Race in the Culture Wars

Abstract

Like culture war, race has many meanings. It can refer to objective essence, or characteristics that are inherited through genes, blood, or mystical spirits. Conversely, race is conceptualized as a historically changing social construction, a concept whose references and attributes vary according to present needs. In this article, I employ both conceptualizations through two illustrative examples. The first is race and racism in the US, where culture wars are fundamentally racialized. The second is the Troubles, a thirty-year period of violence (1960–1998) in Northern Ireland, a culture war turned into open war, where variants of race and racism were a determining factor. In the latter example, culture war turned into civil war, while, in the former example, extremists hope for the same. In the concluding sections, I identify the steps in a process that turned culture war into civil war, as it has great relevance to the American case.