NEWSWEEK: You came of age in Arkansas when Central High was being forcibly integrated by federal troops. What do you remember about that time?
CLINTON: I was 11, and I remember it very well. I talked honestly to my folks about it and to my grandparents. We were riveted-we watched the television news every night and waited for the next day’s paper.
My grandparents were both very much in favor of integration and thought that blacks in the South had gotten a raw deal. My grandfather always had a lot of black customers when he had a little grocery store, and my grandmother had always been in hospitals [as a nurse]. They knew black people and they thought [segregation] was wrong. Little Rock had a searing effect on me. I was embarrassed for my state and I was proud of the federal government for trying to force the integration.
How do we confront racism today?
It’s more subtle in the sense that we have a more integrated society, but the problems out there are still pretty profound. We’ve never taken the time to take a comprehensive look at what it will mean when we are a truly multiethnic society in a way we’ve never been before. I have been obsessed with trying to prepare the country to live in a very different time. We’ve still got a long way to go before we feel truly comfortable working with each other, living with eachother, relating to each other and helping solve one another’s problems instead of saying, “Well, that’s their problem and not mine.”
What did you think about the O.J. criminal trial?
I had a whole lot of conflicting emotions. I’ve always trusted the jury system in America. There were a lot of factors in that trial, including all the publicity and television coverage-the questions about the L.A. Police Department–that you wished would never be part of any criminal trial because you hate for any criminal trial to be basically either political or, in this case, involving great social commentary.
After it was over, I felt that if anything good can come out of this, maybe it will be that blacks and whites and others will be more honest about how they see the world they live in. We have to start, community by community, to make sure that there is, at a very minimum, honest respect for the law and that people believe the law is being implemented in a fair and impartial way everywhere.
How do you address white backlash?
It will inevitably be a part of the conversation. You have to begin with the principle of personsal responsibility, which I thought was the best thing about the Million Man March. If you wanted to participate, whatever anybody may think about any of the people involved in it-[Louis] Farrakhan and the others-the price of admission was admitting that good citizenship begins with personal responsibility and obeying the law and taking care of your own kids.
[Now] you have to say to whites, “Look, you don’t have to accept blame for things that happened before you. But you do have to accept the facts of the society you live, in.” The way to avoid getting into a fundamentally meaningless debate is to keep our eyes on what I think the real prize is, which is, what could America be like a generation from now? And we can do it without a lot of the handwringing and anxiety, frankly, that would occur if we were doing it in the aftermath of social breakdown. I think the American people are ready for this.
Americans lead increasingly segregated lives, especially in schools and universities.
One of the things Chelsea loved about her high school was that it’s incredibly multiethnic. One of the reasons she was attracted to Stanford is that it is so diverse. We’re going to have to depend on the young people of this country who have had the experience of being with other people of different racial and ethnic groups to turn that around. Americans won’t resegregate if they honestly believe that they have shared values and shared interests in an integrated society. I think that’s the trick.
Could Tiger Woods help in your effort?
He’s getting his career off the ground and we need to let him have his space. He needs to define his own involvement, and I hope he’ll do that.
The idea ought to be that there are no bastions that any child of any background can’t scale. He does a lot of good just by going out and playing great golf. Just being there and exhilarating these kids and making them imagine they can do that or something else is a very powerful thing. Just by proceeding with dignity and strength-who knows how many people watch him on television and it changes an attitude they have toward people who are different from them when they go to work the next day.
