Race and America's Long War

Abstract

The title of Race and America's Long War conceals as much as it reveals. While it initially suggests a study of military history, the book instead presents readers with a sprawling work on America's race problem, which the author likens to a continuing centuries-long global civil war. Nikhil Pal Singh brings to this issue the concepts and sensibility of the currently prominent field of whiteness studies. He asks: “How far [have we] progressed from the modes of racial dominance out of which the wealth of modern nations grew” (p. xi)? Singh's answer to that question is uniformly unfavorable and pessimistic. He sees the United States since its foundation as a nation caught up at home and abroad in an ongoing conflict to suppress and dominate people unlucky enough to not be born white. This struggle began against Native Americans on the frontier and African slaves imported against their will to work on America's plantations. The struggle for white dominance, Singh believes, continues presently, with a temporary moderation in the second half of the twentieth century necessitated to serve the public image needs of the Cold War, giving way to a renewed war on nonwhite people exemplified by the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans in U.S. prisons, anti-immigrant hysteria, and the war on terror.