Clinton envisioned an America based on equal opportunity, fairness, and respect for all as well as shared responsibility and a greater sense of civility.

Clinton viewed race relations as something that too often divided and weakened the nation even as America was rapidly becoming the world's first truly-multiracial democracy.

Clinton identified three imperatives for the initiative to focus: expanding opportunity, demanding responsibility, and creating one American community based on respect and shared values.

I want this panel to help educate Americans about the facts surrounding issues of race, to promote a dialogue in every community of the land to confront and work through these issues, to recruit and encourage leadership at all levels to help breach racial divides, and to find, develop and recommend how to implement concrete solutions to our problems -- solutions that will involve all of us in government, business, communities, and as individual citizens.

The President's Advisory Board on Race commissioned a Case Study on a local Elementary School in Fairfax, Virginia[2] and their Report "America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future Report"[3] quotes Linda Chavez-Thompson, about her visit to Bailey's Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences in December 1997 in her capacity as member of the Advisory Board on Race [I]t is absolutely delightful that the children at the elementary level don't know what color is.