Race Wars

Abstract

Race Wars Matthew Pratt Guterl (bio) Kathleen Belew. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. x + 339pp. Notes, sources, acknowledgements, and index. $29.95. In the 1996 film The Substitute, a platoon of soldiers, set adrift after a brief military intervention in Cuba, find themselves in Miami with nothing to do. A polyglot, racially and linguistically diverse group, they are led by Shale, an enigmatic white officer with a gift for clandestine wetwork, who promises to find them some more mercenary possibilities. The men are bored, hungry, and anxious to be paid. Fortunately, Shale finds them another war, this time in a local high school where gangs have taken root. As luck would have it, Shale has a girlfriend, a teacher in a dystopian institution corrupted by the drug trade. Jane, as she is called, is a two-dimensional stickler for history and a fervent believer in every child's potential. After running afoul of a gang leader recruiting in the school, she gets roughed up, her body's brutalization serving as a reminder of liberalism's failure in the stereotyped urban ghetto. And Shale, sensing the urgent need for a more muscular response, volunteers as her substitute and gears up to dispense a twisted approximation of justice. Bringing his special set of skills into the classroom, he lectures students by day on the history of Vietnam while surveilling, disciplining, and murdering the element he defines as criminal at night. Shale's approach works in the classroom, though in the end his action-starved platoon is enlisted to fight in what becomes an all-out war and the body count rises higher and higher until the school itself is engulfed in flames. There was nothing special about The Substitute. In its own inimitable way, it set out to pillory a familiar liberal savior narrative in which do-gooder types wander into a context marked as broken and impossible to fix yet manage to save some small number of those at the far margins of civil society. The movie offered no solution to the problem of poor, inner-city schools, the decades-long decline of public support and collapse of civic faith in common education. No solution, that is, except for the provision of violence as a searing, cauterizing force, as a way to stop the advance of the disease. It left intact one of the dominant tropes of American filmmaking: that the military was an [End Page 452] almost completely integrated institution, and that the racially mixed platoon was an avatar for the United States of the future. And by doing so, it enlisted the whole of the nation in the war on drugs. Finally, it also reminded viewers—as other films, like First Blood (1982), had—that combat veterans left the theatre of war permanently changed, with dramatic consequences for their eventual return to the home front. In this case, as the film closed and the credits rolled, Shale and one of his surviving comrades from that mixed-up platoon announce their intention to sign up to be substitute teachers elsewhere, an obvious plea for a sequel but just as obviously a reflection of what happens when the war comes home. An unoriginal film from an age of action movie knock-offs, The Substitute is nevertheless necessary and emblematic, a touchstone of a generation's thinking about race and violence and war. And Kathleen Belew's masterful work, Bring the War Home, cuts straight across it. Where The Substitute imagines veterans as alienated from a soft, liberal domestic world, Belew sees these same returning soldiers rapidly synergized with a broader, homegrown "paramilitary culture" that increasingly valorizes gun ownership, that grows to loathe the state, and that determinedly prepares for an eventual race war. Where the film underscored the racial diversity of the platoon, Belew uncovers a network of white racist actors, their affiliations shaped partly by military service, partly by their disenchantment with American liberalism, and partly by fever dreams of creating a paramilitary structure outside of state control, attempting to will into being a different white supremacist fantasy of the future. And where Shale, returning to the states in...