The war on drugs, was an actual war, because the US government actually waged war against the people who were involved in the drug trade. They killed them. They bombed them. They systematically hunted them. The war on disease, doesn't exactly fit, but, I would say it works because the intent is the destruction of the opposition. There was no race war in the 60's. There was a lot of racial tension. There was some conflict.
It isn't a race war, and Trump is a giant fecking twat who should never have been elected. When you use the word "war" to describe anything, you devalue the word. What are you going to call it if suddenly roving gangs of white people, and people other than white, start murdering each other? A race holocaust? A race apocalypse? Or is that still just a race war? When you start to call everything war, nothing starts to look like war. You can of course use the dictionary definition, but the dictionary definition as I have pointed out, doesn't necessarily contain the literal interpretation of war, it includes any widely used interpretation of the word. That doesn't make it the correct useage, it just means it is the most widely used ways the word is used. That is how a dictionary works, if you didn't know.
We could, as a society decide to use the word feck as a pronoun, and if enough people used it, it would be added to the dictionary as a pronoun. War has been used to describe any sort of confrontation, any sort of conflict, any sort of competition. That doesn't mean that everything you call a war, IS a war.
A race war IS a war, if it is actually a war. You cannot conflate tensions with war. Why? One denotes chaos, death, destruction, the other denotes opposition to or resistance against. There are racial tensions in the US, with enough provocation, they could boil into a race war, I suppose, though I doubt it. However, if there was an actual race war, things would be horrific, on a level you haven't even contemplated. You want to know what a race war is?
The Rwandan Genocide was a race war. That is what a race war looks like. You might say, "That's not a race war, the Hutu and the Tutsi are both black", except, that is not what they were taught by the Belgians, and not what they believed. They believed they were separate races, and the result was an actual, horrific, honest to god race war.
