Slate-Sen. Jim Webb/Being A White Person Is Just Like Being A Slave

Sen. Jim Webb/Slate Magazine

(Story reported by Tom Scocca)

Let's have a conversation about race! Sen. James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, took to the Wall Street Journal's opinion page this past Friday, apparently because he felt left out of last week's vaudeville show of racist stupidity. James Webb has very strong feelings about affirmative action, which he believes has "damaged racial harmony" and has moved "away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites."

But James Webb knows it is hard to talk about race, and especially about the problems of white people, without upsetting folks:

Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for generations.

Well, actually, Pat Buchanan got in trouble because Pat Buchanan is a known anti-Semite, and that particular column was a particularly clumsy attempt to find a novel way of complaining that the Jews control everything. (The new code is "Ivy League pretensions to represent and rule America," which is pretty rich coming from lifetime Washington insider Pat Buchanan, Columbia Journalism School '62.)

(click here to read the full story on the Slate Magazine website)