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.

  • DragonTypeWyvern
    164·
    1 year ago

    What an astonishingly reductive and inaccurate statement.

    Here’s but a small token of FDR’s statements on the matter.

    https://youtu.be/qrNDwyj4u1w?si=c-ZuF7_UOWJQH0wz

    Anti-fascist rhetoric was clear and popular, even in nations that would be arguably considered fascist themselves today, like Segregation Era America and the British Empire.

    Tons of those soldiers might have continued being a racist after being drafted to fight Nazis, but just as many learned exactly what path they were following and changed course.

    FDR’s political coalition even pretty much directly evolved into the Civil Rights Movement.

    The simple reality is that 20th century politics was never simple but progressive thought thoroughly won out over ideologies of hate and actively worked to undo the centuries of damage done by colonial era white supremacist thought.

    It was hardly a perfect process, and it’s one that continues to this day, but to pretend it was simply just nations butting heads to the common man is dangerously revisionist.

    The allied nations fought fascism. They knew what it was, could describe it better than many do today, and the leadership was clear in their opposition, even if often confusingly hypocritical, and often beset by internal opposition. That not every person in 1940 was completely on board with it is simply the human condition.