Hillary Rodham Clinton listens to student Claudy Paul talk about his first brush with racism. (AP)

First Lady Recalls Early Taste of Ethnic Tension

BOSTON, Dec. 9 — The chill in the air prompted her to say something to a stranger, but the chill in the response would stay with her for a lifetime.

During a junior high school soccer game, a teenage Hillary Rodham turned to the goalie from the other team and remarked, "Boy, it's really cold." The other girl snapped, "I wish people like you would freeze." Stunned, the future first lady asked how she could feel that way when she did not even know her. "I don't have to know you," the goalie shot back, "to know I hate you."

More than 35 years later, Hillary Clinton recalled the pain of that childhood encounter today as she discussed the combustible issue of race with a sports arena filled with 11,000 teenagers from throughout New England.

The first lady used the tale as an object lesson about the need for understanding during her appearance at the Fleet Center here, the latest chapter in President Clinton's year-long campaign to start a national conversation on race relations in America.

Only later in an interview did she say that the goalie was white, but Clinton said that the girl came from Eastern European descent and resented what she apparently considered "some sort of uppity, wealthy, whitebread" girl.

The forum was a very different scene from her husband's inaugural town hall meeting on race in Akron, Ohio, last week. Where his was C-SPAN, hers was MTV. With the lights turned down and music from U-2 blaring from the speakers, today's meeting had the atmospherics of a rock concert. The discussion, too, seemed livelier and less structured than the Akron town hall — although, like that dialogue, it was dominated by a chorus of people who agreed with each other.

Wearing matching white and blue T-shirts, mobs of excited eighth- through 11th-graders filled most of the home of the Boston Celtics for the fourth annual such gathering organized by a group calling itself the Team Harmony Foundation.

One of the foundation's co-founders, former Celtics assistant coach Jon Jennings, began working this fall in Marshall's office as a White House fellow. The first lady was invited as part of a day of activities at the gathering, which featured sports figures such as basketball star Sheryl Swoopes and Red Sox player Mo Vaughn, several musical groups and the stars of MTV's "Real World."

Hillary Clinton sat on stage with 32 teenagers and talked about their experiences. Claudy Paul, an African American high school senior, recalled an encounter at a bus stop when he interrupted another student who angrily dismissed him by saying, "You listen, nigger, this ain't no Dorchester," referring to a predominantly black area in Boston.

"I felt so stunned, I started in tears," Paul said. "From that moment, I felt like my dreams were all shattered."

Amy Coran, a Jewish high school student, remembered the time some boys told anti-Semitic jokes. The most hurtful, she said, asked the difference between a Jew and a pizza: "A pizza doesn't scream in the oven."

Other students told of swastikas in bathrooms, self segregation on buses and racially inspired fights. And several said they took their problems to school authorities only to see nothing done.

Yet much as in Akron, these youngsters were the converted. No one who spoke up today expressed any prejudices of their own. Instead, they recited in unison the "Team Harmony Pledge," which started, "I pledge from this day onward to do my best to interrupt prejudice and to stop those who, because of hate, would hurt, harass or violate the civil rights of anyone."

Clinton said the gathering will help make bias unacceptable among the next generation. "If we stick with it, we will change minds," she told the youngsters. "Not everybody's. There are still going to be people who are so unhappy inside, so resentful of anybody else's success that they just won't be able to accept other people." But those people should be countered "with our own respect and love so they are rendered as harmless as possible."

During a question-and-answer phase, the first lady said she was of two minds on the effect of affirmative action in the United States. "Affirmative action has helped on the one hand because it has given opportunities to many people to prove themselves, which they have done," she said. "But I think it has hurt because I believe it has been misconstrued and misunderstood and used in a negative way."

Asked by a student if she had experienced discrimination, she mentioned the soccer incident and later elaborated during her plane ride home. Although she grew up in an all-white neighborhood, she said, her school was riven by divisions among Poles, Slavs, Italians and other ethnic groups. "There was a lot of tension because of that," she said. "Some corridors you couldn't walk down without feeling unsafe, uncomfortable."

That experience, she said, demonstrates that the race initiative needs to focus on animosities among people, although she added "the black-white issue has to be the focus because it's the unfinished business of America."

As it attempts to energize its race initiative, the White House has dispatched a variety of prominent administration figures throughout the country to hold discussion groups, including one today in Petersburg, Va., led by Secretary of the Cabinet Thurgood Marshall Jr. and another scheduled for Monday in Baltimore with Education Secretary Richard W. Riley.

One such session backfired last week when Transportation Secretary Rodney K. Slater met with only other black leaders behind closed doors in Dallas, a move that was repudiated by the White House as a mistake.

The first lady said she "can understand" critics who believe the race campaign has been unfocused, but said conversations are a "good end in and of themselves." She was impressed by someone who told her today that her husband should urge Americans to do little things to reach out, such as going to lunch with a co-worker of another color. "I'm going to tell Bill that was a really good suggestion," she said. "You can't take for granted these really small steps that people can do on their own."