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.

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yes, but that’s the thing… the media portrayed the far-right as laughable “fringe movements” back then - we didn’t have the internet, and the connection between capitalist societies and the far-right (whose violence protects them) was pretty much hidden from us by the very people who empower the far-right when working-class people get uppity.