very stimulating panels and we now have a chance to hear a representative from the administration. Ben Johnson, who is the assistant to the President and who is the director of the White House office on the President's Initiative for One America. Ben Johnson is a Hoosier by upbringing but he's lived in Washington for the better part of 20 or more years. He has been deeply involved in politics throughout his life, both at the local level in South Bend, Indiana and here in Washington, D.C. He has been active in the organization and management of credit unions. He has had major jobs in the Washington, D.C. administration. He has served both the administrations of President Carter and President Clinton, the latter since 1993.

We're privileged to have you, Ben, and we await your words. Welcome to our podium.

[Applause]

B. Johnson: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, I know it's been a long day for most of you. I bring you greetings on behalf of the President and the Vice President of the United States. And I thank Mr. Armacost and the Brookings Institution for inviting me to participate in this forum on race in America.

Believe me, after listening to the panel, this is quite an honor and a privilege to be with so many distinguished people in this room. I salute all of the distinguished program participants and thank my good friend, Joyce Ladner, for her leadership in pulling this important forum together.

Eli Anderson and I graduated from high school together, in South Bend, Indiana. He was on the scholarly side of the school. All my classes were near the end. But we've remained friends over the years and it's certainly a great privilege to see Eli on this program.

Thanks to the hard work of the American people, these are good times for the country: an era of falling unemployment, receding crime, rising wages, mounting surpluses, and the highest home ownership in history. In fact, some people would say now is a good time to just kick back and relax.

Well, the President looks at it a little differently. He, like many of you, knows that only a fool waits for a rainy day to fix the roof. Now that the sun is shining in America, the President is intent on addressing some of our most pressing, long-term needs. And that is why he has taken on the challenge of moving this closer country to his vision of one America. A place where every child has the chance to live up to his God-given potential, a place where we all cherish our distinctive identities while uniting around a common vision of what it means to be an American.

The face of America is changing and changing fast. Within just a few years, the state of California, our largest state, will not have a majority race. By the time today's toddlers are my age, the entire nation will not have a majority race. As we move into the 20th century this is no longer just a black and white issue. Already five of the country's largest school districts draw students from over 100 different racial and ethnic groups. We are, and we always be, a nation of nearly all of the peoples of the world, with greater diversity than any other country on the face of the earth.

To be sure, there is old, unfinished business between black and white Americans but the classic American dilemma has now become many dilemmas of race and ethnicity. We see it in the rising racial tension between different groups. We see it in the resurgence of anti-Semitism. We see it in the proliferation of hate groups. And we see it in the hostility with new immigrants from Asia and Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

These challenges require our engagement as individual, in our families, in our communities, our churches. And that is why, nearly two years ago, this President launched his historic initiative on race, to bring Americans of different backgrounds together to discuss hopes and fears.

Ten years from now, I believe that people will look back and see that the year of honest dialogue on race, that the President started, was a real turning point in America's long struggle to lift the heavy burden of race from our children's future. But as the President has said, we have just begun to peel away the outermost layers of fear and misunderstanding between people of different races and ethnicities.

So, while the President's Racial Advisory Board has completed its work, the President has asked me to head the first ever, permanent White House office devoted to helping to bridge our society's racial and ethnic divides. The past two years were devoted to spurring dialogue and generating ideas. This year is devoted to putting those ideas into practice.

The new White House office on the President's Initiative for One America will focus some combined resources of the federal government on closing the opportunity gaps that remain in our communities. We will take full advantage of this moment of sunshine to fix the national roof. We will help forge new coalitions across lines of color and class. We will help spread the word about promising practices in our communities for building one America, one neighborhood, one school system, one workplace at a time.

The first opportunity gap we will address is the need for more jobs and economic development in many of our urban and rural areas. Because, as President Clinton has said, the best anti-poverty program, the best anti-crime program, the best urban program, is still a job for every person who will work. So we will press ahead to bring the spark of enterprise to inner cities, to reach those rural communities prosperity has passed by, and move millions more from poverty and despair to work and towards hope for a real future.

In his balanced budget, the President has proposed a historic new markets initiative. It is a sweeping new public-private partnership that, if passed, will boost business opportunities in under-served rural and inner-city communities. We all know about international trade missions to developing countries, this is a domestic mission that will highlight the economic potential of untapped markets within our borders. Our new initiatives will include tax credits, loan guarantee incentives, technical assistance and mentoring programs, as well as a network of private-venture capital companies. It will attract over $15 billion in private capital to struggling communities across the country. This administration has always stood for opportunity and responsibility. Opportunity for all and responsibility from all.

