President Clinton's advisory panel on race held a hearing today on how to achieve diversity on college campuses but chose not to solicit the views of opponents of affirmative action. The chairman of the panel, John Hope Franklin, the historian, said only supporters of affirmative action were invited to speak at the daylong session because he wanted to hear only from those who saw the value of having a diverse student body.
California lawyer Angela Oh raised not a few eyebrows when, at the initial meeting of the $4.8 million racial advisory board, she called for the creation of a federal department charged with promoting racial harmony. The department, she explained, would be modeled on the "ministries of unity" in Indonesia, where the government has undertaken forced population transfers in order to achieve racial balance.
As part of the administration's overall national conversation on race, Hillary Clinton later "spoke openly of her own encounters with prejudice" with 32 middle- and high-schoolers in Boston. The incident she went on to describe occurred in high school, when a soccer goalie from an opposing team was mean to the future First Lady. "Boy, it's really cold," she had remarked to the goalie, who replied, "I wish people like you would freeze." Mrs. Clinton said this stunned her, and that she asked the goalie how she could feel that way when she did not even know her, to which the goalie replied, "I don't have to know you to hate you." The goalie, who was of East European descent, apparently had thought of her as "some sort of uppity, wealthy, white-bread girl," as Mrs. Clinton later explained to reporters. The Washington Post wrote movingly of the encounter: "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."
