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.

Religion played a great role in the Northern Ireland culture war and has a prominent place in its American expressions. In Northern Ireland, race and religion were intertwined as markers of difference in the collective violence that was the Troubles. In the culture wars of the United States, religion has always been a factor, but the linkage between religion and race is complicated by the history of American Protestantism and its relation to race and racism.

Like civil wars, culture wars make perceived differences into divisive issues, congealing around polarities and binary oppositions. With regard to race, these polarities can be color-coded, white/colored, light/dark, or they can refer to ancestral traits that mark off one group against another. Race and racism in the United States, for example, is multi-colored, with ‘white’ defined against black, brown, yellow, and red (Eyerman 2022). The consciousness of being ‘white’ and a member of a distinctive ‘race’ is formed historically through processes of differentiation, political and social discrimination, and repression. Whiteness has proven fluid and flexible enough to expand its borders to include various shadings. “Swarthy” southern Europeans were ‘whitened’, as were Semitic and Slavic groups. In a similar process, racism can be coupled with religion: in the United States, for example, whiteness is sometimes associated with Christianity (Gorski and Perry 2022). In Northern Ireland, where religion was central to the collective identification of warring groups, skin tone played little part. At the same time, however, “Irishness” was at times identified as a racial identity, distinguished by Celtic mythology and the Gaelic language. These ‘racial’ characteristics were, on the one side, positively interpreted, while being negatively attributed traits on the other. As waves of Irish immigrants flooded the American shores in the 19th century, they were identified as a ‘colored race’ (Jacobson 1998). Thomas Davis, a founder of the Irish nationalist Young Ireland movement in the 1840s, identified the Irish as a Celtic nation. Davis was a Protestant and resented the association of nationalism with Catholicism, but, by the time of the Troubles, Irish nationalism was dominated by Catholics and nonreligious Marxists.

1. Race and Culture War in the US

Race permeates the culture wars in the United States, where the very idea of ‘race’ is itself a product. As a historically formed contested concept, race emerged as a category of distinction between people and peoples in order to rank them.1 Specific groups were racialized, as difference was assigned through categorization, which, once made, was hierarchical, vertical, and horizontal (see Boas 1945 for a classic study). Related to caste, race became part of a value-laden classification system; certain traits, including skin color and other physical characteristics, were valued more than others, and those who bore them ranked higher or lower in its coded scale. Such ordering is both visible and invisible. Isabel Wilkerson (2020, p. 19) provides us with a useful image: “Race… is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race is the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place”. As a principle, one can say racism, a prejudice rooted in values, preceded race. It was the prejudiced eye and the power-related interest that made the category, a viewpoint often cloaked within the ‘objective’ and value-free language of science.

Race and racism were present at the founding of the United States and have since become a foundational category of experience. Slavery was justified as a condition imposed upon those of a lesser category, a species or race apart. Those enslaved, the vast majority of whom were black, were a different sort of being than those that owned them. Slave-owner Thomas Jefferson, future president and ‘Founding Father’, put it thusly: “The first difference which strikes us is that of colour: whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and the scarf skin, or in the scarf skin itself. Whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood or the colour of the bile or from some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature and it is as real as if the cause were better known to us”. Racial characteristics, including inherent worth, are here taken as objective facts. The cultural code conditioning that perception is itself invisible. For Jefferson, blacks are “a peculiar race of animals below man and below the orangutan… a kind of brute hitherto undescribed” (both quoted in Eyerman 2022, p. 22). The basic tension between the universalistic ideals of individual freedom in its founding documents, some of them written by Jefferson, and the reality of slavery would eventually lead to a civil war, whose memory and meaning remains contested.

Such perceived difference would be redefined and reinterpreted over the centuries, but the fundamental idea of separate ‘races’ has remained constant in the United States, though the valuation has shifted. There are many examples to draw from, but I will confine myself to the social sciences. The African American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois argued, in his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk (DuBois 1903), that the Negro “race” formed a distinctive cultural group that had much to offer the world. He grounded his activism, the struggle for recognition and inclusion into mainstream American society, on this idea. Du Bois wrote, “the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack” (DuBois 1903, p. 5). The civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s took up the themes of this progressive narrative of inclusion on the basis of equal worth and the idea that ‘black is beautiful’, while opponents, such as George Wallace, governor and presidential candidate, called for ‘separate but equal’ living conditions for the races. One of the fundaments of later culture wars was to measure how successful this struggle for recognition was, while, at the same time, challenging the very idea of race and racism.

