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.
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'm a 90s kid, and I haven't watched American History X partially because of how uncomfortable I think it'll make me feel. Seems like a culturally significant film, but not one people watch more than once.
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.
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.
When it came out tho I remember thinking that a neo-nazi/nationalist movement could never happen (on a large scale) in any Western nation ... yet here we are with that exact thing almost worldwide now.
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.
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.
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.