Reuniting white America after Vietnam.
“If war among the
whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks,” Frederick Douglass
asked in 1875, peering into the nation’s future, “what will peace among
the whites bring?” The answer then and now, after civil war and civil
rights: a white reunion disguised as a veterans’ reunion.
How White Men Won the Culture Wars
shows how a broad contingent of white men––conservative and liberal,
hawk and dove, vet and nonvet––transformed the Vietnam War into a
staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reconciliation.
Conservatives could celebrate white vets as deracinated embodiments of
the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices
must be heard. Erasing Americans of color, Southeast Asians, and women
from the war, white men could agree, after civil rights and feminism,
that they had suffered and deserved more. From the POW/MIA and veterans’
mental health movements to Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” they remade
their racial identities for an age of color blindness and
multiculturalism in the image of the Vietnam vet. No one wins in a
culture war—except, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army
green.
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