JIM LEHRER: Clarence, that makes sense to you?

CLARENCE PAGE, The Chicago Tribune: That makes a lot of sense. We have gone around the table and I have exhibited great patience by withholding my comments. Everybody here is expressing this dream of integration but we all have different courses about the pain we want to pay, the pain we want to experience to get there.

I'm sure, equal opportunity in a corporate world, an educational world, but how much equal opportunity are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of diversity. The integration dream that Roger is expressing. And let us get back to Richard's question about the language that we speak. I have heard us go from prejudice to racism and then over to diversity and integration. You think we are talking about the same thing but we are not. You know racism is institutional. We are talking about history here.

That is why if you want diversity in San Francisco schools, if you want that virtue of having your kids exposed to other kids of different races and backgrounds, then you got to be willing to say we got to put a ceiling on some people. I have told the same thing to African-Americans back in Chicago with housing, because we want to keep desegregated housing, then you have got to tell black folks as well as white folks, hey, we have got enough of you right now, and that's a hard thing to do but because integration, desegregation does not come by just good wishes. You got to work at it. You got to take some mechanical steps to get from here to there and until we can do that, we can't have an honest dialogue. Until we are willing to talk about how much are we willing to pay.

The making of an honest dialogue.

JIM LEHRER: Somebody has to get hurt in order for some other people to be helped?

CLARENCE PAGE: Right. There has got to be some pain involved. And everybody talks about it. Mr. President, I have written this so, it's only popular that I say this to you personally. I feel like that one problem with the race dialogue was that I feel you were reluctant to deal with the question of affirmative action. It is the most divisive question we got along lines of race in our country besides crime, which is another question for the dialogue. But we need to talk, and of course, I agree with you fully, we need to amend it, not end it, we need affirmative action, but how do we define it, and how do we deal with those people who feel like they are sacrificing and I think the sacrifices have been overrated and the polls tend to don't bear me out.

Most white folks don't feel that pained by affirmative action or quotas, etc. It's a great political tool and until we deal with it effectively, have a real dialogue about it, it's going to continue to be exploited politically by various people in a positive or negative kind of way. And I guess I'll have to say how do you feel about that in terms of the kind of tiptoeing around the really tough issues of race?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: See, I believe, I frankly, I believe that the real reason it's a problem, it's more a problem with education now than economics because the unemployment rate is so low, and because the jobs are opening up so most gifted people feel that if they're willing to work hard, they can find a job so you don't see, we don't have the anxiety about affirmative action you used to have when the police departments and the fire departments were being integrated and promotions were being given.

Every now and then you hear something about that, but most of the controversy is about education. Why? because people know education is really important and if the parents and children make a decision about where they want to go to school in the case of Elaine, a public school that they believe is good or a college, they are afraid if they don't get in where they want to get in, they will get a substandard education.

I have a different view. The reason I supported affirmative action, as long as you don't just let people in who are blatantly unqualified to anything is that I think number one, test scores and all these so-called objective measurements are somewhat ambiguous and they are not perfect measures of the people's capacity to grow, but secondly and even more importantly, I think our society has a vested interest in having people from diverse backgrounds. I mean, when I went to college in the dark ages one of the reasons I applied to Georgetown was they had foreign students there and they had a policy of having a kid from every state there.

And you know, maybe I got in because there weren't too many people from Arkansas who applied, for all I know. I think there are independent educational virtues to a diverse student body and young people learn different things in different ways so, and I don't think objective measurements are perfect, so I don't have a problem with it.

But I think the most important thing is that we have to understand that this is one of the hard questions, and it is best worked out, in my view, by people sitting around a table trying to work out the specifics like in San Francisco, and when people feel like they have no voice, then they feel robbed, but there will never be a perfect resolution to this.

No perfect resolution to the question of race?

