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.
When it came out I was dealing with National Alliance, Baltimore Hammerskins, and to a lesser extent the Pagans motorcycle gang in my area of Northern Maryland. It was far from historical if you were actively around white supremacist areas, particularly the rust belt or around orange county California. I remember visiting OC in the aughts and everyone confused me for a nazi, some waitress chick showed me her Himmler tattoo.