
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 17, 1995                   TAG: 9510170093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: AUSTIN, TEXAS                                LENGTH: Medium

SWEEP OUR HOUSE CLEAN OF RACISM, CLINTON IMPLORES

A thousand miles from the Mall in Washington, President Clinton said Monday the ``throngs of men'' gathered there could serve as a reminder to whites ``that most black people share their old-fashioned American values,'' but only if people of both races purge themselves of prejudice.

``America, we must clean our house of racism,'' Clinton told students at the University of Texas in remarks shortly before the main program at the Million Man March began.

Two men who for many Americans are potent symbols of the house's soiled condition - march leader Louis Farrakhan and former Los Angeles police detective Mark Furhman - got prominent attention in Clinton's speech, though not by name.

``One million men are right to be standing up for personal responsibility, but one million men do not make right one man's message of malice and division,'' Clinton said in a line that aides said was intended as a rebuke to Farrakhan's history of anti-Semitic remarks.

Turning to Furhman, whose taped interviews laden with racial epithets became pivotal in the O.J. Simpson murder case, Clinton lectured whites, ``The taped voice of one policeman should fill you with outrage.''

Yet the mood of the president's address - one that aides said he and speechwriters labored over through the night and into Monday morning - was not so much judgmental as empathic. Blacks have some reason to mistrust white justice, Clinton reasoned, just as whites have some reason to fear black crime.

It's not simply racism that's dividing people, the president said, but the ``different ways we experience the threats of modern life,'' as well as ``the fact that we still haven't learned to talk frankly, to listen carefully ... across racial lines.''

He urged ``every citizen in every work place and learning place and meeting place all across America to take personal responsibility for reaching out to people of different races, for taking time to sit down and talk through this issue.''

``This may seem like a simple request, but for tens of millions of Americans this has never been a reality,'' Clinton said. ``They have never spoken, and they have never listened - not really, not really.''

Recalling the injustices blacks have borne from white justice, from the lynchings of the Old South to the beating inflicted on Rodney King, Clinton implored, ``White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain.''

But blacks, too, must make the mental leap, Clinton urged, to ``understand and acknowledge the roots of white fear in America.

``There is a legitimate fear of the violence that is too prevalent in our urban areas - or at least what people see on the news at night - violence that for white people too often has a black face,'' Clinton said.

by CNB