White House Words Belie Action on Race

Billed as a major policy address on race relations, President Clinton’s commencement speech Saturday at UC San Diego is expected to outline “new approaches to interracial rapport.” Catchy but not compelling when you consider the source and take a look at the Clinton administration’s record on race relations.

The hypocrisy trickles down throughout this administration. From Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to Education Secretary Richard Riley, the administration has aggressively pursued a policy of preferential treatment toward certain Americans at the expense of others, a far cry from “mending” affirmative action programs. Hiding under the vague definition of “diversity,” it has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal funds from public projects and educational institutions unless numerical “targets” are met, targets only achieved by granting racial and gender preferences.

In her commencement speech in May at UC’s Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, Reno all but ridiculed the will of the majority of Californians who after much thought and debate voted last year to eliminate all state racial and gender preferences. In an attempt to spin the vote as anti-immigrant, she made an amazing claim: “We cannot deny that we are a multicultural society.” Nowhere in her speech did she give specific examples or demonstrate how Californians have denied being a multicultural society. Californians embrace with great pride the different ethnic groups that make up the state’s population. But we also recognize that government-sponsored discrimination is not the path to racial harmony.

In any case, Reno should be all too familiar with the consequences of forcing quotas on public institutions. On Jan. 20, 1995, Oklahoma City withdrew from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Police Hiring Supplement Grant Program, under which it had been authorized to hire 25 additional officers. Sam Gonzales, the police chief, objected to a Justice Department requirement that the city carry out an “underutilization analysis” for women and minorities and to develop a plan for the “equal employment of women and minorities within the Police Department’s sworn personnel.” Gonzales commented: “I believe this particular language to be very significant in that it states equal employment of women and minorities rather than equal employment opportunity.”

Even more ludicrous is the statement last month by Richard Riley when asked about the effects of Proposition 209 on higher education in California. He responded that “it’s having a very dramatic, negative effect . . . . The impact of it . . . has caused a real chilling of interest in poor and minority people advancing their education.” Riley should have checked with UCSD first. The latest figures provided by UC’s Office of the President paint a very different picture from the one Riley would like to have us believe. At UCSD, my alma mater, the number of underrepresented applicants increased between 1996 and ’97. In the wake of Proposition 209, the number of enrolled black freshman increased from 61 in 1996 to 80 in 1997. Collectively, freshman enrollees of Latino descent saw their numbers increase from 241 in 1996 to 313 in 1997.

Sure, Riley can point to the UC flagship campus in Berkeley and say that African American undergraduate enrollment there decreased 3.1% between 1995 and 1997. But are African Americans and society as a whole really worse off or set back decades, as some contend, if their enrollment at one UC campus experiences a slight drop while it increases at another?

Race and all the complex issues that emanate from it must be discussed. The evils of racism, bigotry and discrimination surface in subtle and not-so-subtle forms. Fortunately, those who harbor such evil or hate are themselves a minority. History shows that society has no problems with marginalizing such individuals. Our institutions and our people have come a long way since the days of Jim Crow, China Basin and Japanese American internment camps.

If President Clinton is sincere in his effort to “reconcile antagonisms between races and bring people together in one America,” perhaps a good starting point would be for him and his administration to ignore the irrational mantra of group entitlements and pursue the goal of racial harmony premised on equal treatment of individuals.