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.

  • vivadanang
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    1 year ago

    Mostly agree but in my own experience it’s not WW2 vets that went Birch/KKK etc., but their kids.

    • yata@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Your experience is wrong. KKK and others existed just fine before and during WWII.

      • vivadanang
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        1 year ago

        It’s high water mark was the 20s for sure, but when we talk about the outwardly visible racists, goddamn the baby boom represents