Panel on Race Urges Nothing but More Talk

After 15 months, three presidential town hall gatherings, 11 board meetings and more than 300 public hearings involving millions of Americans, President Clinton’s initiative on race relations makes its recommendation to the White House today: Just keep talking.

“If we are to succeed in the mission to create a more just nation, the initiative’s work must continue,” an advance copy of the report states. “Not only must it continue in name but it must continue in the spirit with which it began.”

But an exhortation for more talk about race, however sensible, falls well short of the soaring goal Clinton proclaimed for the advisory panel in San Diego last year.

“If we do nothing more than talk, it will be interesting--but it won’t be enough,” Clinton said. Future generations, he said he hoped, would see that “this year of honest dialogue and concerted action helped to lift the heavy burden of race from our children’s future.”

Instead, the panel--handicapped by a lack of organization, an uncertain mandate, internal disagreements and a president whose attention has wandered to other, seemingly more pressing issues--achieved only halting dialogue and marginal action.

No question proved more divisive than the issue of focus, as the commission wrestled with whether to concentrate on black/white issues that have long been at the core of America’s race dilemma or to broaden debate to the clashes of a multiracial society in which Latinos and Asians are often, as in Los Angeles, prominent, and sometimes dominant, minorities.

“There was even a point at which I thought, ‘What am I even doing here? Maybe I should depart,’ ” said Angela Oh, a Los Angeles attorney and the only Asian American on the panel. “And that’s how rough I think it has been.”

Well-Meaning but Ill-Conceived

Based on interviews with key White House staff members, race panel members and dozens of participants in initiative activities, the portrait of the task force and its work is one of a well-meaning but ill-conceived plan that never really got on track. The idea of a national dialogue on race, with the White House seal of approval, took root shortly after Clinton was reelected in 1996.

Clinton, who has often spoken in heartfelt terms of his concern for improving race relations, embraced the concept as an effort to burnish his legacy. In early 1997, aides offered Clinton two alternatives for a race-study group. One was to appoint an independent commission that would assess the nation’s racial climate and make a formal presentation to the president. The other was to assign the race study to the already overworked White House domestic policy team.

But neither of those ideas pleased Clinton. An outside commission might prove to be too autonomous, robbing him of some authority over whatever it produced. But if the White House staff assumed total control of the project, the commission might not command the unquestioned respect of the larger public.

Three days after a spirited debate in the White House Cabinet Room on the two proposals, Clinton settled on a compromise: a task force, headed by a respected individual, that would report directly to him. This approach allowed the president flexibility to accept or reject the findings while freeing up his staff to handle other matters.

Not Meant to Be Final Word on Race

“This was the best of both worlds,” said Christopher Edley Jr., a Harvard University law professor and one of Clinton’s advisors on race issues. “He would have some outside help to provide focus, some breadth and wisdom. But he would also have control by which he would speak to the nation, in his own voice, about the conclusions.”

White House officials said that the report was never intended to be a definitive assessment on race relations. The race panel was designed to be nothing more than the “eyes and ears” of the president as it traveled the country to collect information and report back. Clinton planned to author his own document, expected sometime late this year or early in 1999, said Edley, who is working with White House officials to write it.

But even this approach to gather data on race relations had its critics, said one observer close to the race panel.

“First of all, you have to understand that there were powerful and influential factions in the White House that never wanted [Clinton] to undertake race as the defining issue of legacy,” said one White House aide. “That faction was afraid that any discussion of race would put Clinton in the position of having to do something about race. They thought it just would be better to kill the idea at the outset.”

Clinton, however, wanted it this way. Staff members made plans to unveil the task force during a commencement address at UC San Diego before a supportive, multicultural audience. “Today, I ask the American people to join me in a great national effort to perfect the promise of America for this new time as we seek to build our more perfect union,” Clinton said in that address.

But behind the scenes, there was little more than a suite of offices to support this “great national effort.”

Initially, Clinton and his advisors had trouble hiring an executive director. The first two choices--Minyon Moore, who now serves in the White House liaison office, and Edley--turned down the job. A month after the San Diego speech, Judith A. Winston, a former Education Department official with strong ties to the civil rights community, accepted the task of organizing the advisory board and setting up its Washington office space.

“She had no time to get organized,” said one observer. “Here she was, heading a high-profile White House operation and the phones weren’t yet turned on.”

Edley agreed that an “inordinately drawn-out structure” hampered the group at the start. “They were a newly created board that had to decide what they are going to do,” he said, noting that Clinton allowed the panel wide latitude in defining its responsibilities.

At the panel’s first meeting, a getting-to-know-you gathering, the group ran headfirst into controversy. Board chairman John Hope Franklin, who is black, outlined his vision of what the panel would discuss in the coming year, focusing largely on the historic divide between black and white Americans. Oh suggested that the panel should take a broader view of race that would not overlook the nation’s many minority groups.

“I raised the challenge of moving beyond black and white because it would have been very easy to avoid moving beyond the black/white chasm,” Oh said in an interview. “Intellectually, the president gets the idea of inclusion. [But] at an experiential and gut level, he really knows the black/white thing. I don’t think he has an Asian American friend.”

Since the exchange occurred in front of reporters, who seized on the moment of difference as the meeting’s defining moment, it created an impression of discord among the panel’s members. It also served as a cautionary event that limited frank discussion during panel meetings. To comply with federal law, all official gatherings of the race panel were open to the public, limiting how freely the panel could speak or debate different opinions without fear of being misinterpreted.

The race advisory panel did succeed in sparking limited, public conversations on race relations, but it failed to move beyond talking about it for fear of overstepping the president’s authority. While the panel’s work stimulated some new interracial initiatives, it mostly cast a dim national spotlight on efforts already underway in some cities and towns.

In the wake of 1992 Los Angeles riots, for instance, interracial dialogue groups sprang up all across the Southland to help people deal with their fears and apprehension about race. In Akron, Ohio, the Beacon Journal initiated a community-wide race awareness campaign, which ultimately led to the newspaper winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Brewing Scandal Distracts Clinton

By mid-December 1997, even Clinton was distracted from his aggressive advocacy of the race initiative. Bunkered in the White House with his legal advisors, Clinton curtailed his public appearances to deal with allegations of a sexual relationship with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

Clinton did appear at two more race panel events--a May town hall meeting broadcast on ESPN, the cable sports network, and a July PBS discussion on the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” “Those were totally scripted events,” said the race panel insider. “Those weren’t official activities of the panel itself. Those were opportunities presented to the president and the panel but directed elsewhere.”

Still, the panel continued to travel the country, meeting with groups of business, religious and civic leaders. Some events drew big crowds. Others provoked demonstrations.

Jessie Woolley, president of Crimson & Brown Associates, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm, was invited to participate in a July meeting for corporate leaders in St. Louis. She said she had hoped the race panel would offer practical suggestions for public policy changes to the president.

“There are tangible activities that the administration could take to help minority businesses,” she said before the report was released. “I don’t know what the panel is going to tell the president, but if it’s nothing but more talk, then it will be a disappointment to me.”

But that decision had already been made. At the advisory board’s final meeting a few weeks before the St. Louis session, Franklin already had signaled that the panel would retreat from Clinton’s call to arms. He said it would present the president with a document that contained no solutions, no policy prescriptions and no sweeping program alternatives to mend the nation’s racial divide. Instead, Franklin said, he would urge the White House to maintain a race panel.

“I hope that we can persuade the country and certainly the president that this effort must be carried on,” said Franklin, a Duke University historian. “It must be institutionalized in some way so that it will continue long after those of us who have been participating the last few months have passed off the scene.”