Bringing The War Home

ANYONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING about American history and culture knows that white supremacy is and has always been a core American value. More specifically, white Christian supremacy. As much ado as Americans have made about "equality" among their core values, the United States has never had social, economic, racial, ethnic, legal, gender, religious, nor any other type of equality, including equality of opportunity. So, precisely what is meant by the term when it is used to describes American characteristics and aspirations may be a bit uncertain. The more Americans espouse rehe virtue of equality, the less of it the country seems to have as a whole. You can't help but notice how often some angry young man commits, mass murder, then gives thanks to President Trump for inspiring him, and spouting extremist right wing ideology. The mainstream conservative American community has chosen to describe every one of them, notwithstanding their obvious similarities, as "lone wolves", flukes, anomalies. This, of course, is pure nonsense. The anger and hatred of america's right wing is palpable, roughly defined as conservative christian evangelical Republican capitalistic Trumpers. This, by and large, is community from which racism and white supremacism emerge. The complete history and analysis of white supremacism in the United States, from before the civil War to the Trump movement and the alt right, is brilliantly delineated by Kathleen Belew in her seminal work "Bring The War Home". Our modern movement, she asserts, originated in the nineteen seventies, in the aftermath of post Viet Nam war societal unrest. Obviously, modern white supremacy has its American origins with slavery, and the entire tragic history stemming from the Civil war and emancipation. But there has been a cyclical nature to it, and the era Trump is an era of white supremacist resurgence. Like most sociologists and historians, Belew sees Trump as more a symptom than a cause. Progress in recent years in gaining equal rights for minorities such as the LGBTQ community, African-Americans, and Hispanics, and particularly the election of Barack Obama, Belew sees as engendering a backlash throughout the white Christian conservative community. Considering the president's apparent popularity because of, not in spite of his racism and anti-minority attitude, the current racial and cultural situation in America does not seem to bode well, for equality, inclusion, tolerance, or acceptance, for the foreseeable future.