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.
Not answering for girlfreddy but I’d also like to chime in. I don’t know how to say this, but like America used to feel different 30 years ago. Even though rights were slow coming for women in the workplace and eventually gay people, it felt like we were always either stopped or moving slowly forward. Maybe it was just a sheltered existence, having all of the benefits of a pretty damn good public school system in a quiet corner of the suburban area, but I fucking swear, there was like a clear line to this nation becoming some kind of next civilization and it felt like everyone shared it for a minute there.
I don’t know if it was 9/11 or the Neoliberal creep. Maybe the 08’ crash, or the Obama election and the feelings that came after. I can tell you though some time around 2010-2011 I started telling people that white supremacists and fascists were coming. I’m sure it was a bunch of little things, but they all started to click around then. I watched this movie with my mom, and now I’d largely consider her the equivalent of a Nazi. She doesn’t think she is, but she’s also brainwashed to the point where she gave up our relationship over being unable to confront her christofacist ideas. She liked the movie and was disturbed by the racism back when we watched it.
A lot of all this can be pinned to Regan and his welfare queen bullshit that he purposely put out to race bait and fire up the right. Still, they all kinda stood by and just stewed in their closeted prejudice to the point where all this shit felt like a legitimate surprise when it began to snowball together. A lot of it is intertwined with their feelings on Obama for sure. A half black guy made most of the people around him look like lame dumpy hicks. A lot of America couldn’t process that so they started to try to delude their reasoning, rather then coming to terms with it. He’s a black Muslim, with a fake birth certificate. He’s a weed smoking smooth talker. He’s a new world order pawn of the elites. They still hate him so much that Q made a detour and said his wife is a secret transsexual and by reason he a closeted fraud…
Anyway, got off track. But again, I’ll stand behind it that none of this somehow felt possible pre 2000, and largely still into like 08’. At least to a much younger and naive me.
Edit: rereading this, I kinda wander a lot. Sorry if it detracted at all from the convo. I’m gonna leave it though cause it still feels personal and true, and I’d be sad to delete this after all the memories I got to think back on. I am old.