#spygel

What?! Can you link to it, pretty please?

The Civil Wars is a band?

Without knowing anything about the artists or their music, I can see both sides of this one. On the one hand, the pluralism of the name implies that they're not referring to a specific event, but rather the concept of civil wars. On the other hand, the Civil War is so ingrained in the American collective consciousness that it's more or less impossible for the outside observer to see the band's name without immediately calling to mind THE Civil War, so the association is there whether it was intended or not. Though, like I said in the post about antebellum, the Civil War was not just one thing -- every war has at least two sides -- and I don't see how the referencing of the Civil War could be inherently racist. However, Wikipedia tells me that the band is from Tennessee, which sort of weakens the whole not THE civil war/we're totally not referencing the confederates argument.

This is all just me thinking out loud, by the way. The subtleties of black/white racial conflict are sort of lost on me because I grew up in a very, very white area where nobody ever talked about race. As in I didn't know there were still genuinely racist people (aside from old people that were stuck in their ways) until my third year of college, and I had never heard someone shamelessly make an explicitly racist comment until about two years ago. So I sometimes feel like there are a bunch of invisible lines that everyone else knows about and I don't. I'm doing my best to figure it out, but it's (sometimes a little overwhelmingly) complex.