Go to Main Story

Go to Today's Top News

Go to National Section

Go to Home Page

Clinton Scouts for More Voices To Revitalize Race Panel

After months of criticism for a slow and unimaginative start, President Clinton is trying to reinvigorate his much-trumpeted campaign for racial reconciliation with a burst of projects aimed at engaging everyone from business executives to religious leaders to opponents of affirmative action.

Nearly halfway into its yearlong lifespan, Clinton's advisory board leading the initiative announced for the first time yesterday an active schedule of events, including a forum with corporate leaders, a second town hall meeting and a trip to Fairfax County to explore the suburbs cited by Clinton as a laboratory for American diversity in the 21st century.

In addition, the White House is developing other outreach efforts that went unmentioned at yesterday's board meeting. Among other things, officials have decided to invite a group of prominent conservatives to the White House to share their views on race with Clinton and the administration is working with the television industry to organize race-related programming that would air across the major cable networks simultaneously.

Yet despite the newly energetic approach, the White House is still struggling to foster the sort of provocative conversation Clinton said he wanted when he predicted in June that "emotions may be rubbed raw" by a blunt examination of the way people get along.

Yesterday's session at the University of Maryland at College Park, for example, was devoted to higher education, one of the hottest battlegrounds in the nation's racial struggle since the elimination of affirmative action programs reduced minority enrollments at some graduate schools in Texas and California.

However, there was virtually no discussion of California's Proposition 209 or court decisions rolling back racial preference systems, including one forcing Maryland to stop reserving its Banneker scholarships for black students. Instead, the collegiate and corporate figures who participated offered similar-sounding testaments to the value of diversity generally.

John Hope Franklin, chairman of the race board, said critics have been too impatient and expect too much. "People ask me from time to time, 'What are you doing? Have you solved the problem yet? When can we expect a final report on the euphoric state of race relations in America?' " he said. "I have to remind them we're not in the business of solving the problem."

Franklin, a historian, said he saw no reason to include in the discussion critics of affirmative action such as Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who has led the fight against race-based government programs. "The people in California that advocate Proposition 209 are not addressing the subject of how to make the university more diverse," Franklin said. "And therefore I'm not certain what, for example, Mr. Connerly would contribute."

Still, other board members acknowledged that their effort has not yet reached many segments of the American public. "Obviously it has not," said William F. Winter, former governor of Mississippi. "But at least it has begun the conversation."

Clinton, anxious to step up the effort, convened senior advisers last week to discuss its direction and begin considering policy options he can pursue. He plans to moderate the first town hall meeting on race in Akron, Ohio, on Dec. 3.

According to aides, Clinton is contemplating recommendations to expand empowerment zones to spur economic development in blighted urban areas; enhance enforcement of civil rights laws through more mediation programs; target medical conditions that disproportionately afflict minorities through more research and prevention money; and refocus his America Reads literacy program toward minority communities.

Aides also have planned events designed to move the race issue back to the top of the national agenda.

Just yesterday, a group of 75 African American leaders was brought to the White House for a briefing on environmental issues. This morning, Clinton is slated to host a prayer breakfast with members of the clergy focused on race relations. Business executives will gather in South Florida soon to discuss workplace practices promoting diversity.

The race board, which has met just three times in five months, also will live up to its promise to take its explorations beyond the Beltway, scheduling meetings for Dec. 17 in Fairfax, Jan. 13 in Phoenix, Feb. 11 in San Francisco and March 25 in Denver, in addition to its own town hall meeting in Atlanta in mid-January.

The Fairfax meeting will focus on schools in the rapidly diversifying Northern Virginia jurisdiction. Clinton has been fascinated for months with the changing face of Fairfax schools, where students hail from 180 different countries and speak more than 100 native languages, and the president urged his advisers in September to study them as a microcosm for how demographic changes will affect the rest of the country.

Since then, administration officials have begun reviewing how a single Fairfax school copes with its ethnic stew, choosing Bailey's Elementary School, where most students speak English as a second language. In the early 1990s, Bailey's was the setting for racially polarized school boundary battles until the county started a widely praised magnet arts and sciences program there to help balance its enrollment.

In seeking diversity of a different sort, the White House plans to reach out to conservatives, who so far have been shut out of the deliberations. Aides said about 10 to 12 prominent activists and authors would be invited to meet with Clinton privately within the next month.

"We know that somewhere in this there is some common ground on where we are going," said Judith A. Winston, executive director of the president's race initiative.

Clint Bolick, a leading conservative activist who has fought against racial preferences, said such a gesture would be welcome. "That would signal the first openness to a genuine dialogue in this administration," he said. Clinton "has repeatedly called for a dialogue but conducted a monologue."