JIM LEHRER: Richard, you agree, no perfect resolution to this thing?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: No. I do agree. I think generally no perferct solutions. I left the university over affirmative action. I consider myself a Hubert Humphrey liberal. When it came time for me to get a position over you because you were white and because America perceived me to belong to this new brown race, this complete fiction of the Hispanic race. Does not exist. There is no Hispanic race left or right of Cuba. We, my father is very light skinned, my mother looks very Indian, there are white Hispanics, there are black Hispanics, but the university didn't care about any of that.

I was in new brown race, this new Hispanic, at a point in the American political discussion when the only person who was not a minority was people that you came from, poor whites, particularly poor white males in this society who the language of affirmative action is that they are somehow represented in the public society. Like hell they are.

Where are the Appalachian whites represented? Because there are white men in the front of the airplane. And it came to me at a time when I was middle class Mexican-American, perfectly capable of dealing with the competition for jobs and the jobs came looking for me because I was their brown man. And I threw the jobs back at them. I didn't want those jobs.

And if that's the way we were going to discuss race in America with these bureaucratic understandings of who is a Hispanic, without even knowing what a Hispanic means, we are in real trouble in this country.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: But let me ask you, let me ask everybody, first of all, I'm glad you said that because we are in the business of defining stereotypes tonight, so that's good. I think all of us who have worked hard to get where we are sort of traveled, I mean, when I was a young man, I was the only person on my law school faculty that voted against our tenure policy because I never wanted anybody to guarantee me a job. I told them they could tell me to leave tomorrow and I'd go. I really identify with what you have done.

I'm proud of that. But suppose you are the president of the university. Would you like, other things being equal, to have a faculty that were not, that were reasonably racially diverse and even more importantly, would you like, other things being equal, to have a student body that reflected the way America, the way the America of these young people was going to live in once they graduated, and if you believed that and you didn't want to infuriate people like you have been infuriated and make them feel like you felt, how would you go about achieving that? You see, I think this is tough stuff. I don't pretend my position is easy or totally defensible. How would you do it?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I think you would start at the bottom of the social ladder. You would start in first grade rather than at graduate school to try to decide which ones of us get into law school. You would make sure America had a system of education that saved children in first grade because we lose them there.

A question of quotas.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: I think that's absolutely right. Even though it sounds like a distinction without a difference, goals are better than quotas and if you know what you want in a particular situation, be it a workplace or a college class, then you are not stuck in the exact situation Elaine mentioned in which you are doing something patently unfair. Also the nice thing about goals is you don't always have to reach them. The idea is to keep them, your eyes on them, and hope that you get the proper and reasonable mix in a group.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let's go back to this, I want to ask you to, because I want you to go in here. Did you, what exactly was it did you resent? Did you resent the fact they were going to guarantee you a job whether you were any good or not, or did you resent the fact that they were looking for Hispanic faculty members?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I resented two things. I resented the fact that I was being rewarded for the exclusion of other people of my ethnic group. In other words, I was an American minority at from a point which I was not a cultural minority and the absence of those people, because nine people were not there, I as a tenth person became their minority.

And I resented it for all the political liberal reasons that I have and that there was something that didn't play on my soul, the notion that I was entitled to this job and you weren't because I had darker skin and it didn't play on me. I was never a primary victim of racial discrimination in this country. I belong to California and I grew up among Portugese and Irish kids, never never a primary victim and the name of the primary victims I was advanced to graduate school.

ROBERTO SURO: I've had some of the same experience. Not quite as explictly. There were times when I had consciously not wanted to be regarded as a Hispanic journalist and I don't find that as a central part of my definition or qualification and even in doing reportage. I hope that I could deal with anybody and when I went overseas looking for assignments I very consciously didn't go to Latin America. It draws this distinction that Richard raised, I think, between primary victims of discrimination, people who have different kinds of history and we are dealing with now how do you determine whether, you know, affirmative action was started as a historical remedy.

Lyndon Johnson's speech here was about the foot race, was a reflection on history. And the question is what do you do when you have people who don't have the same history, but belong to a minority group? Among Latinos now you have people who have experienced real discrimination and have a real history of discrimination, places like south Texas, and you have people who arrived yesterday, yet our system of looking at them puts them all together in one group.

