Liberty And Justice Clinton Addresses The Sad Reality That Life In America For Minorities Hasn’t Improved Significantly Despite Decades Of Civil Rights Awareness.

Lenard Clark is the face of racism.

But the 13-year-old African American boy, brutally beaten and left for dead by three white teens in Chicago, is just one measure of the distance the United States has to go to end the kind of discrimination that has torn at the nation’s seams for centuries.

Despite civil rights gains that abolished legal segregation, most minorities still lack access to many of the things it takes to achieve the American dream.

Blacks and Hispanics, in particular, are poorer than whites, have less schooling, less-prestigious jobs and fewer opportunities to own businesses or homes. They are disproportionately crime victims and prison inmates. Their children are far more likely to live in poverty.

It is the numbers behind those facts and faces like Lenard Clark’s that have prompted President Clinton to put a national race initiative at the center of his second-term agenda.

The president will announce on June 14 that he is launching a yearlong effort designed to soothe racial tensions and help minorities gain stature economically.

The initiative to improve race relations will include town hall meetings and a presidential advisory board.

Clinton’s race initiative, to be announced during a commencement address at the University of California, San Diego, will mark the first time that a president has tried to tackle race in the absence of crisis, White House aides said.

“We don’t have a riot, but what you have is like a scab that just won’t heal,” said Maria Echaveste, director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. “Why not try to solve those problems proactively instead of reactively?”

The “scab,” Echaveste said, is the discrimination that continues to hobble minorities’ chances to attain equal opportunities in school, the workplace, neighborhoods and society at large. It is church burnings and beatings, it is stereotypes about “welfare queens,” it is police harassment, it is prejudice against immigrants, she said.

“The reality is that racial discrimination is not a thing of the past, it is a present-day dilemma,” said Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat and member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “It is an important reality for the country to face up to.”

The need for Americans to come to grips with their diversity is even more important in light of immigration and birth statistics that show the United States becoming more diverse racially and ethnically, administration officials said. New York City, for instance, will go from being two-thirds white in 1970 to an estimated one-third in the year 2000, according to the city planning department.

While they agree there is need for a national discussion on race, civil rights leaders worry the administration is not prepared to push for sufficient policy changes or spend enough money to make a real difference.

“This is a useful and important partial step, but it’s not the kind of really big step we need,” said Hugh B. Price, president of the National Urban League, an advocacy group for African Americans.

And Hispanics fear they will be overlooked altogether, said Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group for Hispanics.

“It is naive and pernicious and counterproductive for anybody to be talking about race relations in a very black-white paradigm,” he said. As an example, Yzaguirre said that Hispanics were a mere “footnote” in the administration’s review of affirmative-action policies.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s most vocal opponents on race contend he actually could increase racial unease by continuing to push for affirmative action and other programs that many whites and some minorities find offensive.

“We believe very strongly that the president should come down on the side of eliminating racial preferences immediately,” said Jennifer Nelson, executive director of the American Civil Rights Institute in Sacramento, Calif., the renamed group that led the fight for California’s Proposition 209 to eliminate government-sponsored affirmative action. “Unfortunately, the administration has a dismal record on racial preferences.”

Neither side disputes the problem. When Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office in 1963, blacks earned 53 percent of what whites earned. Despite the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills that Johnson signed, that figure climbed to just 60 percent by 1995, according to the most recent Census Bureau figures.

That year, the median income for non-Hispanic whites was $37,178. For Asians, it was $40,614. But for African Americans and Hispanics, it was $22,393 and $22,860, respectively.

Other numbers paint a more desolate picture. In 1994, 16 percent of white children were living in poverty, compared with 43 percent of black children and 41 percent of Hispanic children, federal figures show. That same year, 18 percent of white children lived with a single parent, compared with almost 60 percent of black children and 29 percent of Hispanic children. Nearly half the nation’s prisoners are black.

Beyond the numbers are the realities of everyday life. Though they are no longer legally segregated, whites, blacks and other minorities most often live in separate neighborhoods, go to separate churches and have separate friends. And while people of all races interact more than they used to, they see the world through different lenses, a truth driven home by the police beating of Rodney King and the prosecution of O.J. Simpson.

Those varying perceptions will make Clinton’s job particularly arduous, according to a number of civil rights advocates. Because discrimination is not as stark as it once was, because blacks no longer are relegated to the backs of buses or to forcibly segregated schools, because there are success stories such as Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell, it is difficult to get people to take seriously the remaining inequities.