{"id":4344,"date":"2010-07-24T03:36:58","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T03:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=4344"},"modified":"2010-07-24T03:39:30","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T03:39:30","slug":"jim-webb-and-the-dark-matter-of-american-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/jim-webb-and-the-dark-matter-of-american-diversity\/","title":{"rendered":"Jim Webb and the “dark matter” of American diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jim Webb has returned to his populist roots in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal<\/em>,\u00a0Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege<\/a>. Webb is the author of Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America<\/a>. Of Scots-Irish descent himself he is explicitly conscious of the diverse streams within<\/em> Anglo-America, outlined in more scholarly works such as Albion’s Seed<\/a> and The Cousins’ Wars<\/a>. An underlying superstructure to the sectional conflicts which have erupted over the arc of American history, with the Civil War an exemplar, has been the divisions across the Anglo-American folkways. Most modern Americans, schooled only in the value of racial diversity, or vaguely aware of the massive wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration between ~1900 and 1924, remain totally ignorant of this ethnic “dark matter.”<\/p>\n


\nWebb on the other hand is well aware of this ethno-history. His body of work suggests that he views himself as a spokesman for the marginalized Scots-Irish, who have traditionally been looked down upon by the Anglos of Greater New England, and the sophisticated cosmopolitans of the Mid-Atlantic. 19th century ethnographic descriptions of Scots-Irish settlers from the Upper South in the Midwest by Yankees plainly were informed in part by a deep prejudice against them (though to be sure the empirical reality is<\/i> that the Yankees were a more advanced folk in relation to the Southern Scots-Irish in all the things that we moderns value).\u00a0Webb himself is in many ways atypical of his people, ascending to the elite and having a voice which is anything but marginalized. His current marriage is to a Vietnamese American woman who was born abroad. In the above op-ed Webb is arguing against affirmative action precisely for individuals such as his youngest daughter, a child of the global elite. It redounds to his credit that he made no reference to his personal life to insulate him from the inevitable accusations of nativism and racism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Webb has returned to his populist roots in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal,\u00a0Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege. Webb is the author of Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Of Scots-Irish descent himself he is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[579],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4344"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4353,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344\/revisions\/4353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}