Clinton to Take On Race Divisions

WASHINGTON — In choosing California as the site for his long-awaited speech on racial conciliation, President Clinton picked the state often touted as the multihued model of an ever-changing America.

“It’s not accidental that the speech is being given in California,” senior White House advisor Rahm Emanuel said of the commencement address Clinton will deliver today at UC San Diego. The White House views the event as a landmark moment in the second term. “It’s a symbol of what the future holds for this country,” Emanuel said.

Yet, California also symbolizes the difficulties of the nation’s racially oriented present. It is a stark example of the social schisms and volatile politics that can arise when many cultures cluster in one society, divisions expected to make Clinton’s self-appointed task only more difficult.

When his motorcade rolls into the shady La Jolla campus of eucalyptus and torrey pine trees, Clinton will enter a smoldering conflict over affirmative action in the state’s giant university system. Appearing just 25 miles from the Mexican border, he will speak to residents of a state that remains deeply split on immigration, with an emerging controversy over bilingual education just the latest example.

If the Golden State offers an encouraging glimpse of America’s future, it also is a place where Clinton’s message could prove most divisive or disappointing, where lofty rhetoric runs smack into hard realities.

“Bill Clinton is going to be speaking at ground zero of the debate on race relations,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican campaign consultant based in San Francisco. “If anything, his decision to come out here to give the speech raises the stakes pretty considerably.”

The stakes are high, in any case, because the White House has upped the ante, making clear that the coming push on race relations is of paramount importance to Clinton and that the president believes he has a unique skill to deal with the problem.

The president has settled on a yearlong approach that combines a national dialogue--featuring four town hall-style gatherings--selected areas of study and, ultimately, recommendations for policy changes. On Thursday, the White House announced a seven-member advisory panel, headed by Duke University historian John Hope Franklin, that will help the president write a report in 1998.

Clinton also wants to promote a discussion of citizenship and probably will tell Americans they have a responsibility to respect one another and that their loyalty to ethnic or racial groups should not overshadow their identity as members of the larger society.

“A part of your citizenship is respecting the differences of others,” is how one assistant described Clinton’s thinking. “It’s not a one-way street.”

Already, the highly visible push is attracting criticism from civil-rights advocates who fear a low-budget effort that is long on dialogue and short on actions to ensure fair treatment of minorities. Gay and lesbian advocacy groups were turned down in their bids to be included on grounds that their concerns were too removed from race and ethnicity.

Acknowledging the doubts, administration officials are asking people to reserve judgment. “What we hope is that you will judge us at the end of the process,” White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles told reporters this week.

By launching the process in California, Clinton will be dramatizing how the politics of race and ethnicity have changed from the days when such issues were viewed only in a black-white framework. Indeed, some of the problems that have troubled California in recent years are issues that the White House wants most to examine: declining enrollment in higher education for blacks and Latinos, tense relations between minorities and police and concerns about jobs, health and education for unskilled have-nots of various groups.

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“In some ways you have a more profound platform to discuss this in California,” said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic campaign consultant in California. By using a California podium, he said, Clinton “brings the discussion to the national stage and brings it to the future.”

In Los Angeles, for example, rates of interracial marriage among the youngest married people now exceed 30%, in contrast to a national rate of 2%, according to David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health at UCLA’s School of Medicine.

Whites accounted for just 54% of the state’s population in 1995 (their U.S. share exceeded 73%), and they are forecast to lose majority status in California in 2002. The state’s 28% Latino and 10% Asian/Pacific islander shares are almost triple that of the nation. Blacks, by contrast, comprised only 7% of Californians, compared to 12% nationally, according to the state Department of Finance.

“The concept of race has an extremely limited future in California,” maintained Hayes-Bautista. “How do we code the children that come from what used to be called interracial marriages? What box do we check on the birth certificate?”

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During the economic boom times of the 1980s, such diversity often was touted as a key to California’s strength and prosperity.

Beneath the surface, however, many low-income minorities felt left out of the buoyant picture. Competition for jobs, particularly among the unskilled, mounted. So did friction with police.

For many, it took riots that left more than 50 people dead after the 1992 court verdict in the police beating of Rodney G. King to reveal the difference between the romantic vision and the reality in the streets.

“The real fact is that multiethnic rumblings have continued to pull California apart from its inception as a state,” said H. Eric Schockman, a political scientist at USC.

And the president cannot escape the heat of Proposition 209, which would ban affirmative action for state employment if the judicial system rules that it should be enforced. Although the measure was approved by 54% of the state’s voters, the White House is opposing it in court. All week, opponents of racial preferences have tried to put pressure on Clinton, releasing studies, surveys, advertisements and press releases to make their case.

“It is frankly amazing that the president would come to a UC campus and call for a dialogue on race,” declared Jennifer Nelson, executive director of the American Civil Rights Institute, which advocated the initiative. “We’ve already had that debate in our state.”

But, in other ways, the debate continues. A proposed ballot initiative backed by former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz would wipe out most bilingual instruction in public schools. The proposal would be the third racially charged initiative in recent years, following Proposition 209 and, earlier, Proposition 187, which sought to bar illegal immigrants from most state services.

Such California-led controversies only underscore the questions many experts have about whether Clinton can frame a successful national effort to improve race relations--and whether he is willing to take tough, unambiguous stands that not everyone may want to hear.

“Clinton’s natural tendency is to try to make everybody feel better about the issue he’s discussing,” said Schnur, who believes such issues as affirmative action and Proposition 209 do not lend themselves to such treatment.

‘If he’s going to address this issue with conviction--from any direction--he’s going to offend some people. And if he doesn’t address it head-on, it’s going to detract from the credibility of everything he says,” Shnur said.