Tom Brokaw on "Bridging the Divide": "This Country Has Made Enormous Strides — But We Still Have a Long Way to Go"

NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw spoke with Premier Guide Miami's Daedrian McNaughton about his documentary "Tom Brokaw Presents Bridging the Divide," which premiered on USA Network on Friday, December 10 at 7/6c. Premier Guide Miami sat down to find out what that means — and what comes next.

NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw hosted "Tom Brokaw Presents Bridging the Divide," a one-hour special that premiered on USA Network on Friday, December 10 at 7/6c. Produced by Peacock Productions, the documentary looked beyond inflammatory headlines and politicized rhetoric to examine where America really stands on racism, gay rights, disability access, bullying, and discrimination toward immigrants. The special was part of USA Network's Characters Unite public service campaign.

On comparing intolerance toward Black Americans vs. gay Americans: "When you look at how African Americans were treated — they could not go to the same school, they could not drink out of water fountains, they were not given opportunities in education or higher education or in the corporate workplace. I lived in Omaha in the 1960s. I do not remember a Black retail corp downtown, or if you went into a bank there was not a teller that was Black. I worked at a station which had only one Black employee and he was the janitor. We do not have that kind of discrimination in this country when it comes to gays and their opportunities in the workplace. They are still subjected to too much discrimination but it is not on par with what went on with African Americans."

On the outlook for tolerance in America: "People have enormous anxieties about their personal economic insecurities and they tend to retreat behind their own ethnicity, their class. They do not have as much tolerance as they do during good times. This country has made enormous strides in almost all of these areas, but we still have a long way to go. If you look at the young people who are in schools now, they are far more color blind and far more tolerant, because they are going to integrated schools, they are seeing integrated television commercials and programs, and they are seeing artists in a much different way in our media. A lot of this can break down along generation lines, but it is a slowly rising tide. That is how we will make progress."

On America's uniqueness as an immigration nation: "There is nothing like us. We are an immigration nation. No other nation in the world has the kind of multi-cultural population like the United States does, in the dimension we do. People come from all over the world here and bring with them their faith, their skin color, and their cultures, and we find a way somehow to work together. If you go to Western Europe, there are huge problems with the Muslim population. I was in Germany last year and a young Turkish student went into a coffee shop and was treated disdainfully. I was stunned by how the German clerk behind the counter was so dismissive of this person and not at all to me."

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