In the 158th year of the American civil war, also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence, according to a recent analysis. Its victims include black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women seeking reproductive rights. The Confederacy battles in favour of uncontrolled guns and environmental degradation, including toxins in streams, mercury from coal plants, carbon emissions, and oil exploitation in protected lands.
The premise appears to be that protecting others limits the rights of white men, and those rights should be unlimited. Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire noted that “the oppressors are afraid of losing the ‘freedom to oppress’”. While not all white men support extending old domination, those who do see their privileges under threat in a society where women gain power and demographic shifts will make white people a minority by 2045.
The civil war ended in 1865, but the blowback against Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, and violence against black people continued subjugation into the present. The Ku Klux Klan also targeted Jews and Catholics; Confederate flags resurged in the 1960s as a response to the civil rights movement. The US has 5% of the world's population but 35%-50% of civilian guns, leading to mass shootings that are almost entirely male and largely white.
President Barack Obama was an ardent Unionist for eight years, but the current president has defended Confederate statues, values, and goals, as “Make America Great Again” harks back to an antebellum fantasy of white male dominance. The attack on the 14th Amendment, which extends equal citizenship to all born or naturalised in the US, underscores the stakes.
The definition of “us” and “we” is at the heart of the conflict. The Constitution’s preamble spoke of “We the People” but apportioned representation based on free persons and three-fifths of enslaved people. “You will not replace us,” chanted white men in Charlottesville in 2017. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people in 2015, declared: “Y’all are raping our white women. Y’all are taking over the world.”
