I'll Second that Yikes
Over at Contentions, Jennifer Rubin breaks down just how many different groups Weekly Standard contributor Sen. Jim Webb managed to offend yesterday:
“We shouldn’t be surprised at the way they are voting right now,” said Webb in an interview with MSNBC. “This is the result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African-Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white. And these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it.”
Let’s count up the objections: 1) Supporters of affirmative action reject the notion that whites have legitimate grievances about race-based programs; 2) Hispanics and Asian Americans will love the notion that they are less deserving of the preferences doled out to African Americans; 3) Opponents of race-based preferences will ask why Webb thinks treating citizens by race (apparently only one group) is “a justifiable concept”; and 4) All those people who voted against Obama for reasons having nothing to do with race or affirmative action won’t like being labeled resentful–if not bitter. (I may have missed a few.)
#2 is easily my favorite of the objections. Saying that African Americans are the only minority group worthy of affirmative action kind of blows my mind. I guess Native Americans should just get over that attempted genocide. You know who was treated great when they came across the Pacific? The Chinese. They loved being fourth class citizens, condemned to lives of hard labor and no respect.* Yup. Blacks are the only minority group to have had it rough in American history.
Now I for one oppose race-based set asides and the like (seriously, can’t we move to a class-based system of affirmative action already?), but to suggest that race-based affirmative action should be restricted to African Americans is ludicrous. Also ludicrous: Webb’s assumption that his Appalachian brethren are unhappy that such programs have spread to Hispanics and Asian Americans, but would be perfectly fine with African Americans getting a hand up.
*One of my favorite things about Deadwood is the no-holds-barred way it portrays the difficulties of life for Chinese immigrants in the Old West. It was pretty despicable.