US government diversity programs must end-US Sen. James Webb, Democrat (words breaking from his long record of opposite actions)

Update: I posted this article because I was surprised it was written by a left wing Democrat. I later noticed comments about it at a right-of-center site by people who know more about this guy than I do. They point out Webb will champion none of what he says here and has supported everything to make worse all the problems he cites. An American Thinker commenter's experience with Senator Webb:

• 7/23: 5:43pm, "During the Healthcare fiasco I emailed, faxed and called his office and got back the most condescending, patronizing mass mailed form letters you have ever read. It seems that
  
• he felt that I was so stupid that I could not understand just how lucky I was to have someone as wonderful as him to represent me in the Senate and vote for the
  
• things he knew that I needed even if I was too stupid to realize it.
  
• Well he is up for election in 2012 and I informed him that this stupid voter would do everything I could to make sure he was relieved of the burden of representing me."...

7/22/10, "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," by US Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, Wall Street Journal, Op-Ed

• "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.

*****via Howie Carr