George,

I have read with interest both Jim Webb's column and the comments of Katherine McNamara and Harry Tenney (and Al Weed, commenting on Katherine's comments).

I sort of agree with all of them. Let me offer a caveat here -- I don't have statistics at my command, though frankly anyone can cite statistics for just about any proposition. I base this primarily on years of anecdotal experience.

First, it is analytically very difficult to talk about affirmative action programs as a group. Affirmative action in employment, and affirmative action in government contracting, and affirmative action in college admissions all serve different purposes and different values, and they have experienced different levels of success. When Webb lumps "business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts" together under the title of "government-directed diversity programs," he makes it impossible to tease apart the different goals of each and the different consequences of each. He wants government to be "in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes."

In this last sentence he hints at another problem with affirmative action policies -- what do we mean by "black" anyway? We in Virginia have a rather sordid history with this. Looking back 100 years ago, Virginia's avowed state policy was that anyone with even a drop of African blood was deemed to be a "Negro." Many first families of Virginia were proud to trace their lineage back to Pocahontas, and many of them backed the anti-miscegenation laws, but when Walter Plecker, the head of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, tried to call Native Americans "non-white," the Racial Integrity Act had to be amended to make clear that people with no more than 1/16th Native American blood could still be called "white."

To update the issue, should Tiger Woods or Barack Obama be given the benefit of an affirmative action program? Let's take Tiger Woods -- the self-professed Cablinasian, reflecting the fact that his four grandparents were Caucasian, Black, Indian (Native American) and Asian. What category would he fit? Or his children, who are 1/2 Cablinasian and 1/2 Swedish? And 100% rich, and virtually certain to grow up to be college-educated?

And more to Webb's point, if those children were to apply to a college, is there any reason why they should deserve any consideration under an affirmative action policy?

"Race" begins to lose its meaning after a while.

Second, it is my sense that the overwhelming problem in American society now is not discrimination based on race, but discrimination based on education. Or, to give it a slightly different spin, discrimination based on class. Webb cites the statistics on college degrees, noting that 61.9% of those of Chinese and Indian descent had college degrees, saying that those who developed affirmative action policies failed to note these "differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures."

Jim Webb correctly points out that poor whites and poor blacks have much more in common that poor whites have in common with affluent whites. And affluent blacks and affluent whites have more in common with each other than either group has with the poorer people of the same race. That is not to say that there is no difference between the opportunities given to whites and blacks who are otherwise similarly situated -- only that the differences are more pronounced on class lines than on race lines. And to further complicate the analysis, many black women insist that they suffer more of a disadvantage in the workplace because they are female than because they are black.

Let's say that we are looking at the likelihood of getting elected to political office. I would hazard a guess that any rich person of any race or gender would have a greater chance of getting elected than any middle-class person of any gender or race, and that a middle-class person of any gender or race would have a greater chance of getting elected than any poor person of any gender or race. To put it slightly differently, any person of any race or gender with a college degree would have a greater chance of getting elected than any person of any gender or race with a high school diploma, and that a person with a high school diploma of any gender or race would have a greater chance of getting elected than any high school drop-out of any gender or race.

When Harry refers to the appalling conditions facing Native Americans, we have to remember that many of the Native Americans who are represented by these statistics are living on reservations with no jobs, dead-end schools, and no future. Their situation is hard to generalize from, because for many tribes they choose to remain on what they regard as sacred land, no matter how infertile or inhospitable it may be. And while their poverty can on an historic basis be traced to discriminatory actions by white governments over the past 200 years, the fates of individual Native American children living on reservations in the West are attributable far more to lack of educational opportunity than to any prejudice against them as a group.

Third, one very valid point that Jim Webb makes is that affirmative action laws now are often favoring recent immigrants, many of whom begin with educational and cultural advantages that American-born poor people of any race do not enjoy. Why should the children of Silicon Valley software engineers who happen to be Asian need any preference for getting a job, or getting into college? (It is widely believed that the Admissions Office at UC Berkeley has had to find a way to limit Asian-American admissions, because Caucasian students were being crowded out when purely numerical criteria like the SAT and GPA were used for admission.)

Fourth, to a certain extent Webb is responding to an earlier generation of affirmative action programs. In the 2003 Supreme Court decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court considered the affirmative action policies of both the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts and the University of Michigan School of Law. The Court held that the LS&A procedure was invalid, but the Law School procedure was permissible. The LS&A scheme used a 150-point scale to rank applicants, and it gave to applicants of certain ethnic groups a 20-point bonus (a perfect SAT only got you 12 points). The Law School scheme did not use any specific formula, but the admissions officers accepted the notion that a racially diverse student body was a good thing, and therefore they would accept black applicants who perhaps did not have the numbers (LSAT, undergrad GPA) that other applicants had. The Law School's stated policy was to promote diversity because legal education within a diverse student body had benefits for all, including the white students who were admitted. That, the Court said, was a permissible goal. The Supreme Court held that the Law School's loose system was permissible, while the "mechanistic" formula used by the undergraduate school was not.

My sense is that when people rail against affirmative action, they are railing against "mechanistic" formulas, rather than as generally expressed desires for the advantages that diversity brings. If a kid from Westhaven gets a good SAT score, and Tiger Woods' kid gets the same SAT score, do they both deserve the same bump from an affirmative action formula?

Fifth, when Jim Webb writes that "the need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible," I realize that he hasn't lived in the South as long as some of the rest of us have. He is probably right that in many (I hesitate to say "most") government agencies who have the power to award contracts or hire workers or admit students, "inclusiveness" is becoming more and more ingrained. But in many other agences, when a Good Old Boy government official always awards a lucrative government contract to the same white men that he has always dealt with, affirmative action programs that encourage awarding contracts to the firms owned by minorities and women make good sense.

I agree with Katherine's comments about Webb's final call for his fellow politicians to end affirmative action so that "harmony" will be allowed to "invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away." This implies that advocates of affirmative action are responsible for bitterness and disharmony. That's just nuts.

I do not share Katherine's sense that Senator Webb's comments will intensify a revitalization of Pat Buchanan's Southern Strategy. Webb's viewpoint -- though I believe it to be flawed -- is not that of a racist, or a demagogue, or one who is pandering to voters. He has raised a serious issue that will not go away if we ignore it.

Lloyd Snook (Electronic mail, July 31, 2010)