How White Men Won the Culture Wars

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.