Is White Privilege a Myth?

Virginia Senator Jim Webb urges an end to government diversity programs, saying that they hurt deserving whites and benefit people not entitled to them. This is a debate we should have, but can we?

Here is what I anticipate: Jim Webb, the senior senator from Virginia, will soon be both vilified and lionized in the ''media'' for attacking affirmative action as wrong-headed and divisive. And one result is that the intense conversation we've endured in recent days about race in the wake of the sacking of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod is now headed for overtime.

In last Friday's Wall Street Journal, Webb asserted that affirmative action programs, which he and most everyone else now refer to as ''diversity'' programs, have strayed from their original intent and today do more to hurt white Americans and harm the country than they do to redress past racial injustice.

''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,'' Webb writes. ''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.''

The piece is headlined, ''Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege.'' The notion that white privilege is a myth will surely ignite a backlash among many black Americans, who will say that there is nothing mythical about the advantages that being white bestows in America. Alternately, Webb will be hailed as a hero and a truth-teller among those who see the racial landscape in America so vastly altered in the last 50 years that the idea that whites continue to have any inherent advantage based on race is at least outdated and, more likely, a perverse, intentional corruption of the truth. People will argue that white privilege is a social conceit intended to gain political and economic advantage -- the race card, in common parlance.

So here we are, almost 150 years after monumental disagreements about race led to the outbreak on the Civil War, confronting monumental disagreements about how to deal with the consequences of the last 150 years. Racial injustice has been at the core of the national debate for the entire life of the republic; it has been a blunt-force instrument used to destroy the lives and aspirations of a whole race of people over many generations and with lasting consequences. The remedies, when they've been sought, have never been elegant, largely because the blunt force of racial injustice and discrimination has never allowed for elegant solutions. From the Dred Scott decision to the present-day diversity programs, we have argued consistently about the role of race in the American life. Black people have almost always come out on the losing end of that debate. The length of the debate alone is evidence of how difficult progress has been.

One hundred fifty summers ago, in July 1860, in one of his last speeches as president and one that helped create the climate for war, James Buchanan told a group of anxious Democrats at the White House that the only way to save the Union was to let Southern slave owners take their "property" into the new territories of the West. Northern abolitionist agitators had no right to dictate otherwise, he said.

"The sovereign states of this Union are one vast partnership. The territories were acquired by the common blood and common treasure of them all," Buchanan said. "Each state, and each citizen of each state, has the same right in the territories as any other state and the citizens of any other state possess. Now what is sought for at present is that a portion of these states should turn around to their sister states and say, 'We are holier than you are, and while we will take our property to the territories and have it protected there, you shall not place your property in the same position.' "

The argument today seems so ridiculous and so wrong that it seems unimaginable that it could have been made by a president of the United States. But it is one more historical example of how the long-running debate about race has been one of monumental misunderstanding about what is important to the other side. Blind to the injustice of slavery, Buchanan was passionate about preserving the rights of Southern planters. Five months after that speech, Lincoln won the White House, and four months later, the Civil War began.

Jim Webb may be right about diversity programs, but his arguments are politically nuanced and historically layered, and as a result will not matter. The discussion of race is America has a long history of impermeability to nuance and subtlety: The history is long and painful, and the arguments on each side are too sharply honed and too well-refined to admit any common ground with the opposition. There remains a huge empathy gap about what is important to the other side.

He acknowledges all the important points his opponents will make: 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 Webb's brief will sound like a counter-narrative, in large part because it dismisses the idea of white privilege. For many black Americans that will end the conversation, but his argument is not with black Americans. "Where should we go from here?" Webb asks. "Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end."

I read the piece with interest because Webb came to mind earlier this week as we bumbled through the Shirley Sherrod USDA firing debacle. Advised to look at the whole speech, I listened to Sherrod talk about a historical partnership between poor blacks and whites in the South and thought of Jim Webb.

"You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black -- there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for the seven years and -- and get their freedom," Sherrod said. "And they didn't see any difference in each other -- nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat … '' The historical time line may be imprecise, but her point stands.

I got to know Webb a little while working on my book about the Senate. He does not categorize easily. He has made the high incarceration rate among young black men one of his signature efforts in the Senate. He calls it a "trajectory" issue, believing that it affects the long-term future of the country. "We want to keep bad people off our streets. We want to break the backs of gangs, and we want to cut down on violent behavior," he said. "But there is something else going on when we are locking up such a high percentage of our people, marking them at an early age and in many cases eliminating their chances for a productive life as citizens." So his arguments about diversity programs cannot be lightly regarded as facile, political posturing.

A fierce defender of his Scots-Irish heritage, Webb is a Democrat and part of what he and its other members describe, only half-jokingly, as the "redneck caucus" in the Senate. Webb has made the point more than once that poor, working-class people -- black and white -- have the same economic and social interests and should naturally be in political alliance. Webb, like Sherrod, thinks that the schism that exists between poor and working-class blacks and whites was the intended handiwork of economic elites who saw such an alliance as harmful to their interests.

Webb now argues that diversity programs are making those divisions worse because they help the wrong people and hurt deserving whites. "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," Webb writes in The Wall Street Journal. ''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."

This would be an interesting debate to have, if we could get to it. But we've been having the larger, more raucous and painful one for so long that our categories are now too rigid to rearrange. Until a young black woman and a young white man can somehow represent exactly the same promise in the American imagination, if they can bring the same diversity, inclusion will continue to be a question of race, and that is a whole same discussion.

Terence Samuel is the author of The Upper House: A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the U.S. Senate, published in May by Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Twitter.

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