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.
Growing up in the So-Cal punk scene I saw these people every time I went to a show. Dudes with boots and “wife beater” tank tops holding a confederate flag at a Voodoo Glowskulls show come to mind especially.
The punk shows I’ve been to I think would kill any Nazi punk stupid enough to show up. I’m relatively newish to the scene though and in Seattle. Is this a regional thing, different eras thing?
Different eras. There was a whole punk skinhead subculture, and a sub-subculture within it that were Nazis. Most skinheads were explicitly anti-racist, so needless to say the two factions did not exactly get along…
The Dead Kennedys even wrote a song called “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”