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.

  • chaogomu@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    Got to add, it didn’t just happen in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

    There were fascists in every country in the world, and a lot of them stayed in power after WW2.

    Most of Asia was fascist ruled at one point or another. South America was almost completely ruled by various fascist dictators for most of the second half of the century.

    But the more on topic point is that a large percentage of Americans of the time, had wanted the US to join WW2 on the side of the Germans. There were men who were sent to kill Nazis who had marched in support of the Nazis at Madison Square Garden.

    That’s not even counting the KKK, which was falling apart due to the leadership embezzling funds, but just a decade prior had enjoyed hundreds of thousands of members.

    In 1930 the Klan had membership counting 11 Governors, 16 US Senators, and roughly 75 members of the House.

    The Klan then had a resurgence in the 1950s, and well into the 70s all in response to the civil rights movement.

    The Klan might be treated like a joke these days, but the sort of families that have multiple generations of klansman, don’t teach love and understanding to their children.

    There are little towns in the south that have been cultivating their racism since long before the civil war.

    Hell, the state of Oregon was so racist that the banned black people entirely. The people who did that had kids who joined the Klan, so on and so forth, and now there are still places in eastern Oregon that black and brown people have to avoid on fear of death.

    White nationalism has been part of who we are as a nation for a very long time. Thankfully its popularity is fading, which only makes the adherents louder and more dangerous.