In the 1990s, these debates, culture wars with race as their focus, centered on several key texts. One was Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations Black White and Unequal, using survey data to show that economic inequality based on race remained exceptionally present in the United States. Hacker concluded, “Being ‘black’ in America bears the mark of slavery. Even after emancipation … blacks continued to be seen as an inferior species, not only unsuited for equality but not even meriting a chance to show their worth …. There remains an unarticulated suspicion: might there be something about the black race that suited them for slavery?” Hacker’s statistics revealed the reality of race as a social fact, if not an objective reality. From the other side, Dinesh D’Souza (1995) argued that, while race is an objective reality with economic and social consequences, racism had all but disappeared in the United States.2 While rejecting genetic inequality, D’Souza proposed a categorical system of racial groups based on civilizing potential. Here, unsurprisingly, whites rank higher than blacks and other color-coded groups. D’Souza argued that, on this measure, “old forms” of racism had declined, and that the problems facing blacks today stemmed from “black pathological cultural problems” (D’Souza 1995, pp. 22–24). Quite the opposite of DuBois. Against ‘liberals’ such as Hacker, whose “cultural relativism” was said to deny any cultural differences between groups, D’Souza argued against such programs as Affirmative Action that sought to redress racial discrimination.

Some of the latest battles in the American culture wars continue this concern with race, racism, and the place of slavery in American history. In part, they involve the actual teaching of history in American classrooms. As opposed to other countries, the US does not have national standards regarding history texts or classroom topics. Each of the 50 states set their own standards through guidelines that are developed by professionals and community members. These guidelines are routinely reviewed and updated, usually without great controversy. However, the teaching of American history has been a sensitive topic, given the nation’s violent origins and the slavery of the past; conflicts over how the past is represented have a long history. States with widely diverse populations seeking inclusion and recognition, such as Texas, have had many such conflicts. In 2010, Texas revised its social studies teaching guideline, and a conservative majority voted to require students to examine the “unintended consequences” of affirmative action and Title IX, and to encourage high school students to question the “separation of church and state” https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/who-decides-what-history-we-teach-an-explainer/2021/08 (accessed on 13 March 2023). Other states made changes in an opposite direction. North Carolina, for example, revised standards to “place more emphasis on the experiences of marginalized groups and require learning about discrimination in U.S. history” in 2021 (op cit.).

The site of such conflicts has often been local school boards, where elected officials can confront parents and teachers about the form and content of classroom instruction. How the nation’s founding, its ideals and realities, is represented in textbooks and other teaching material is currently a centerpiece of culture war. Should American history represent the nation as flawless and well-meaning, or as conflicted in purpose and outcome? Must history-teaching be ‘patriotic’, offering a positive sense of the nation to students, or should it present the past as sometimes problematic? Such questions are especially relevant regarding slavery and race. While many such conflicts concern textbooks and teaching in public schools where school boards and elected officials have jurisdiction, some attention has also turned to private, religious schools, where accountability is not pubic. In such settings, there exists corporate control over teaching materials, which can potentially be more closely monitored for ideological content (for a classic account of culture and ideological conflict, see Said 1994).

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has generated a new wave in the culture war about race and history teaching; various state legislatures have identified it and banned its teaching in state schools. Originally conceived as a legal framework and taught in graduate classes, CRT has become a symbol of ‘negative’ teaching and a battle cry term for those seeking a more ‘positive’ representation of American history, one that excludes or severely minimalizes the impact of slavery and racism. Starting from the premise that ‘race’ is historically constructed and that ‘racism’ permeates American institutions, CRT argues that “socially constructed categories are crystallized and made real through multiple interactions and institutions: through the allocation of resources, through the injuries of everyday micro-interactions, through schools, and through the withholding of different forms of capital from ‘particular’ groups” (Tavory 2023, p. 74).

In various parts of the U.S., elected officials have introduced policy proposals aimed at limiting ‘race-based instruction’, such as CRT, at all levels of education. Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has called CRT “false history”, suggesting that its teaching is used to “denigrate the founding fathers, denigrate the American Revolution” (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/opinion/ron-desantis-black-history.html) accessed 13 March 2023.

Not all of these education policy restrictions and conflicts specifically mention critical race theory, but all seek to control how American history is represented and taught, most specifically as relates to race, racism, and slavery. Here, culture war and political interests become intertwined, making it is difficult to know what those supporting such policies base their claims on, and if their beliefs are deeply held, or merely opportunistic. Whatever the case, individual sanction, and, sometimes, the threat of violence, is present in these encounters, especially as they occur in a polarized political and social context. Teachers, librarians, and school officials face the threat of job loss, and death threats have been reported (op cit). Such culture conflicts can easily escalate when they become resources for mobilization, not only by politicians, but also by extremist groups. While these conflicts and controversies may be local, they may also attract the attention of outside interests that can orchestrate local issues to the national level, which increases the possibility of a culture war becoming a war of another sort. In the following section, we discuss how a culture war can evolve into violent conflict, and even civil war.

2. The Troubles

After the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) the controversial signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty led to the formation of the independent Irish Free State and, eventually, the Republic of Ireland. As part of this negotiation, six counties in the northeast of the island remained in the United Kingdom as a new country, called Northern Ireland. Like the partition itself, the foundations of the new nation were shaky from the beginning, as they contained an inbuilt religious or ‘racial’ tension between the Protestant, British-identifying majority and an Irish-identifying Catholic minority.3 In 1922, Catholics made up 36% of the population of Northern Ireland. This became the grounds upon which a political and cultural conflict between Ulster Unionists and Irish nationalists, as religious and political identities coalesced and hardened through years of confrontation. Over 400 people died during the founding years, most of them Catholic. In addition, there was mass migration and illicit trade across the southern border after its crooked boundaries were settled.

The new country, whose very name was controversial, was meant as a solution to the problem of what to do with the Protestant minority in the new Irish state.4 The answer was to carve out a space for them where they could rule themselves; however, this created the problem of the large Catholic minority that remained within the territory. The resulting agreement gave Protestants, many of whom were of Scottish origin, de facto rule over the northeastern part of the island. Here, they waved the British flag and prohibited the Irish tri-color. The vast majority of Protestants supported Ulster nationalism, and, along with a ruling elite, tended to regard the remaining Catholics as suspect “natives”, a lower race living under British domain, yet beyond redemption. This was very similar to the way ‘natives’ were viewed in other British colonies (Said 1994).

Belfast, an industrial center with a large Protestant majority, was designated the nation’s capital, while the second city, Londonderry, was called Derry by its majority Catholic population. These and other smaller urban centers were characterized by segregated housing areas with border zones between them, while the surrounding countryside, particularly in the newly drawn border regions, was more fluid in its social interactions, due, in part, to the necessities of rural life; Protestant farmers employed Catholic labor. Intermarriage remained low, especially in rural areas, which were centers of conservative religious beliefs on both sides.5

Carving out a new country with such a clearly divided population created an immediate problem regarding collective identification. Most nations construct a founding narrative around a shared past and the promise of a common future. This was the case in the United States, though the inbuilt tensions caused by slavery complicated the narrative. In Northern Ireland, both groups created their own symbols and ritual practices to represent and reinforce their distinctive communities. Even the very name, Northern Ireland, was controversial, as previously noted. With the border drawn to reflect the needs and wishes of Protestant politicians and businesspersons “keen to maintain the union with England”, one side was “imbibed with British theatricality and rich symbolism” (Dennis 2020, p. 83). The Union Jack, the royal family, and the Protestant religion were represented in the ceremonial celebration, and in more banal forms of nationalism. Through this and other means, the ‘Irish’ were constantly reminded of their outsider status, while, at the same time, internally reinforced. In response, Irish identity was reinvented. Traditional sports and other cultural practices, such as story and song and their related symbols, the harp and Uillenna pipe, played a central role alongside the Catholic religion. Traditional Irish music was turned into a subtle, and not so subtle, form of resistance, with rebel songs competing with traditional music in the Catholic pubs.

Protestants went to their own schools, where they learned British history, and Catholics went to Church-run schools, where Irish history was taught. This strong pull of community formation under siege made for conformity and strict control. The Ulster-born Catholic author, Benedict Kiely, whose novels were banned in the Republic, was, in his youth, suspended from the Gaelic Athletic Association “for being spotted by a member of the Gaelic vigilance committee playing a foreign game with Protestant boys in a Protestant field” (Benedict Kiely Obituary PJ Gillan and Richard Pine The Guardian 12 February 2007). That ‘foreign game’ was soccer. The Belfast-Catholic-raised novelist Anna Burns (2018, pp. 24–25) describes how differentiation and distinction began at birth, with the naming of the newborn, where Catholic parents chose names from a list of what was “not forbidden”. The naming occurred in a “psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal identification, of what was allowed and not allowed, matters didn’t stop at ‘their names’ and at ‘our names’, at ‘us’ and ‘them’, at ‘our community’, at ‘over the road’, ‘over the water’ and ‘over the border’…. There were neutral television programmes which could hail from ‘over the water’ or from ‘over the border’ yet be watched by everyone ‘this side of the road’ as well as ‘that side of the road’ without causing disloyalty in either community. Then there were programmes that could be watched without treason by one side whilst hated and detested ‘across the road’ on the other side. There were television license inspectors, census collectors, civilians working in non-civilian environments and public servants, all tolerated in one community whilst shot to death if putting a toe into the other community. There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. There were ‘our shops’ and ‘their shops’. Placenames. What school you went to. What prayers you said. What hymns you sang. How you pronounced your ‘haitch’ or ‘aitch’. Where you went to work. And of course there were busstops. There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to. There was a person’s appearance also, because it was believed you could tell ‘their sort from over the road’ by the physical form of a person. There was choice of murals, of traditions, of newspapers, of anthems, of ‘special days’, of passports, of coinage, of the police, of civic powers, of soldiery, of paramilitary”.

A constituent part of this culture war was the construction of victim narratives on both sides. For Protestant Unionists, the new country was Ulster, and they were British in a deeper meaning than formal citizenship. In this telling, the Catholics were a fifth column of potentially seditious traitors committed to a united Ireland, more loyal to Dublin and the Pope than to the government in Belfast. Even as a demographic majority and privileged group protected through state authority, these British ‘loyalists’ felt themselves under siege, in constant fear of elimination or replacement by a more demographically fertile Catholic population. Against the rising Catholics, they cried “No Surrender” and “Not an Inch” in compromise. Writing from the other side, the Catholic author Eammon McCann (1993, p. 175) put it like this: “Protestants believed that for four hundred years their community has been besieged by rapacious Catholic hordes intent on the destruction of civil and religious liberty won by the Reformation, and that it was the Orange Order which provided the organizational framework for the successful prosecution of their struggle”. Founded in 1795, the Orange Order was dedicated to maintaining Protestant domination in Ulster. One of its prime activities continues to be the sponsorship of annual marches to celebrate that domination in noisy public displays as they parade through Catholic neighborhoods. Both sides used art forms, such as wall murals and graffiti, to mark off their territory and to warn outsiders of trespass. The marches added a pounding sound to this repertoire of distinction in the culture war.

Northern Catholics also felt themselves cornered and threatened, a minority rendered to second-class status with little opportunity to advance through work or education, as the Protestant majority controlled access to the best schools, housing, and employment. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), a holdover from earlier armed rebellion, the Easter Rising in 1916 and the later Irish civil war, was one of the prime organizations to articulate and define this situation. This was, in their view, a colonial enterprise no different from those in other parts of the globe, with the Irish an oppressed race. Resistance was framed as a colonial struggle, a battle for collective liberation from British Rule, which rendered the Protestant rulers puppets of foreign rule and, therefore, legitimate targets.

These were not the only voices, however; there existed groups that sought to define the situation in class terms, uniting Protestant and Catholic workers in a common struggle, and a relatively small, but increasing, Catholic middle class that sought reform through accommodation. The election of a reform-minded Prime Minister in 1963 gave hope to such ideas, at the same time as the massive commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion in 1966 provided a stage for the representation and revitalization of radical voices.6 Both proved important to the emergence of a bi-partisan and youthful civil rights movement that brought politics back to the street, and, when this failed, a resurgence of militant resistance to British and Protestant rule. In combination, the rise and fall of the reformist middle and the resultant resurgence of radical nationalism on both sides became a catalyst to the Troubles.

3. How a Culture War Became a Real War

The emotions aroused in the commemoration ceremonies of the Easter Rebellion, a celebration of armed resistance, helped give new life to those organizations that were its bearers, most particularly the IRA, and their Ulster opponents, who would soon gain the loud voice of the charismatic evangelical minister Ian Paisley. The reformist government, and an emergent multicultural reformist social movement, was a threat to extremist groups on both sides. The issue of supporting reform contributed to a fracturing of the IRA, between those supporting the new movement and those committed to armed resistance. When civil rights demonstrators met with violent response from Ulster nationalists, the police stood passively by. Later, the police would be more actively engaged, usually on the side of the Protestant protesters. The perceived reaction by the police force helped create a situation where the national government turned to the British military for support.

A key actor in this dynamic of escalating violence was, thus, the British government, which first encouraged political and social reform in Northern Ireland, and then, as the violent confrontations grew and the police authorities were indifferent or powerless, intervened with military force. The street violence was so fierce that a Special Powers Act was enacted, permitting internment without trial. The Ulster police and the British military then swept Catholic neighborhoods and rounded up anyone with a radical past, including many of those who participated in the commemoration ceremonies. That they only swept Catholic neighborhoods inspired support for the IRA and other radical groups (McKittrick and McVea 2012). Many Catholics had, at first, supported military invention, trusting the British to be impartial, but, when only their communities were targeted, that support disappeared almost entirely (McCann 1993). This was a crucial step towards civil war; as Barbara Walter (2022, p. 84) puts it: “once Britain took the side of the Protestants and targeted Catholics, hope died”.

Divisions were further enhanced by the threats of violence that forced those living in ‘mixed’ neighborhoods to leave their homes and seek shelter with their ‘own kind’. This affected both Protestant and Catholic families, but it was mostly the latter that were intimidated and sometimes burned out of their homes. This forced migration created ‘refugees’ in their own country, especially in Belfast, with its minority Catholic population. “In the immediate aftermath of interment, there were 2500 forced evacuations. Thousands of refugees streamed over the border, 6000 alone winding up within two days in five refugee camps established by the Dublin government” (Adams 2017, p. 161). This is written by Gerry Adams, one of the leaders of the new generation of the IRA, who refers to this forced relocation with the incendiary phrase “pogrom”, harking back to the murder of Russian Jews.7 It was the collapse of the reformist middle and the failure of institutions of law and order to defend the Catholic communities that accentuated the anger and divisions between the groups.8 This paved the way for a ‘turn to the gun’.

In an autobiography, Adams writes, “the civil rights struggle and the backlash from the August 1969 pogroms in Belfast dictated the timing and to a degree the sharpness of the divisions” (Adams 2017, p. 122). Once firmly established, these borders and boundaries between communities were patrolled. The barricades marked the physical borders, but there were also social borders to be policed, as noted in the quotations from Burns above. The turn to the gun forced everyone to choose sides and to seek protection in insulated, religion-based communities. With this, “the sense of isolation grew, the tendency to look inwards, to rely on ourselves alone because there was no one else who could be trusted, was daily reinforced” (McCann 1993, p. 142).

