The Cellar - Va. senator calls for ending diversity programs

Quote:

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb called for ending government-run diversity programs in a newspaper column Friday, saying they have disadvantaged struggling whites and hurt the cause of racial harmony.

Webb wrote an op-ed column in Friday's Wall Street Journal that said a "plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future."

Webb's press secretary, Jessica Smith, said Friday that the senator felt the column speaks for itself and that he would not comment further.

As an author, Webb expressed misgivings about how affirmative action programs have grown beyond their initial intent in two of his books, "Born Fighting" and "A Time to Fight."

Federal diversity programs now primarily benefit new immigrants over whites and even black Americans, their original beneficiaries, wrote Webb, D-Va.

"In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations," he wrote.

"The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed," he wrote.

Immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa in recent decades knew no such discrimination from the government, he wrote, "and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hardworking white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years."

Such programs should end, Webb concluded, except for "our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need."

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Wow! just wow.