In 1998, a brutal, controversial indie film portrayed a bleak vision of race relations in the US that appears to have predicted a growing 21st-Century movement, writes Tom Joudrey.

A brilliant film emerged from these skirmishes – but its core insight still takes work to unpack. For generations, a persistent myth that black families were irreparably broken by sloth and hedonism had been perpetuated by US culture. Congress’s landmark 1965 Moynihan Report, for example, blamed persistent racial inequality not on stymied economic opportunity but on the “tangle of pathologies” within the black family. Later, politicians circulated stereotypes of checked-out “crackheads” and lazy “welfare queens” to tar black women as incubators of thugs, delinquents, and “superpredators”. American History X made the bold move of shifting the spotlight away from the maligned black family and on to the sphere of the white family, where it illuminated a domestic scene that was a fertile ground for incubating racist ideas.

  • roguetrick@kbin.social
    21·
    11 months ago

    Or anywhere near the punk subculture I guess. I feel like it’s something that I’ve been hyper aware of my entire life.

    • Spaceinv8er
      21·
      11 months ago

      You need to point out you mean the skin head punks from American History X.

      As there is a vast variety of sub cultures of punk, most of which despise the Neo Nazi Skins.

      Most skin head punks have nothing to do with being a Nazi.