JIM LEHRER: Cynthia, the differences, in other words, dealing with people differently?

CYNTHIA TUCKER: Well, this may be one of those places where in fact the black experience in America is distinct. I did grow up suffering discrimination, real in your face. I grew up in southern Alabama under Jim Crow, and now I am not offended by affirmative action programs at all. I happen to think A, that that does not mean that the person is unqualified, but I also remember only too well when people that I knew were denied jobs because they were black, and so that is one of those places where the black experience is different perhaps from any other experience in this country with the possible exception of Native Americans.

JIM LEHRER: Elaine?

ELAINE CHAO: Clearly the history of this nation as we went through these racial stages have been very tragic. No one would dispute that. And it's clear also that we don't live in a perfect world in which there is equal treatment for everyone, but I think it's absolutely incumbent upon all of us to remember that that is the ideal, that equal opportunity must exist for everyone in this country regardless of color, race, or creed, or whatever and when we talk about diversity, what a wonderful notion it is. Of course, most of us support it.

I for one definitely support it. But the issue is how does one create this diversity and who gets to sacrifice as Clarence mentioned and who gets to suffer, whereas diversity is implemented right now, it's basically implemented through the American quotas, goals, whatever they are called. Basically the touchstone word is we want it to be representative of America, which means that it's 13 percent African-Americans, 8 percent Latino Americans, 3 percent Asian-Americans and perhaps Native, certain percentage of Native Americans and the rest white.

When we don't evaluate things and when we don't offer opportunity based on merit, how do we decide otherwise and what becomes, who becomes overrepresented minorities, who becomes underrepresented minorities, and that just snowballs into differential treatment, preferential treatment, where one group versus another. I think we should heed to the overall core value of this country that equal opportunity applies for all and that should be same standards for everyone.

CLARENCE PAGE: Well how do you define merit? It should be equal opportunity to get into Berkeley and UCLA. But how do you define merit? SAT's ACT's or other criteria?

ELAINE CHAO: No. I think very clearly -- merit.

Native Americans and affirmative action.

JIM LEHRER: Let me ask Sherman, where do Native Americans fit into the affirmative action debate?

SHERMAN ALEXIE: You know, I get this question asked a lot. I always say if we were taking the jobs and we were taking the stops in college then why aren't we having jobs and why aren't we in college? I mean, you got people worrying about medical school, people worrying about blacks being, getting into medical school or law school and I walk through the hospital, the brown people are mopping, so, you know, I think all this debate about affirmative action and about quotas is illusionary and anecdotal.

There has never been a black person who has been denied a job who has won a lawsuit against a company for not hiring them because they were black and yet we are determining national policy based on anecdotal lawsuits and on one example. In Texas, we changed a whole entire admissions system in the University of Texas based on one person's losing a spot because of their job and it was one lawsuit that decided that that turned the tide, and so if you want to talk about affirmative action, that's sort of a legal affirmative action where a white person has more power in the courts bringing a law suit against a university would have than a black person not having a suit against a university or not getting in. So I think --

ELAINE CHAO: Jim, I have to answer that if I could. There is a great database of differential standards that do exist for different racial groups, that is common practice in the admissions of universities today all across America that is common practice for many of our educational facilities. Institutions at the lower levels as well.

There's definitely no questions that it's just not anecdotal. The Center for Equal Opportunity, and many others, have compiled substantial databases that do show this is part of the racial policies of America today. I do want to say one thing about I think --

JIM LEHRER: I want to go to the president.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: You want me to answer Clarence's things?

ELAINE CHAO: I was going to say, I think education-- Richard has a good point. Education. Education is important. We ought not to talk about equal opportunity at this late stage, but how do we get to, back to K and 12. Our schools are falling apart. How do we fix our schools? How do we slash crime in our neighborhoods? How do we create economic opportunity for everyone? I mean, that's the real goal for our country.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: What were you going to say about that?

