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.

  • @masquenox
    1•8 months ago

    What do you want?

    Lots of things.

    Do you want a shot in utero where the switches for white supremacy are flipped?

    No.

    I think the whole inherent racism thing

    There is no such thing as “inherent racism” - in the same way that there is no such thing as “inherent Islamism” or “inherent monarchism.”

    but you seem to say that the interactions we experience in the film are secondary to something more systemic

    Yes.

    Frankly, if you don’t put stock in the interactions the movie depicts, then what hope do you have?

    Actually, if white supremacism worked the way the movie depicts it would be utterly hopeless - we’d be left with no option other than to declare that white supremacism and the reason it exists defies understanding… which it simply doesn’t. That is the liberal conceit of the movie - that racialization is (somehow) “natural” to humans when it so obviously isn’t.

    To hear you say it’s institutionalized makes me feel like it’s hopeless,

    That which is institutionalized can be dismantled - we are literally dismantling a small piece of it right now.

    and my babies, in spite of their colorblind nature now

    Your babies are not “colorblind” - not being able to see “race” is not some disability (you know… especially considering that “scientific racism” is literally pseudo-science despite the fact that it dictates so much of our reality in “western” society). What you meant to say is that your children have not been socialized into viewing the world through a white supremacist lens.

    That is impossible to avoid - white supremacism is not something you are born with, it is something you are born into. White people don’t get to opt out of it, black people don’t get to opt out of it - that is what is meant when we talk about our society being fundamentally white supremacist. It cannot be avoided - but it’s conceits can be understood, it’s camouflage ripped away, it’s tenets debunked, and, ultimately, the institutions that rest upon it can be thoroughly discredited. That is one of the main reasons the alt-right exists - people becoming more and more aware of how deep the white supremacism iceberg goes frightens them. There’s a good reason we call their ilk reactionaries.