Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?
Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?
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.
Resurgence? it never went away.
Yeah my favorite is people who say things like “I’m the 1940s USA/Canada/aus/etc fought fascism, what happened”?
No, they fought GERMANY. tons of those soldiers came back home and became John Birchers or klansmen or Christofascist evangelicals any other kind of fascist.
Shooting nazis does not an anti fascist make, perplexingly.
Also, the US was VERY hesitant to enter the European war. There was a lot of support for the Nazis in the US. From some high ranking people. Like the first director of the OSS and the Dulles brothers (instrumental in forming the CIA and NATO). They wanted a separate peace with Germany, and to enter the European war against the Soviets. But luckily FDR was unmovable in his support of the Soviets against the Nazis.
The latter point is not particularly surprising. Many people fight in wars because they have no choice or out of patriotism, or a combination of those plus other factors.
Another important point is that there are varying degrees of racism. Some people might have the badly mistaken view that a certain skin color is better or worse at certain jobs, for example, but that doesn't mean that they would endorse genocide.
What an astonishingly reductive and inaccurate statement.
Here's but a small token of FDR's statements on the matter.
https://youtu.be/qrNDwyj4u1w?si=c-ZuF7_UOWJQH0wz
Anti-fascist rhetoric was clear and popular, even in nations that would be arguably considered fascist themselves today, like Segregation Era America and the British Empire.
Tons of those soldiers might have continued being a racist after being drafted to fight Nazis, but just as many learned exactly what path they were following and changed course.
FDR's political coalition even pretty much directly evolved into the Civil Rights Movement.
The simple reality is that 20th century politics was never simple but progressive thought thoroughly won out over ideologies of hate and actively worked to undo the centuries of damage done by colonial era white supremacist thought.
It was hardly a perfect process, and it's one that continues to this day, but to pretend it was simply just nations butting heads to the common man is dangerously revisionist.
The allied nations fought fascism. They knew what it was, could describe it better than many do today, and the leadership was clear in their opposition, even if often confusingly hypocritical, and often beset by internal opposition. That not every person in 1940 was completely on board with it is simply the human condition.
My grandma wrote letters to American GIs deployed in Europe during the second world war. She kept the letters she got back.
There were letters outright praising Hitler and hoping the allied powers would take up the fight against the Reds.
It’s been smoldering and festering in the background for so long the internet just gave us a clear view into it. If they really think there’s a resurgence they’ve never been anywhere rural for the past 40 years as a minority.
I remember watching it and it being a comment on racism at the time, no foreshadowing of the future involved.
Same with Romper Stomper for Aus which was released 6 years before American History X.
Yeah, I'm from an area of the country where the events of the movie aren't far fetched. It wasn't predicting anything, it was just showing you what was going on in the places where people don't like to look.
Exactly. I knew kids from middle school who ended up getting really radicalized and became white supremacists. Moved away but at least one of them became a murderer so... yeah.
It reminds me of how everyone was amazed by Gamergate in the 2010s and then the rise of trump around the alt-right. Or the current "angry males" bullshit with tate and the wannabes.
Mostly it just made me think of being a gamer in the late 90s/early 2000s. Plenty of message boards were full of "weird comments" and some folk even pointed out how blatantly a few neonazi handbooks were being followed in terms of recruitment. Like, I distinctly remember feeling really uncomfortable in my Unreal Tournament clan because one of the guys "was an asshole" but nobody else thought it. I didn't want to deal with him but I also couldn't play UT unless I did. Fortunately I ended up breaking ties because nobody else wanted to play OFP/ArmA after UT2k4 was "fun but not the same".
Its been the same shit for decades. And even today, if you care about something as simple as "maybe don't call people 'gay' as an insult" or "that comment is insensitive", people lose their shit and call you the modern day equivalent of an SJW. And, in the interim, neonazis are following those same publicly available recruitment handbooks and are doing a great job of making people comfortable with spewing bigotry because "it is just a joke". Until it isn't.
