How White Men Won the Culture Wars

How White Men Won the Culture Wars PDF Author: Joseph Darda
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520381459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 A cultural history of how white men exploited the image of the Vietnam veteran to roll back civil rights and restake their claim on the nation “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 raceless 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 with stories of vets on their mind 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.

How White Men Won the Culture Wars

How White Men Won the Culture Wars PDF Author: Joseph Darda
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520381459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 A cultural history of how white men exploited the image of the Vietnam veteran to roll back civil rights and restake their claim on the nation “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 raceless 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 with stories of vets on their mind 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.

Angry White Men

Angry White Men PDF Author: Michael Kimmel
Publisher: Nation Books
ISBN: 1568589646
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book

Book Description
"[W]e can't come off as a bunch of angry white men.” Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party One of the enduring legacies of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O'Reilly lamented that he didn't live in “a traditional America anymore.” He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry? Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men – from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students –in pursuit of an answer. Angry White Men presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage. Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them. Angry White Men discusses, among others, the sons of small town America, scarred by underemployment and wage stagnation. When America's white men feel they've lived their lives the ‘right' way – worked hard and stayed out of trouble – and still do not get economic rewards, then they have to blame somebody else. Even more terrifying is the phenomenon of angry young boys. School shootings in the United States are not just the work of “misguided youth” or “troubled teens”—they're all committed by boys. These alienated young men are transformed into mass murderers by a sense that using violence against others is their right. The future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The choice for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem the tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future, or whether they will walk openly and honorably – far happier and healthier incidentally – alongside those they've spent so long trying to exclude.

A War for the Soul of America

A War for the Soul of America PDF Author: Andrew Hartman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022662207X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book Description
The “unrivaled” history of America’s divided politics, now in a fully updated edition that examines the rise of Trump—and what comes next (New Republic). When it was published in 2015, Andrew Hartman’s history of the culture wars was widely praised for its compelling and even-handed account of how they came to define American politics at the close of the twentieth century. But it also garnered attention for Hartman’s declaration that the culture wars were over—and that the left had won. In the wake of Trump’s rise, driven by an aggressive fanning of those culture war flames, Hartman has brought A War for the Soul of America fully up to date, detailing the ways in which Trump’s success, while undeniable, represents the last gasp of culture war politics—and how the reaction he has elicited can show us early signs of the very different politics to come. “As a guide to the late twentieth-century culture wars, Hartman is unrivalled . . . . Incisive portraits of individual players in the culture wars dramas . . . . Reading Hartman sometimes feels like debriefing with friends after a raucous night out, an experience punctuated by laughter, head-scratching, and moments of regret for the excesses involved.” —New Republic

Empire of Defense

Empire of Defense PDF Author: Joseph Darda
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663292X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
“I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century,” an eighty-five-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1953, revisiting his famous claim from fifty years earlier. But the “greater problem,” he now believed, was that war had “become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.” Empire of Defense reveals how that greater problem emerged and grew from the formation of the Department of Defense in the late 1940s to the long wars of the twenty-first century. When the Truman administration dissolved the Department of War, a cabinet-level department since 1789, and formed the DOD, it did not, Joseph Darda argues, end war but rather establish new racial criteria for who could wage it, for which lives deserved defending. Historians have long studied “perpetual war.” Critical race theorists have long confronted “the permanence of racism.” Empire of Defense shows––through an investigation of state documents, fiction, film, memorials, and news media––how the two converged and endure through national defense. Amid the rise of anticolonial and antiracist movements the world over, defense secured the future of war and white supremacy.

Culture Wars

Culture Wars PDF Author: Marie Alena Castle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781937276997
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Boldly stated and passionately supported, this argument against religious influence on the American government and legal system analyzes the impact that religion has on culture in the United States. The book makes the claim that many laws based on religious beliefs, specifically theology promoted in the Middle Ages, are misattributed as long-standing social values and that changing the theology itself threatens the religious institution supporting it--igniting a cultural war engulfed in fear and resulting in political dysfunction. It reveals that from sexuality to family planning to the tax system, religious doctrines direct American life without accounting for difference. Castle provides strategies for overcoming the imposition of religious views and demonstrates the value in standing up for a secular nation where morality is not tied to one particular religious group. This revised and expanded edition provides additional information on the origins and activities of the religious right, and its assault on women's, reproductive, and LGBT rights. It analyzes the Trump Administration's threat to those rights, and it provides case studies of the havoc religious rightists have wrought in states they control, focusing on Mike Pence's Indiana and Sam Brownback's Kansas.

The End of Racism

The End of Racism PDF Author: Dinesh D'Souza
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684825244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 764

Get Book

Book Description
The first conprehensive inquiry into the history, nature and ultimate meaning of racism.

A Feminist in the White House

A Feminist in the White House PDF Author: Doreen J. Mattingly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190468602
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
Midge Costanza was one of the unlikeliest of White House insiders. But for a time during the seventies, this ""loud-mouthed, pushy little broad"" with no college education was a prominent focal point of the American culture wars. In this book, Doreen Mattingly draws on Costanza's life to tell a wider, but heretofore neglected, story of the hopeful yet fraught era of gender politics in late 70s Washington - a history that is not just important to US women's and presidential history but which continues to resonate in politics today.

Deserting from the Culture Wars

Deserting from the Culture Wars PDF Author: Maria Hlavajova
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262362953
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book

Book Description
Artists and writers consider a tactical desertion from the "culture wars"--a refusal to be distracted, an embrace of the emancipatory understanding of culture. Deserting from the Culture Wars reflects upon and intervenes in our current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, often seen as the return of the "culture wars." How are these culture wars defined and waged? Engaging in a theater of war that has been delineated by the enemy is a shortcut to defeat. Getting out of the reactive mode that produces little but a series of Pavlovian responses, this book proposes a tactical desertion from the culture wars as they are being waged today--a refusal to play the other side's war games, an unwillingness to be distracted.

White Guys

White Guys PDF Author: Fred Pfeil
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789607159
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Get Book

Book Description
What do men-white straight men in particular-want? In a series of witty and provocative investigations of American popular culture, Fred Pfeil exposes the contradictions in the construction of white heterosexual masculinity over the last fifteen years. White Guys probes such topics as the rock'n'roll bodies of Bruce Springsteen, Axl Rose, and the late Kurt Cobain; the "male rampage" films Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and the films of "sensitive transformation" that followed in their wake; and the curious yet symptomatic activities of the men's movement whose "rituals" Pfeil has investigated firsthand.

Whose America?

Whose America? PDF Author: Jonathan Zimmerman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045446
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book

Book Description
What do America's children learn about American history, American values, and human decency? Who decides? In this absorbing book, Jonathan Zimmerman tells the dramatic story of conflict, compromise, and more conflict over the teaching of history and morality in twentieth-century America. In history, whose stories are told, and how? As Zimmerman reveals, multiculturalism began long ago. Starting in the 1920s, various immigrant groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, even the newly arrived Eastern European Jews--urged school systems and textbook publishers to include their stories in the teaching of American history. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s brought similar criticism of the white version of American history, and in the end, textbooks and curricula have offered a more inclusive account of American progress in freedom and justice. But moral and religious education, Zimmerman argues, will remain on much thornier ground. In battles over school prayer or sex education, each side argues from such deeply held beliefs that they rarely understand one another's reasoning, let alone find a middle ground for compromise. Here there have been no resolutions to calm the teaching of history. All the same, Zimmerman argues, the strong American tradition of pluralism has softened the edges of the most rigorous moral and religious absolutism.