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.
feeling uncomfortable when you’re watching it doesn’t mean you’ll regret it afterwards, just make sure you’re mentally in the right place to watch something serious
Oh, NGL, it’s a tough watch. But some of the best films are.
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.
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.