For those now restricted to polarized communities, the loss of hope and the threat of violence created more fear and anxiety. One could not leave home without taking precautions; threat permeated daily life and collective consciousness. Newspapers, radio, and television played an important role in keeping the incidents of violence alive and present in the public mind; there were daily broadcasts and bulletins with each new occurrence. In the process, the media helped construct a coherent storyline to the disparate incidents, which they now called “The Troubles”. That storyline would shift as new weapons entered the field, from the Armalite AR-18 rife (obtained from the U.S. in the 1970s), to the bomb, and, most especially, the car bomb. Killing became more random and impersonal, and, thus, more terrifying. The journalist Fintan O’Toole (2021, p. 230), who lived through these events as a concerned Dublin teenager, discovered an emergent pattern. He writes, “Loyalist murders were often intended to be luridly gruesome. The purpose was to terrify the Catholic population into submission-for that purpose the more hideous the better. IRA murders were intended to create a more general sense of anarchy, to make it clear that Northern Ireland was ungovernable under British rule. For that purpose, the more impersonal, the more distanced the perpetrator was from the victim, the better”. Bombings fit that latter purpose well. O’Toole points out that such killings were not the stuff of heroes or heroic song; the perpetrators’ names were not sung out in the pubs. Another turn away from the heroic and positive public recognition was the rise in internal murders, as the IRA escalated their censorship and punishment for deviancy. As messages painted on the city walls warned, ‘touts’, or those who collaborated, were the lowest of the low, and could expect nothing but distain from the community. This distain and the double-life and eventual death of the informer is the subject of many crime novels set during the Troubles. The ultimate punishment for collaboration was death, and, as the middle ground was eliminated, the number of ‘disappeared’ persons rose accordingly. “Because the victims were members of its own community, it was not convenient to claim their murders. They were instead buried in secret graves, precisely so that their fates would be unknown” (O’Toole 2021, p. 231). The special group that carried out these disappearances was the ‘Unknowns’, as if to recognize their anti-heroism. In another irony of the Troubles, one of the leaders of the IRA group responsible for punishing collaboration was himself in the employ of the British government (Keefe 2019).

The dynamic of violence would end in 1998, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, actually a pair of agreements, signed on 10 April 1998. This agreement developed out of a long-negotiated peace process. It represented a settlement between most of Northern Ireland’s political parties, and included an agreement between the Irish and British governments. Like the founding of Northern Ireland itself, the terms of the agreement remain controversial, and the threat of renewed sectarian violence continues to exist. The violent past remains present in collective memory and in the commemorative practices that actualize it. As one website dedicated to its victims recounts, “Every day of the year marks the anniversary of someone’s death as a result of conflict in and about Northern Ireland. 3720 people were killed as a result of the conflict. Approximately 47,541 people were injured. There were 36,923 shootings. 16,209 bombings were conducted. Between 1969 and 1998, 1533 of the deaths as a result of the conflict were under the age of 25. 257 of those killed were under the age of 18. The largest age group (25% or 898 people) killed between 1969 and 1998 were those between the ages of 18 and 23.7. As of 1998, the largest group (54%) of the deaths as a result of the conflict were civilians. As of 1998, the largest group (68%) of those injured were civilian” https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/victims/docs/group/htr/day_of_reflection/htr_0607c.pdf (accessed on 13 March 2023).9

Easter 2023 marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The nationalist Sinn Fein is now the largest party in Northern Ireland, and Catholics make up the majority of the population. While many Protestant voters still support the Union with Great Britain, this number is shrinking, especially since Brexit, which required a special agreement for Northern Ireland. Signs of renewed violence still threaten in a war that was never really about religion, but about who owns the country, the British or the Irish. In social contexts polarized through racial and religious segregation, culture war can become a vehicle on the road to civil war.

