Former Virginia senator and Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb said Friday that President-elect Trump’s inauguration creates the opportunity to “reset” the national discussion on race, including addressing the issue of “reverse discrimination,” or discrimination directed at the white majority.
“[T]he discussion is mired in the biracial dialogue of the 1960s, while our challenges have become multicultural and mixed with reverse discrimination. Many people who want to remedy this voted for Mr. Trump. One can hope his administration will seek policies to reduce racial tensions and increase fairness for all Americans,” Webb said in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
Webb, a former secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan as well as a noted author, has long had a preoccupation with racial issues. He has often expressed the belief that emphasis on the concerns of minorities in the government and the broader U.S. culture has come at the expense of working-class whites, many of whom are suffering economically. He returned to that theme in his Journal op-ed.
“Few would dispute the original purpose of affirmative action, which was to help African-Americans remove the ‘badges of slavery.’ But after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, the ethnic makeup of the country dramatically changed. Affirmative action expanded into broader diversity programs, often discriminating against poorer blacks and Americans who happened to be white. Working whites have been hit particularly hard, since white America is not a monolith but a composite of cultures widely stratified in terms of education and income,” Webb wrote.
“The disparate impact of diversity programs on different white cultures is not apparent using broad statistics based on race. In addition, more frequent racial intermarriage has blurred the data further, and will continue to do so,” he said.
Webb was a star in the Democratic party a decade ago for his staunch criticism of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War and for defeating Republican Senator George Allen in his 2006 re-election bid. However Webb’s opinions on the issue of race and other issues have often put him on the outs with his party.
He challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2015 but drew scant support and dropped out of the race in late 2015. He toyed with the idea of an independent bid after that but decided against it, and remains somewhat estranged from the party.
