Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?
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.
The latter point is not particularly surprising. Many people fight in wars because they have no choice or out of patriotism, or a combination of those plus other factors.
Another important point is that there are varying degrees of racism. Some people might have the badly mistaken view that a certain skin color is better or worse at certain jobs, for example, but that doesn't mean that they would endorse genocide.
Some skin colors ARE worse at certain jobs
Like, I'm white, I could never play Mike Tyson in a movie
Counterpoint: that would be hilarious
Edit: without blackface only
Just get the voice right and people will suspend disbelief.
Also, talk about toads. A lot.
And a lot of guys just want to kill someone. They’ll listen to anyone who says someone’s a bad guy who can be morally murdered.
No, not really. You could, if you really wanted to, distinguish between two different "wings" or "traditions" of white supremacist ideology (which, of course, is the only "racism" there actually is) - the eliminationist and the exploitative.
They are not mutually exclusive - the Nazis, for instance, followed both policies when they exploited Slavic people for labor with the full understanding that all Slavic people would be eliminated as soon as their labor was no longer needed by the (so-called) "master race".