And we also see the same "oh, they are just misguided" kid gloves. It makes me IMMENSELY angry when influencers like Disguised Toast or Ludwig or Charlie/Moistcritical (although, he has let his chud flag openly fly a few times) will try to position themselves as "a left leaning centrist" but will openly praise and defend people like ishowspeed or sneako who threaten women with rape and scream misogyny but "are really talented and great at building their brand" or "just have a difference of opinion". Rather than call them deranged right-wing lunatics.
No. American History X was pretty on the mark for the state of the US in 1999.
Trump 'telling it like it is' and how he was going to make Mexico pay for the border wall were what brought all the racist scum out of the woodwork.
Political correctness gets a lot of flak, but what it did was raise the bar. If you have to be careful to call one group of students 'first years' and not 'freshmen', then you know damn well calling different ethnic groups slurs is not acceptable. The PC movement drove the racists further into the closet, and then Trump was a big dinner bell to bring that shit back out again.
This ^ Neo Nazis and Militia Groups were both very real threats in the 90s and American History X is very much a reflection of that.
The fact that things have gotten WORSE and the idea that a history program like "American History X" would be outright banned from being taught in certain states, is a failure of imagination.
I mean he definitely didn't make it better, but I tend to associate the "racists coming out of the woodwork" moment with Obama getting elected. Which also corresponded with the increase in Internet usage. The racists suddenly weren't confined to their small groups of like minded people wherever they lived, but connected to all the other dip shits who believe the same disgusting shit internationally.
Political correctness gets a lot of flak, but what it did was raise the bar.
It boggles my mind that anyone could live in the United States for any amount of time and have the takeaway that the problem in this country is too much political correctness.
Great film, but I’d argue what was ahead of its time was the criticism of toxic masculinity. And it avoided the Fight Club trap of people misunderstanding that it was a critique of that mindset and glorifying the dark side of the protagonist/antagonist.
Wrt Fight Club, I took it as that’s a mental health break from a reality of desperation. Can that happen going to a soul-sucking day job? Then how much more incidences of those who lose jobs, homes, cars, SOs and kids? Then we criminalized desperation and symptoms thereof.
Oops we accidentally put Nazis in charge of our intelligence agencies.
If you add a question mark to the end of your headline, do you sound like a non-committal ass?
Only say said question wearing hipster glasses while releasing a butterfly.
That's OP's headline.
That's BBC's headline...
No. The answer is no it did not. What a weird question
Yes and the handmaid's tale solidified it.
T
No.
Counterpoint: yes.
This movie has a some seriously cringe-worthy moments in it. For instance, it blames the main character's extremification on the actions of one black person - the white firefighter dad being shot by the (thoroughly stereotyped) black drug dealer - without addressing the fact that being extremified by that would necessitate pre-existing white supremacist beliefs on the part of the main character. And that's just where it starts.
This movie pretty much does the opposite of what it purports to do. It's basically liberal "non-racialism" that doesn't challenge, queston or even acknowledge the existence of the very thing the current normalization of overt far-right ideology draws upon - the fundamental white supremacist ideology the US (and the rest of "western civilization") was built upon.
without addressing the fact that being extremified by that would necessitate pre-existing white supremacist beliefs on the part of the main character
But they do explore that. They clearly show that he was already developing racist ideals influenced by his father even before the murder. The father's death was just the tipping point.
They clearly show that he was already developing racist ideals
I don't remember seeing that... I could be wrong - I saw it a long time ago and it's not really a movie I'd return to. It simply doesn't tell you anything useful about the far-right or the intimate connection it enjoys with the status quo we exist under.
I have never seen USian media that isn't terrifically negligent when portraying the true nature of right-wing ideology - and I'm afraid I don't see anything about this movie that makes it an exception.
There was definitely a scene where they're sitting at the dinner table and the father is railing against affirmative action because his department hired a black firefighter.
Yeah, someone's forgetting the movie. Derek Vineyard's dad was your classic closer white racist who had no problem dropping n-bombs at the table, and Derek was an impressionable teen at the time. And in the midst of this, his hero firefighter father is murdered, and Derek takes what can be construed as a realistic, however irrational, tack, by following his father's words in an effort to determine why his father was murdered.