Hysteria over Shirley Sherrod last week unfortunately overshadowed a sensible, courageous and long overdue analysis of racial politics by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Webb put to rest the myth of white dominance that has “served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America.” Because of government-sponsored “diversity” policies, he wrote, white workers have become marginalized to serve an overbroad effort to make up for past wrongs.
Webb rightly notes that the old South was a three-tiered society, “with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to maintain power.” He might have added that white elites used populist rhetoric to keep an entire third of the region’s population disenfranchised, in effect also making the Southern economy “backward.”
