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.

  • Jessvj93@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My version of this is seeing losers on 4chan trying to be edgy, didn’t know it would be a fucking breeding ground years later that would lead to the storming of the US Capitol and multiple militia groups forming.

    • girlfreddy@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. It was annoying but not overwhelming. Now we’ve got politicians catering to the nazi/nationalist crowd like they’re some kind of demi-god.