In July amidst all of the media coverage of the firing of Shirley Sherrod there was little to no coverage of an opinion piece by Virginia’s United States Senator Jim Webb where he argues that the idea of White privilege is a myth and that the policy of affirmative action should be brought to an end because the primary beneficiaries of the policy are recent non-white immigrants who have not historically been victims of institutionalized discrimination here in America. Click here for  the link to the article. 

The right honorable Senator from Virginia offers in support of his argument statistics, that at best, provide circumstantial evidence in favor of his premise but in reality have nothing to do with what he alleges. Senator Webb even reaches (and I do mean reaches) back to the antebellum America to support his premise that non-elite white Americans were not and are not privileged. I would like to suggest that perhaps the senior Senator from Virginia was smoking in the boy’s room during American history class in high school; so for his and the benefit of others let me offer a history and science lesson. As a preliminary statement let me qualify all that follows with a science lesson by stating that there is no scientific evidence to support the premise that there are any racial differences between modern human beings i.e. the species of humans known as homo sapiens. Geneticists generally describe the differences among human beings as a difference of variety that developed after modern humans migrated out of Africa into Europe and other parts of the world. This accounts for the ability of human beings of differing phenoytypes (people who look different or what we conventionally call race) to intermarry; end of the science lesson.

Now, for the history lesson---Senator Webb pay attention! America from its time as colonies to its founding as a nation had practices, that as a matter of law, discriminated both on the basis of economic status as well as race. Within this context many of the first Africans brought to colonial American became indentured servants just as had many Europeans, while others Africans and no Europeans were enslaved for life. The only difference between indentured servitude and slavery was simply a matter of the length of time, with the term of indentured servitude being a matter of years and slavery being for life. Those Africans that were indentured servants were the original free black population of America. In most colonies white people who did not own sufficient property could not vote or run for political office and in most cases people of color, not at all, no matter how much property they owned. The statutes that proscribed these types of discrimination here in Virginia are spelled out in William Hening’s Virginia ‘Statutes At Large’, a collection of Virginia statutes from about 1619 to the mid-1800s. From Hening’s it is clear that “white privilege” as a disparate practice was institutionalized even before slavery, the difference being the extent of the privilege. The language in the various colonial and later state statutes clearly gave white people privileges that free black and native peoples did not enjoy. One example that was codified until after the Civil War was the inability of free African or Native-Americans to testify in courts of law against white people. This legal disparity handicapped the ability of people of color to use the legal system to protect themselves from whites. Another was a prohibition on African-Americans owning firearms (See Hening’s Virginia Statutes Act X, Laws Of Virginia, January 14, 1639-40). These firearms laws existed in an environment where one needed firearms to hunt food as well as for defense of self and property. Among other disparities free African-Americans were subject to lifetime slavery for certain violations of the law where whites were not.

After the Revolutionary War many of American states prohibited formal education to people of African descent regardless of whether free or enslaved. Similarly, at no time in the history of this country, either as a colony or after, were white people ever prohibited from education themselves as a matter of law. It was not until after the American Civil War could people of African descent seek formal schooling without fear of punishment by the state or otherwise. Still for other reasons---some a direct result of unlawful discrimination---educational disparity existed from the post Civil War period until today. Simply because members of minority groups that are recent immigrants to this country have been beneficiaries of affirmative action policies only demonstrates Senator Webb’s lack of knowledge of United States history as well as affirmative action policy.

Senator Webb blames federal government affirmative action policies for the plight of the averages White worker and that “…the time has come to cease the false arguments…” in favor of affirmative action “…and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.” The false argument according to Senator Webb is the historic “monolith of White…dominance…” Well if White dominance is a figment of the collective black imagination then someone needs to explain to me what I am misunderstanding about the American Jim Crow era and the impact that Jim Crow practices have had on the present state of minority America in general and African-America in particular.

So what was the Jim Crow era of American history? It was an era characterized by policies and practices based upon race and an era that many extant Americans have lived and many of those same Americans suffered through. In particular Jim Crow policies and practices gave European-Americans or white people as a group advantages over African-Americans or black people. The Senator alleges that white Americans are subject to discrimination because of affirmative action that unjustly benefits black Americans and other minorities, but he fails to address obvious contradictions to his claims, e.g. why are European-Americans and European-American males in particular significantly higher in all economic measures than African-Americans? According to economic data compiled by the United States Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics European-American males and their families currently and historically had significantly greater incomes than their African-American counter parts regardless of education and work experience. In addition the disparity between the incomes of European-American males to females has decreased over the years that has resulted in contributing to the overall increase of incomes of European-American families. Here federal affirmative action policy favoring white females being one of the factors contributing to the reduction of income disparity between white males and females. In this regard it can be argued that affirmative action has done more to maintain or even improve the economic advantages enjoyed by Americans of European descent than other minorities including African-Americans. Once again Senator Webb, where is the discrimination or even the discriminatory result?

In addition, Senator Webb attempts to use education statistics that are over thirty years old to support his premise of institutional discrimination again white America, but presuming that those statistics were valid then or today (I don’t by-the-way), they only support the same argument that is advanced against certain segments of the African-American population----the failure to make education a priority is the reason for income disparities among the lower quintiles of those populations.

Senator Webb like other Democrat and Republican politicians claim that they have dedicated their political careers “…to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force…” The problem is his recent record does not support this claim anymore than the “facts” alleged in his article support his premise of institutionalized discrimination against white Americans. In July Senator Webb voted against a bill that would have helped all low income Americans pay for college and to date Senator Webb had done nothing to eliminate the new Jim Crow programs funded by federal dollars that discriminates against Virginians of African descent. One such program is Virginia’s child support program that fraudulently creates and inflates child support arrearages of African-Americans in order to illegally collect incentive payments from the federal Department of Health and Human Services. This neo-Jim Crow program fattens Virginia state coffers at the expense of its black citizens.

While I agree that economics should be an additional consideration of affirmative action policy, Senator Webb’s article made one thing clear---white privilege for well off white Senators from Virginia is alive and well when a poorly researched and poorly written opinion piece can be published in ‘The Wall Street Journal’ simply because its written by a well off white Senator from Virginia.

Obama rode into office on a vast wave of progressive enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was bound to be followed by disappointment. Given the facts of politics, and above all the difficulty of getting anything done in the face of lock-step Republican opposition, he wasn't going to be the transformational figure some envisioned.

But progressive disillusionment isn't just a matter of sky-high expectations meeting prosaic reality. Threatened filibusters didn't force Obama to waffle on torture; to escalate in Afghanistan; to choose, with exquisitely bad timing, to loosen the rules on offshore drilling early this year.