How White Men Won the Culture Wars

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 nations 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 menconservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and nonvettransformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a postcivil 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 warexcept, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army green.