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in the last 50 years that the idea that whites continue to have any inherent advantage based on race is at least outdated and, more likely, a perverse, intentional corruption of the truth.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.