Second, we're going to address the devastating gap in education opportunity. A generation ago, as we heard from Elaine, we engaged in the great struggle to open the schoolhouse doors to all of our children. Today the schoolhouse doors are open but behind too many doors too little learning is taking place. We're working with the Congress to give a million children a chance to participate in Head Start by 2002. This is why we're working to provide our children with smaller classes and safer, more modern schools. It's why we want to expand the funding for basic adult education and high school completion programs. Why we are interested, most of all, of holding states and school districts accountable for results.

The third thing we will do is significantly step up our civil rights enforcement to systematically root out discrimination in our workplaces, our housing markets and wherever else we find it. We are working to end the major backlog of private sector discrimination cases in the EOC. Thousands of our fellow citizens are waiting for justice and we must end their wait. To combat the increase in fair housing violations, Elaine, HUD will double the number of its civil rights enforcement actions by the year 2000. We have increased funding for the Justice Department to coordinate all enforcement actions in the federal government. And with the help of many of you in this room, we will make the hate crimes prevention act the law of the land.

And fourth, we will work to eliminate unacceptable racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care. Folks, we are not one America when the rate of heart disease and prostate cancer for African Americans is nearly double the rate of white Americans. We're not one America when Vietnamese American women have cervical cancer at five times the rate of other Americans. We are not one America when the rate of diabetes on some Indian reservations is double the rate of white Americans. We are not one America when rural whites have much higher rates of chronic illness than those in urban areas. We are not one America when Appalachian white men have the highest rate of lung cancer in the United States. And we are not one America when nearly a third of all Hispanic children have no health insurance. This President and this Vice President are committed to ending these disparities by the year 2010.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing more important to our future than closing these gaps. And everyone in this room can participate in this great mission. You can invite work colleagues of different backgrounds to join you in a community-building project. You can become a mentor or a tutor. You can even help organize a day when parishioners or schoolchildren spend time getting to know their counterparts from other communities. We can do amazing things when we let down our guard and reach out our hands. We have to get involved, folks, in a real way.

There's a story that Susan Rice, our assistant secretary for Africa, likes to tell so I'm borrowing it from her. This is a story about a group of animals and insects who decided to organize a football game. Somehow the teams were organized according to size. All the big animals, including the bears, lions, elephants, and giraffes, were on one team. Rabbits, squirrels, gophers and insects formed the other. The game got off to a lopsided start and at the end of the first quarter the big animals were leading 56 to nothing. By half-time their lead had extended to 119 to nothing. But guess what? When the second half started the lion received the kickoff on the 25-yard line and was tackled on the 37-yard line. On the first down the bear went up the middle and was tackled at the line of scrimmage for no gain. On the next play, the cheetah attempted to run the ball around right end but was tackled for a one-yard loss. At that point the cheetah looked around at the bottom of the pile and saw a centipede smiling back at him. He asked, did you tackle me? I sure did, said the centipede, I also tackled the lion and the bear. But where were you in the first half, the cheetah questioned, when your team failed to get a single touchdown. The centipede replied, I was on the sidelines tying up my shoes. Now the bottom line, folks, is that none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines as we discuss this great issue of race.

On the eve of a new century, our country is more free and equal than ever before but we have to keep going until Americans of every background have a chance to live out their dreams and make the most of their God-given capacities; until every American has a chance at a good job, a decent house on a safe street; until every American has a chance to reap the full rewards of citizenship in dignity and respect. That is what this vision of one America is all about. But, once again, I say, this is not a job for government alone. We need everybody's active support. It is a righteous mission for every American. Thank you and god bless.

[Applause]

M. Armacost: I want to thank Ben Johnson for his thoughtful remarks. I want to thank all the panelists for a very stimulating presentation this morning, and to Gwen Ifill and Juan Williams for moderating those discussions. And particularly for Joyce Ladner and Chris Foreman's leadership in putting together the forum. We've gone a little long but I think you understand why. It's been stimulating from my standpoint. This conversation has been so productive that we will resolve not to have a one-off affair but to find ways of continuing this discussion. And to all of you, we thank you for your participation.