Last year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder opined that Americans need “frank conversations” about race. Last week, Sen. Jim Webb started one. Of course, certain quarters of the left don’t like the direction the conversation has taken.

In “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,” which appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week, Sen. Webb flatly stated that affirmative action harms white Americans. That may seem out-of-character for a Democrat, but anyone who knew Mr. Webb and was familiar with his writing before he ran for office is not surprised. As well, he is right.

A few of the more refreshing lines bear repeating:

“[G]overnment-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. …  [and] now favor anyone who does not happen to be white. …

“Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. …  [b]ut the extrapolation of this logic to all ‘people of color’ — especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S. — moved affirmative action … toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans.”

In short, these programs now work to the detriment of “many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years. …

“Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white.”

Immediately, the “frank conversation” went South, so to speak.

“We vehemently disagree,” said King Salim Khalfani of Virginia’s NAACP, and “wonder if serving in the elite, rich United States Senate has skewed your vision of the world in which we live. … Do you really believe that affirmative action has hurt white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants or are you pandering to the divisive, conservative, Tea Bagger types whose votes you will need in 2012?” In fact, Khalfani argues, “[t]he true beneficiaries of affirmative action programs are white, Anglo-Saxon women …  overwhelmingly.”

The idea that Jim Webb is an elitist is so laughable it does not require refutation. Nor does the rest of Mr. Khalfani’s rant. If Mr. Webb is rich, it is because he ably recreated the war in Vietnam within novels read by millions, and for no other reason.

Anyone who knows anything about this subject knows Mr. Webb is correct, and they know it because they either read the newspapers every day or have experienced the reverse discrimination to which Mr. Webb alludes. Last week, two sociologists released a study of diversity at private colleges that shows they routinely discriminate against poor and middle-class whites. More specifically, the study determined that participation or leadership in such activities as 4H, high school ROTC and Future Farmers of America — “Red State activities,” as one observer called them — practically doom an applicant’s admission chances.

These are the whites about whom Mr. Webb is speaking and with whom he shares cultural roots. They are the whites he writes about in “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.” In that impressive book, he rightly argues that liberals have waged a decades-long war to dispossess these whites, partly using the programs he describes in his article. These dispossessed, by the way, do much if not most of the fighting and dying in this nation’s wars. Yale won’t take them, but the U.S. Marines will. Readers can decide what that says about Yale, and what it says about the Marines.

With Mr. Webb’s bracing article on the table, we await Mr. Holder’s reply.