Opinion: Sen. Jim Webb Uses His Privilege to Play Racial Politics

(July 27) -- It's hard not to automatically dismiss an op-ed titled "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege" written by a man who has profited, whether he acknowledges it or not, from precisely that privilege.

In his piece for the Wall Street Journal, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., claims that government-orchestrated diversity programs are marginalizing white workers.

Webb sets out the classic contrarian viewpoint that affirmative action programs, which are intended to promote fairness, do anything but, and have instead actually "damaged racial harmony."

The argument is a familiar one, but the key players have shifted.

Instead of blacks being vilified as the beneficiaries of the government's "compassion" at the expense of white workers, the target is immigrants.

Webb is politically savvy enough to write: "The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed."

He's learned his lesson from 10 years ago, when he wrote in the Journal that affirmative action "has within one generation brought about a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand."

Though Webb now knows to pay closer attention to his analogies, he still seems to study from his own set of history books.

Webb says that immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America "did not suffer from discrimination from our government" the way black Americans did, but they nevertheless benefit from programs intended to rectify it. He doesn't address the prospect that American imperialism affected people of color in various parts of the world.

Affirmative action, Webb feels, has thwarted the economic welfare of the "many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years."

Webb has spoken for several years on the plight of poorer and working-class whites and the false notion that whites are a monolithic group.

Both points hold validity, but neither amounts to a just cause for abolishing programs intended to promote diversity.

Moreover, Webb's flawed interpretation of certain events does little to convince others (particularly blacks, who Webb subtly pits against immigrants) to lend support to his cause.

On the change of immigration laws in 1965 and its effects on affirmative action, for instance, Webb writes, "these laws moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites."

For someone who likes to constantly remind the country that white people aren't a monolith, why does he leave out the fact that some of affirmative action's greatest beneficiaries have been white women?

Webb's attempt to downplay the role of slavery in America doesn't do away with the fact that white Americans -- slave-owners or otherwise, impoverished or not -- benefited from an institution built on the belief that blacks were inferior.

To this very day, not even a college degree can close the employment gap between blacks and whites. Such discrimination lingers for blacks and other racial groups, and a U.S. senator should know that considering his main glimpse of color on the job is when he's looking at the carpet of the Senate floor.

Had Sen. Webb simply articulated the point that nondiscrimination programs should become more inclusive and take class differences into consideration, then perhaps it would be easier to embrace his point of view.

But no, Webb would rather focus on trying to dismiss the notion of white privilege and slam immigrant workers -- coincidentally at a time when xenophobic immigration laws are being passed amid growing cries of "reverse racism."

Webb's op-ed isn't about making things fair. It's his way of slumming for the angry white male vote as he looks to his 2012 re-election campaign.

That, unfortunately, is also his privilege.