KAY JAMES: I was just going to say, Mr. President, I think the operative phrase was in your question, all things being equal, wouldn't we like a diverse community, particularly in the academic arena. I was looking around the table and thinking gee whiz, I bet I'm the only one here at the table that needs to make admissions decisions. And you are right. All things being equal, wouldn't we like to have a diverse community? And I think that's where most people in America are.

Most people in America, of course, acknowledge and have high esteem for diversity and recognize that their lives are much more enriched in that environment but what they have a problem with is feeling like there are setasides or preferential treatment for some class of people that exist for them only because of their race. As an example, I guess I run across so many middle class African-American students who don't deserve to have preferential treatment based solely on their race. They have had every opportunity.

They have been given every chance in America and so it makes no sense to give them preference for purely race-based that maybe we should look more at some of the programs that exist in America that give treatment and preference to people out of poverty, that give preference and treatment for a variety of reasons but to purely have race-based solutions in America today doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

President Clinton: "We need a vocabulary that embraces America's present and past on this race issue."

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let me go back. Let me go back to something Clarence said at the beginning. As you pointed out, we talked about prejudice, discrimination, and we started talking about diversity and all of that. I think you need, if I could, go back to the very first thing that all of you started talking about. We need a vocabulary that embraces America's future.

And we need a vocabulary that embraces America's present and past on this race issue. And we need to know when we're making distinctions, and then we need to fess up to the fact that at least when it comes to Native Americans that if we don't do something fairly dramatic, the future is going to be like the past for too many people.

I mean, so...for example, I think most American, whether they are conservatives or liberals or Republicans or Democrats, would support the, for example, my budget proposal to give more resources to the EEOC to get rid of the backlog, because all the surveys show that 85 percent of the American people or 90% or something believe that actual discrimination against an individual person in the workplace is wrong based on race.

Now, the real problem is that affirmative action, I think, now since there are a lot of middle class blacks, middle class Hispanics, people of color, that it's almost, people are not so sure in the workplace and the school place whether it is furthering the goal of getting rid of the lingering effects of discrimination, which is Cynthia's experience, and mine as a southerner, ours, or whether it is now being used to create a more diverse environment which people feel is a good thing, but not a good thing if it is sticking it to this hard-working Chinese mother in San Francisco and her children, who is raising her kids under adverse circumstances.

AndI guess one of the things that bothers me is that a lot, we need to take, make these kinds of discussions practical and institution or community-based because I'll say again, I think that we want, we want our children to grow up to learn to grow up in the world that they will in fact live in. Therefore, if you forget about discrimination for a minute, you can't ever do that, but let's just assume there is no discrimination, America has a wonderful system of higher education.

There are hundreds of schools I think you can get a world class undergraduate education in, and I believe that therefore it's worth having some policy to try to diversify the student body. It's interesting to see what Texas did when the Hopwood decision came down and they said, well, we don't want to have a totally desegregated set of colleges and universities so we'll say the top 10 percent of every high school can automatically go to any Texas institution of higher education.

That looks more merit based than the other decision because there are segregated high schools and there are differences in test scores and all of that, so I just would say we need to kind of, we need 10 hours to discuss this. I would like to listen to you. But the only thing I want to point out is the American people have got to decide. You know do they want a housing project in Chicago, in this case the people of Chicago get to decide, that's integrated, if so, if the people who don't get in, there do they have reasonable alternatives?

That's one realistic thing. If a child doesn't get into a good school that he or she wants to get into, do they have an equivalent alternative? If they don't, you maybe have hurt them for life. Is it worth it to get discrimination?

Or in the case, look at Kay's problem. She runs a government department, makes these admissions decisions in a school that has a certain religious and value-based approach to life so if a child gets deprived of going into there, even if the kid goes to Harvard, it may not be the cultural environment.

KAY JAMES: They couldn't get barely the education they get at Regent.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let's assume it's equivalent. The child may lose something noneducational. So I mean-- all these things, I just want the American people to stop talking about and whether it's real.

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