Last week, the task force concluded its work by issuing a report to the White House. What is striking about this report is its indication that the panel has not made any real progress during its 15 months of work. For instance, one of the major recommendations that the board made to the president was that he create a permanent body - to be known as the President's Council for One America - to do almost exactly the same thing that the original group was supposed to be doing for the past year. This is an admirable and necessary step toward healing the wounds that discrimination has caused, but it, unfortunately, is not enough. Talk has bred only more talk instead of concrete proposals for the implementation of actual political and economic reforms.
Part of the problem can be traced to the panel's composition. Its staff had little experience in policy-making and was in fact discouraged by White House officials from making suggestions and recommendations that might seem too bold to be politically expedient. For a president who has received strong support from minority communities during both of his election campaigns, Clinton's latest effort to respond to the needs of those communities may have amounted to an empty promise. Speeches and committees may help bolster the president's reputation as a champion of civil rights and racial equality, but they do little for the social and economic ills that the committee formed to combat.
In an effort to address the issue of racial imbalance among the American prison population, the board called into question the use of racial profiling by federal and local law-enforcement agencies. This practice, which uses race as a factor in determining the profiles of likely criminal suspects, was raised as an issue for debate, but the panel stopped short of actually making any recommendations to the Justice Department. It is hard to know whether this timidity in proposing actual policies against institutional discrimination is a result of official encouragement or if it is simply a matter of bad organization within the committee. But either way, the result is the same: the panel's activities have brought about effective policy recommendations.
Clinton seems not to have regarded the panel so much as an independent entity that could cut across political lines to make legitimately helpful recommendations, but rather as a kind of information-gathering committee. He wanted them to research the nation's racial climate, but he didn't necessarily want them to have direct input into how the administration was going to handle what they found. Part of the difficulty with acting on this report is that much of the findings are rather murky; its major recommendations tend toward vague language and recycled platitudes rather than specific information. The president has stated his intention to officially respond to his panel's report sometime early next year. Perhaps between now and then he will figure out what, if anything, the committee has accomplished and more importantly, what policies can result in actual improvement of this country's ailing race relations.