Black World Column
October 1998

Clinton's Race Initiative

by Lou Turner

After more than a year of exhaustive investigations, testimonies by scores of witnesses, and millions of taxpayers' dollars, the report and recommendations finally released to the public in mid-September fell far short of the media hype about explosive revelations and far-reaching consequences for the nation. There was simply nothing there, and the American people were tired of discussing the matter.

No, it's not Kenneth Starr's Special Prosecutor's report on the misadventures of President Clinton's sex life that seems to endlessly titillate the fancy of a salivating national media and a voyeuristic right-wing Congress. It's instead Clinton's own advisory report that the McCarthyite Starr report and the release of Clinton's video-taped testimony to the grand jury succeeded in whiting out, namely, The President's Initiative on Race report: "One America in the 21st Century."

Clinton's Race Initiative report and the timing of its release are full of ironies, both banal and bazarre. That Clinton has sought to wrap himself not in the American flag as all other patriots and scoundrels have when facing adversity and scandal, but in race and religion, especially in the Black dimension, is one of the more bazarre ironies now playing itself out in American life. In the category of banality is the Race Initiative report itself whose title is an unimaginative composite of two of the most powerful aphorisms ever formulated to sum-up the intractable contradiction of race in "American civilization."

The designation "One America," which is apparently derived from Clinton's own personal "vision" and which the report defensively acknowledges in its very first endnote as having come under criticism as "misleading and even worse, hypocritical," is an allusion to the famous summary judgment in the Kerner Commission report that there is not one but "two Americas-one black and one white, separate and unequal."

The reference to the "21st century" is an homage to W.E.B. DuBois' famous 1903 prophetic utterance in SOULS OF BLACK FOLK that "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."

The explicit reference to DuBois' formulation came out of a "debate" that arose during the first meeting of the Advisory Board for Clinton's Race Initiative between Board chairman, Duke University Black historian John Hope Franklin, and Board members Linda Chavez-Thompson, the Latina Executive Vice-President of the AFL-CIO, and Angela Oh, a noted Korean-American lawyer who served as Special Counsel to the California Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis (i.e., the 1992 LA rebellion).

Chavez-Thompson commented that the "classic American dilemma has now become many dilemmas of race and ethnicity," and Angela Oh argued for the need to "go beyond" the discussion of racism affecting Blacks "because the world is about much more than that" and the Initiative must look toward "the next horizon." To this Franklin responded: "This country cut its eye teeth on racism in the black/white sphere... [The country] learned how to [impose its racist policies on] other people at other times...because [it had] already become an expert in this area." In fact, despite its widespread attribution to Black/ white race relations, the original import of DuBois' aphorism recognized the multiracial character of the color line.

However, the more illuminating reference was Linda Chavez-Thompson's allusion to Gunnar Myrdal's historic study of American race relations, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA. For it is precisely Myrdal's moralistic framework of bridging the gap between the promise of the so-called "American creed" and America's racist reality without in any fundamental way transforming the capitalist system that bred the "dilemma", that most informs the perspectives and recommendations of the Race Initiative report.

Of course, there is no President more prone to moralizing rhetoric on everything from race to personal redemption than Bill Clinton. In the most Myrdalian tone, the report sonorously states that "as difficult as it may be to acknowledge the darker side of our history, we strongly acknowledge and appreciate that at every stage of the struggle to close the gap between the promise of our democratic principles and our policies and practices, Americans of every race worked side-by-side to move the Nation closer to the realization of that promise."

What this moralizing view of race in America is meant to obscure is the darker side of our history being made today by Clinton and the right-wing Congress. In the section on "Welfare Reform and Race," there is not the slightest criticism of Clinton and the Republic-led Congress' dismantling of welfare for the working class poor. Instead, the report sounds positively triumphal that "Welfare rolls have fallen 37 percent since the President took office in 1993 and 27 percent since the enactment of welfare reform (sic) in 1996."

Even on the totalitarian practices of racial profiling and the racial disparities in drug sentencing in the criminal justice system, the report couldn't even muster the "moral" courage to recommend that these racist practices be unequivocally abolished.

In all, Clinton's Race Initiative report documents the progress of and barriers to a growing non-white, multiethnic America's achievement of the middle-class "American dream." Questions of ghetto and barrio poverty, of economic underdevelopment of Native American reservations, of the criminalization of immigrants, and so-called welfare "reform's"-all essentially formations of punitive government policies that persist under Clinton-come down to recommending that the poor help and transform themselves rather than the power structure changing or abolishing itself. Clinton's Race Initiative, in other words, has only initiated more of the same.

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