The Wall Street Journal Editorials
Diversity and the Myth of
White Privilege
America still owes a debt to its black citizens, but government
programs to help all 'people of color' are unfair. They should end.
July 23, 2010
The NAACP believes the tea party is racist. The tea party believes
the NAACP is racist. And Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by
pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court,
there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants
make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for
generations.
Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights
movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about
power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate,
WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of
government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white
workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow
every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.
I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to
America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what
people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately,
present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having
expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor
anyone who does not happen to be white.
In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can
understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move
ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the
country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony.
And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped
African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action
as it was originally conceived.
How so?
Lyndon Johnson's initial program for affirmative action was based on
the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which
authorized the federal government to take actions in order to
eliminate "the badges of slavery." Affirmative action was designed
to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans.
This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who
came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in
socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.
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. But
the extrapolation of this logic to all "people of color"—especially
since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the
demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from
remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It
has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who
despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still
experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and
family breakup.
Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin
America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our
government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of
special government programs. The same cannot be said of many
hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America
go back more than 200 years.
Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a
monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse
(yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them
together for the purpose of public policy.
The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from
examining the history of the American South.
The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put
whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial
tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in
1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent
black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that "fully three-fourths
of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate
economic interest in the maintenance of slavery."
The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And
from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II,
the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.
In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission
to study what he termed "the long and ironic history of the
despoiling of this truly American section." At that time, most
industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region.
Of the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a
mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate
was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice
that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of
European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total
endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were
less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average
schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her
education, compared to $141 for children in New York.
Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and
they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion
Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that
white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a
level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well
below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey
of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years
1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish
Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had
obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a
Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and
Indian descent of 61.9%.
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 these 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.
Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to
assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed
diversity programs should end.
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 in our communities. Our government should be in the business of
enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so
by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not
determine outcomes.
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.
Mr. Webb, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from Virginia.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS