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 flashback where he’s eating dinner with his family and talks about his cool black teacher and his father goes on a racist tirade. It shoes the seeds of racism were put in him since he was a kid. The whole point of the scene is to show he didn’t just wake up hating blacks one day. It was a process that started home.
Anyway, I respect your opinion even if I don’t agree with it.