Webb on Affirmative Action

So Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.)has a new WSJ editorial about the evils of affirmative action. Leiter provides the usual instructive comments. Some commentators have taken Webb to endorse a class-based approach to affirmative action, but the only point he tries to make about affirmative action policies is that they have resulted in unfair treatment of the supposed "white monolith," so it is probably best not to attribute to him a positive case for limited forms of affirmative action, especially since he ends his article with a plea for equal treatment under the law (without, needless to say, providing any notion of what that might imply).


Let me focus on three issues. First, Webb Webb is blurring the distinction b/w (1) geographical disparities of wealth and educational opportunities and (2) racial disparities in educational or economic achievement. So for example, he compares the education of "white Baptists nationwide" with blacks--not, apparently, black Baptists nationwide, but blacks as a whole, before noting that the white Baptist education level is far below that of the white national average--the only figure that should technically be put head-to-head for a comparison to the black national average if our concern is institutionalized racism.

The problem for his position, though, is that there's no clear path between scrapping affirmative action policies and getting rid of (1), while there is (granting that this is a matter of practical dispute) a clear path between keeping affirmative action policies while helping to alleviate the effects of (2), or alternatively, jettisoning affirmative action policies while leaving (1) largely intact and considerably worsening (2).

Second, Webb commits the same error he attributes to proponents of affirmative action, by failing to distinguish how affirmative action actually *doesn't* treat all non-whites uniformly. So, for example, Japanese students don't get preferential treatment for being east-Asian, or (subcontinental) Indian students for being Indian.

Third and least forgivably, Webb indulges in a bit of strongly inappropriate racist imagery. The lead sentence of his second paragraph is: "Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America." Thus Webb uses a notorious image, of a whipping post, but reverses its historical polarity, making White...dominance" serve as the whipping post, instead of the whipping agent. For this, Webb should be ashamed of himself.