Civil War, Race War, and the Politics of the Family: From Antiquity to Great Replacement Theory

This article draws on Black Feminism to demonstrate how the mainstreaming of race war and the obsession with the heteronormative patriarchal family in white supremacist thought is rooted in a longer genealogy. I follow how race war’s familial imagery emerges through a contrast with civil wars, which were constituted as fraternal and fratricidal. Tracing this genealogy through antiquity, I show how civil war’s potentially redemptive bloodletting within the family relied on the slave’s constitutive exclusion from the family. Carrying this exclusion through the 19th and 20th centuries, I examine white fantasies of Black rebellion and race war in the history of chattel slavery. White fantasies of race war took the images of miscegenation, infanticide, and parricide. In contrast to civil war’s potentially redemptive war within the family, race war destroyed the patriarchal family and with it, political order. I show how this fantasy of race war emerged as an idealized patriarchal family that simultaneously was upheld as a model of pacification and continued warfare against the enslaved. Slavery’s violence and the institutional form of the heteronormative family intersect to produce a fantasy of race war as an attack on whiteness through an attack on the family.