Dr. David Silbey of Avernia University will speak on "Race War! Race and War, Culture and War: America fights in China, the Philippines, and Iraq."

According to Silbey: Societies fight wars the best ways that they know how. They create militaries based on their own cultural strengths and weaknesses, and it is those militaries that win or lose on the battlefield. In essence, wars and the militaries that fight them are not distinct from the societies that wage and build them; they are expressions of that society. This is nowhere more true than the United States. America brings with it to its foreign wars all the cultural beliefs, ideas, and baggage that shape our lives at home.

Silbey adds, "We have brought our ideas about how the world works and how wars are fought abroad with us, and have often been surprised to find that the world does not work that way. Those beliefs, racial, social, and cultural, have both helped and hindered American efforts in the Philippines, in China, and (more recently) in Afghanistan and Iraq."