Senator Jim Webb: End Government-Directed Diversity Programs
When I read Senator Jim Webb’s “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” article in the Wall Street Journal, my reaction to it was similar to Roger Clegg’s at The Corner. Webb calls for an end to “government-directed diversity programs,” and writes that laws against discrimination should apply to everyone equally.
But he says America still owes a debt to blacks, a group that “despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.”
Webb apparently believes the so-called legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are to blame for these social pathologies, and the government must intervene and/or give something to blacks to narrow the disparities. As Clegg notes, Webb doesn’t mention what partly explains social pathologies: out-of-wedlock births.
Only a third of black children in America is born to married parents, and illegitimacy is closely associated with fatherlessness, which itself is correlated with poverty, delinquency, criminality, drug use, and illegitimacy. Family instability exacerbates social pathologies. And generally speaking, a parent has less emotional attachment to and makes a lower financial investment in children he doesn’t live with. That’s a fact of human nature, despite any anecdotes to the contrary.
Webb correctly notes that “affirmative action” was created with descendants of black American slaves in mind, not immigrants, legal or otherwise. Hispanics have already overtaken blacks as the largest racial/ethnic minority in the U.S. Do preferences proponents believe Hispanics, especially first-generation immigrants, should benefit from such policies?
I say let’s end government-sanctioned racial preferences now, and the answer to the question will be irrelevant.
