By Wayne Dawkins
 
U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., in a Wall Street Journal essay July 22, said federal diversity programs stir racial tensions. Webb did not cite any specific, egregious program. He should or he is pouring accelerant on an inflamed racial landscape.
 
And without specifics, this friend of the civil rights community looks like he is caving in to the vile, racially hostile attacks of the ultra-right wing. Webb’s piece was published 48 hours after a malicious blogger edited videotape to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department staff member had discriminated against a white farm couple.
 
Shirley Sherrod was fired by the USDA and the NAACP expressed dismay at what it did not know was a doctored clip of her four-month-old speech. When facts surfaced that trumped blogger Andrew Breitbart’s malice, Sherrod was vindicated.
 
Yet crackpots on the right are probably plotting other attacks, like the ACORN farce, the recent New Black Panther polling place tempest, and other shenanigans.
 
The headline on Webb’s essay said white privilege is a myth. Webb did not write that in his own words. What he did write in several nuanced paragraphs was that the old White Anglo Saxon Protestant power elite had declined.
 
As E. Digby Baltzell explained in “The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America,” ethnic whites in the 1950s and 1960s learned how to Anglicize their way into the power elite, whether it was politics, corporations, or Hollywood.
 
But to say that white privilege has vanished in the early 21st century is a stretch. The nostalgia for the “Mad Men” days of 50 years ago has lost some power, but it’s not gone.
 
Baltzell published his book one year before U.S. immigration law that for several generations fueled white supremacy dramatically changed. American law after 1965 gave more access to immigrants not from European countries, including Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. After 45 years and nearly two generations of immigrants of color flavoring America, it may be that people are benefiting unfairly from anachronistic government diversity programs.
 
Webb’s critique then could be valid. Adjustments of programs or even eliminations should be made. But please, offer some evidence of badly conceived programs, because lack of an example was the glaring omission in the senator’s Wall Street Journal essay.