Power Leads to Injustice

Last week Sen. James Webb (D-VA) wrote an important op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about race politics.

The fact is, he argues, the current "diversity" policy of the governing elite is a policy that discriminates against whites. A policy that was intended to help black victims of pervasive discrimination now discriminates in favor of all "people of color" including millions of people who came to the United States whos never experienced any discrimination.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years. Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

The fact is that, e.g., in the South, there are whites that have experienced significant and extended deprivation and hardship, even as considered in the dry-as-toast categories of liberal social science. And "diversity" programs often help non-whites that are anything but deprived.

There is a word for this sort of thing. Injustice. Injustice that will rise up out of the hinterland and sweep to vengeance one day with a terrible swift sword. And as usual, the ruling elite doesn't have a clue what is coming.

Jim Webb calls for an end to diversity programs, except for blacks: "Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end."

No, Jim. You just don't get it, not even now. What the Negro needs, above all, is to be left alone. That was true 150 years ago just as much as it is now, when Frederick Douglass wrote the following:

What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us... I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! ... And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... your interference is doing him positive injury.

Do nothing, Jim! Have the decency to respect the American Negro as a person as worthy and as capable as yourself. Let the Negro alone to make his or her individual journey to the center of this Nation of Nations. When he or she is left alone, no longer the darling of the political elite, then he or she will have a chance to find their place. Not the place that the Southern racists wanted for them. Not the place that the Northern liberals wanted for them. Not even the place that African Americans might think is waiting for them.

No, what is waiting for African Americans, if left alone, is a destiny that nobody can know.

Meanwhile, a horrible indictment is building up against liberals in the scales of justice, growing heavier every day. It is frightening to consider the retribution that is coming.