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.

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
      0·
      9 months ago

      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. Its the same as Jimmy Fallon rubbing trump’s head to show he was just a loveable goofball.

  • Gargleblaster@kbin.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      9 months ago

      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.