4. Conclusions

What I would like to have revealed through this discussion is not only how ‘race’ and racism are constituent aspects of culture war, but also how culture wars can evolve into real wars. In this concluding discussion, we will discuss the American case through the lens of the Northern Ireland example, with this in mind. Before turning to that issue, a few general remarks. The very idea of race emerged out of a desire to differentiate, categorize, and rank-order groups and the individuals assigned within them. This may seem like a benign process, an innocent bureaucratic impulse without political intent. However, as a wide range of historical examples reveal, say the German use of Dutch categorization to round up Jews during their occupation of the Netherlands during WW 2, that impulse is seldom innocently applied and can easily become a weapon in a culture war or worse. This is the case in the two examples above, where racial categorization was fundamental to hierarchical differentiation and to legitimating exclusion, subordination, and exploitation. Here, such categorization formed part of culture wars that involved both symbolic and real violence. In addition to this bureaucratic impulse, racial classification can also be personalized as self-identification, linking an individual to a group, and as ‘white’ or ‘black’ in the American context can add an additional political/ideological dimension to cultural conflicts, a step towards bloc voting, or further, towards ethnic nationalism. In that latter process, culture war may turn into real war, and there are some on the American political extreme for whom race war is a defining step in that direction (Eyerman 2022).

Using the two cases, we can identify some crucial steps in that process of escalation. When difference involves more than categorization, becoming a self-consciousness collective identification, its mobilizing potential increases. Mobilization around perceived difference creates in-groups and outgroups, ‘them’ and ‘us’, solidifying collective identification and increasing the potential for collective violence justified as self-defense, such as that described in the Troubles. At this stage, individuals may arm themselves and paramilitary organizations may form to patrol the border between the self-identified groups. This is a significant step towards collective violence and civil war. As Walter (2022, p. xv) writes, “modern civil wars start with vigilantes…armed militants who take violence directly to the people”. As opposed to Northern Ireland, where weapons had to be imported from abroad, there is no shortage of firearms in the United States, just as there is no shortage of organized groups ready to use them. Along with religion, deeply rooted racial identification is a central characteristic of American society generally, and these groups particularly (Eyerman 2022). The road from culture war to armed conflict is well-primed and paved. What often remains to facilitate the process moving forward is some coordinating force, a meta organization, or a charismatic figurehead with access to the means and media that makes such coordination possible. The performance of elites are key here; will they seek to quell or orchestrate the process of polarization? Elites are crucial, not only for their status, but also because they provide access to resources, including mass media and political organizations. On the Catholic side of the Northern Ireland Troubles, student activist Bernadette Devlin emerged out of the civil rights cause to become a Member of Parliament and charismatic spokesperson for the movement on an international scale. The previously mentioned Ian Paisley was a charismatic figurehead for Ulster nationalism, with a talent for organization building and media performance. In the American culture wars, religious leaders and the organizations they represent have provided powerful resources on all sides. Media figure-turned-politician Donald Trump, along with religious and political leaders, have proven essential in articulating, orchestrating, and enacting the value conflicts that are at the core of the American culture wars.

An important check on processes of escalating polarization is the presence of alternative middle paths, elites, organizations, and movements that bridge the cleavages by seeking integration and inclusion across the divide. Reformist politicians, civil rights activists, and an alternative youth culture offered such a middle ground for a short period in Northern Ireland. The loss of hope that followed their crushing proved a turning point in the escalation of violence. The civil rights movement in the United States, which inspired the Northern Ireland movement, functioned similarly, but also catalyzed strong, and often violent, reaction.

Another important factor in moderating polarizing forces is an impartial institutional structure, such as judiciary, military, and police services. It is essential that such services are trusted and generally accepted as nonpartisan by a majority of the population. The public trial and punishment of those responsible for outbreaks of violence is a necessary part of collective repair and the maintenance of the middle path, but outcomes must be perceived as fair and just. Relatedly, Impartial Information sources, mass media, newspapers, radio, and television services are also crucial. One-sided media will only orchestrate and feed off tribalism, creating enclosed echo chambers that reinforce partisan views and values.

As the middle paths of inclusion and cooperation collapse, and trust in an impartial institutional structure is undermined, hope for non-violent change dissipates and the road from culture war to civil war opens wide. Once a dynamic of reciprocal violence begins, it is difficult to stop. The Troubles ended through a combination of internal exhaustion and external pressure. In the case of the racially based culture wars in the United States, it is more difficult to identify what sort of external pressure would alleviate the destructive forces that drive the internal conflicts. To prevent opening the road from culture war to real war, the middle path and the hope of non-violent resolution must be kept open and the guardrails of impartial institutions kept firmly in place.