u/chankljp

While the premise of TFR was for the most part, 'What if all the various types and flavors of radicals and extremists on all sides during 2020 actually got organized, and could potentially be exacted the way their opponents demonized them to be?', there is one particular aspect that I think might have not been given enough attention to, at least until the "American Experiment" update comes out: Racial relations in the US, in particular, the Southern US.

While I am not an American, in the TFR world, we more or less saw a case of both white and black nationalists being shown to be 100% correct about each other in their internal propaganda.

With African American turning (Again, at least seemingly) en-masse to ultra-nationalist armed struggle against the majority population in the form of the BLA, complete with their own version of the Moscow theater hostage crisis/Crocus City Hall in Atlanta, and racially motivated mass rapes targeting the families of public figures (At least, there were events showing the above in the Flavor Expansion submod, which seem plausible to have happened off-screen in the mod proper as well), all before the outbreak of the Civil War.

While for the white Americans, there was the literal return of the Confederacy of the first Civil War, one that can and will bring back slavery either openly or in anything but name. Not to mention the freaking KKK not just being some fringe terror group, but one with minor regional politicians and law enforcement defecting to it leading up to the outbreak of open conflict. And besides from the shooting of Quinton Evans being one of the trigger point in kicking off the giant mess, there were events showing innocent African Americans getting unjustly arrested and even killed by an already drained and on-edge police force.

Much like the real life Rwandan genocide, it will be one of those ugly conflicts in which both sides can have a legitimate claim on their own radicalization being merely a response to actions from the other side. And similar to other kinds of ethnic cleansing, the moderates and even people that simply wish to be left alone will quickly be forced into the arms of the extremists just to survive... Which was indeed the case as shown in some of the events.

Worst of all, perhaps even more so compared to the other theaters of the Second Civil War, the damage to the psyche of the Deep South might be much more permanent. In that the most likely outcome being a race war between Neo-Confederates and Black Nationalists before a unifier comes back in to lay down the law. It would be a total repudiation of everything that US has done on the race issue since the First Civil War: The Reconstruction, the end of Segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, etc, all 160 years worth of progress, would all have been shown to be not just total failures, but complete lies that were just waiting to explode into Haitian Revolution style racial massacres at first opportunity, with both sides of course pointing their fingers at each other.

No matter who ended up reunifying the US, I honestly wonder if it will even be possible for blacks and whites to co-exist under the same society any longer, at least in areas once controlled by either the Confederates or the BLA. Even if partition is off the table, I can imagine massive demographic movements not seen since the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of WW2. As survivors will want to 'stick to your own kind' and band together into ethnic enclaves or flee as far away from the South as possible.