Liberalism on Film: Externalising Racism in American History X

American History X is racist. There, I said it – everyone’s favourite anti-racist film is, in fact, more racist than a minstrel show directed by Leni Reifenstahl. I’m not talking about the overt kind of racism, as displayed by the film’s characters. Instead, I’m going to look at the way American History X, by focusing so much on that overt, stereotypical race hate, plays into the externalisation of racism. By this, I mean the tendency, particularly prevalent among white liberals, to think of racism as something other people do – and that those other people are exclusively the kind of shaven-headed, swastika-tattooed thugs portrayed in the film. Externalising racism means reducing racism to individual actions and beliefs, and then assigning those actions and beliefs to a group so outlandish, so far from yourself, that you don’t have to even consider the possibility that you might be complicit in racism.

            This is exactly what American History X does. The only racists in the film are the most cartoonish caricatures ever put to celluloid; they’re actual neo-Nazis, complete with brown shirts and copies of Mein Kampf on their bookshelves. They could have been interesting if they’d been given more depth[1], but Saving Private Ryan puts more effort into humanising the Nazis than American History X. To illustrate, here’s the main character’s story: he’s racist, because black people killed his dad; he goes to prison for killing some black people; he gets raped by the concept of racism (well, technically it’s a group of neo-Nazis, but the symbolism is so unsubtle it would make CS Lewis blush); then meets a black bloke and decides not to be racist anymore. At no point is any of this remotely interesting – in fact, I think director Tony Kaye deserves credit for being able to make a brutal prison rape boring.

            But enough about the artistic flaws in the film. It has the emotional complexity of a Hallmark card, but what I want to talk about is its tacit approval of liberal racism. By making its subjects so grotesque, American History X allows every person watching to rest assured in the knowledge that racism is something done by scary working-class people with tattoos and no health insurance, rather than something they and their middle-class friends might be guilty of. The message of American History X is not “racism is bad”; it’s “Nazis are bad”. And if anyone who saw that film didn’t already agree with that message going in, I doubt they agreed with it by the end.

The radical feminist writer bell hooks has suggested that, instead of “racism”, we use the more accurate term “white supremacy”. This is because when you say “racism”, people think of individual actions and thoughts (as discussed above) but when you say “white supremacy” it is clear that you’re talking about a system that allows the domination of one race by another. While criticising white supremacists, American History X lets white supremacy off the hook, by not mentioning it at all. And if you’re making a film about racism, in a country that is built on the enslavement of black and brown people both in the past and in the present, you need to mention white supremacy; to not do so is the equivalent of making a film set in 1930s Germany without mentioning Nazism. American History X is a film about white supremacists made in a country built on white supremacy; a country that has been the principle enforcer of white supremacy worldwide since the fall of the British Empire; a country where the black people enslaved by the prison industrial complex today outnumber those who were enslaved on plantations two hundred years ago; and it passes over all this, instead choosing to focus on a small, powerless, inconsequential group of thugs.

Even with all that considered, though, the film didn’t have to go the way it did. After all, fascist groups are a growing problem in Europe and the US; given that fascism thrives in difficult economic conditions, imagine how effective a different American History X could have been. Imagine if Edward Norton (I know his character has a name, but I honestly didn’t care enough to remember it) and his gang had been stopped by antifascists – imagine if the central message of the film had not been “fascism is bad,” but “fascism is dangerous, and here’s how to stop it.”

            But, of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, where does Norton see the light? In prison. In a fundamentally racist institution[2], run by a white supremacist state that has a history of enacting racist laws and imprisoning – even murdering – anti-racist activists. At the end of the day, it’s the forces of law and order that save the day, something that I suspect the families of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland or any of the other victims of racist police brutality might have reason to take issue with.

In conclusion: it is possible to make a safe, profitable film for a mass audience, and it is possible to make a truly, radically anti-racist film, but it is not possible to do both.

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[1] For an example of just how interesting a film about a group of skinheads can be, see the masterful This Is England

[2] For an examination of the racism inherent in the American justice system, I’d recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis

Workers of the World, Relax: An Antidote to Pro-Work Propaganda

It's happened, as we all knew it would. After spending five years attacking those of us unable to find work, the Conservatives have now broadened their assault to include low-paid workers. Jeremy Hunt's recent remarks urging Britons to "work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard" followed Conservative plans to cut tax credits, further increasing the burden on Britain's working poor. To see a man who has never done an honest day's  work in his life idolising a country that works its citizens literally to death is a slap in the face to those of us who spend our time labouring to create the wealth that he and other capitalists leech off, but enough has already been written on that subject. What I want to talk about is the ideology behind his words. Hunt asks us if we want to work as hard as the Chinese. To any sane individual, the answer is obvious: of course we fucking don't. The people of this country already work far too hard for far too long, only to see the majority of the wealth our work creates siphoned off by wealthy parasites who then dare to lecture us on the dignity of labour. This Victorian idea that wanting to work less is somehow immoral is a key element of capitalist propaganda. When you have the public convinced that a good person is a hard and willing worker, it is easy enough to sell them on the idea that when workers ask for shorter hours, or higher pay, they are Bad People. We must accept our lot, we are told; work will set us free. But what will set us free from work?

The great anarchist theorist Petr Kropotkin(2) theorised in the early 20th century that, with the correct management of resources, people would only have to work four or five hours per working day in order to maintain a decent standard of living for everyone; John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the twenty-first century we would have reduced the working week to fifteen hours. And yet here we are, working forty-plus hours per week, many of us still struggling to make a living. The question is, Why? And the answer is very simple: because our society is still ruled by a class of people who live off our work, and so long as we continue to support them, they will continue to drain our resources. Therefore, it is in their interests to keep us working as hard as possible, for as long as possible, so that they can live in ever-increasing luxury, literally at our expense. The ruling class are clever - that's why they still exist as a class - and they know that overt force is an inefficient tool when it comes to keeping the masses in line. The times in history when workers have suffered the heaviest repression have also been those times in which workers have offered the strongest resistance, because people don;t like being pushed around, and therefore any overt exercise of authority will generate resistance. Stalin learned that; even with one all the coercive power of the Russian state at his disposal, he was still forced to invest in raising living standards for workers in order to deal with the epidemic of slacking and sabotage that plagued the USSR during his time in power(1).

The British government, and their capitalist backers, know that the stick is not enough, and the carrot is too costly to them. So they use propaganda. They demonise the unemployed, and spread a poisonous "strivers vs skivers" rhetoric that glorifies the work ethic to an almost Calvinist degree. In our present society, any calls for us to work less and live more will be met with accusations of selfishness and laziness by those who have internalised this rhteoric so completely that they are reduced to the status of dogs in love with the leash.

So how do we counter this? Well, there are numerous tactics that people have used and are using, to varying degrees of effectiveness. There's the dropout culture espoused by writers like Bob Black and bands like Crass; there's the approach of fighting for shorter hours and higher pay through union organising; and there's the approach of fighting propaganda with propaganda of our own. Personally, I think all of these approaches are useful and important for a libertarian, anti-capitalist movement, and that we should use whatever methods work best in our own circumstances. But, most important, we need to unify - we will not win this fight through the sectarianism and petty ideological squabbles so beloved of the modern left and liberal activists. Instead, we need to build bridges between the insurrectionary dropouts, the unionists, and the liberal activist groups that provide a fertile ground for radicalisation.  As the late, great Rob Crow put it - spit on your own and you won;t acheive anything, but if we all spit together, we can drown the bastards.

(1) The Political Economy of Stalinism, Paul R Gregory
(2) The Conquest of Bread, Petr Kropotkin