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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