Senator Jim Webb has always been something of a maverick, but now he has done something truly shocking: He has broken from Democrat Party orthodoxy on the intertwined issues of race, diversity and white privilege.
In a
Wall Street Journal op-ed piece today, Webb makes it crystal clear that he is sympathetic to the condition of African-Americans in this country, who still wrestle with the legacy of slavery the Jim Crow era, and is supportive of measures to remediate, in the words of Lyndon B. Johnson, “the badges of slavery.” But he is uncomfortable with the idea of extending that remediation to all “persons of color,” most of whom are newcomers to America and have never suffered discrimination from the U.S. government. Furthermore, he argues that white cultures are so diverse that lumping them together for purposes of public policy (as in bearing the brunt of reverse discrimination) is not justifiable.
As Webb notes, 95% of the whites of the old South did not own slaves. The South was economically devastated by the Civil War, leaving not only blacks but whites in poverty. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, two-thirds were white, roughly mirroring a population that was 71% white. As late as 1938, white illiteracy was far higher than the national average; all colleges and universities in the South combined had endowments smaller than Harvard and Yale combined. The legacy of that white poverty lives on today in lower-than-average levels of education. Writes Webb:
Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on those policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.
He concludes:
Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. … Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.
Bravo! Well said.
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