Revisiting American History X to Pose a Potentially Transformative Question: Does White Male Supremacy Make White Americans’ Lives Better?

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More than revealing a problem with the Democratic Party, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency last November affirmed the fact that a significant portion of the American population maintains a deep commitment to white supremacy, in addition to misogyny and hatred of LGBTQ people.  At a minimum, nearly half of Americans were comfortable with a candidate who articulated these values and this worldview and did not see these attributes as disqualifying, even if they gave other reasons for their vote.

Observing this powerful affirmation of this cruel and painful dimension of the nation’s culture, part of the nation since and even prior to its inception,  we have to wonder where we can see hope of overcoming this mentality, this deeply ingrained structure of feeling in this culture. I don’t mean just fostering anti-racist politics, organizing and supporting movements for civil rights, and passing legislation that counters, contains, and seeks to keep at bay U.S. racism and the other forms of hate that sustain inequality, but motivating a more substantial and truly transformative change of hearts and minds in those subscribing to this value system that is not just damaging to others but to themselves.

Argument and persuasion through reason and logic generally prove ineffective. Racist ideology is beyond reason, working on an extra-rational level. Stories, however, work on many levels in animating and informing our cultural sensibilities, so I turned there.

Indeed, the transformation of hearts and minds will require a profound cultural transformation, and promoting important stories that can define and inform a national self-consciousness and identity and narrate a new direction is one key element of this project of cultural transformation.

Our nation collectively, but especially white America, needs to confront and work through psychotherapeutically the deep cultural and collective mental illness of white male supremacy to understand why it’s damaging to the interests and well-being of white Americans and all Americans. We need stories that help us work this poison out of our cultural bloodstream.

One story that came to mind was the 1998 movie American History X, directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna. 

The film asks the key question, has white male supremacy made white Americans’ lives better?

The story’s central character is Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton), a young celebrity of a white supremacist who, under the auspices of Cameron Alexander (Stacy Keach), founder and ringleader of white supremacist organization and network, serves as neighborhood leader in Venice Beach, California.

The story the film tells, I think you’ll see, represents a world characterized by circumstances eerily and unfortunately similar to our nation’s contemporary reality, underscoring its relevance and its utility in the process of collecting, even marshalling, cultural resources to engage in the crucial task of a larger cultural transformation by centering stories that offer narratives whose arcs bring us closer to a just world.

In the film, Norton’s character Derek Vinyard rallies other youth with typical racist talking points about immigrants and people of color invading and taking jobs and opportunities from the “real” (white) hard-working Americans.

 Sound familiar? 

In one scene, Derek and his thugs ransack a local grocery that, Derek complains in provoking his gang, was once owned by a white man from the neighborhood they all knew and who hired them but is now owned by a Korean who hires immigrants for pennies. In another scene, Derek, a skilled basketball player, challenges African Americans to a game of Blacks versus Whites for control of the courts, and he wins. His ability to “take back” the neighborhood attracts other white youth. He later murders one of the other team’s players and another African American when he catches them trying to steal his car from his driveway in the night, landing him in prison.

The film opens on the day Derek is to be released from prison, focusing on Derek’s brother Danny (Edward Furlong) in the office of the school principal, Dr. Sweeney (Avery Brooks), because he has written an essay on Mein Kampf, discussing Adolph Hitler as a civil rights hero. 

Again, sound familiar?

While the teacher (Elliot Gould) wants Danny expelled, seeing him and his brother as irredeemable, the African American Sweeney, familiar with both, knows that Danny’s behavior is linked to issues with his brother. Rather than expel him, he becomes Danny’s history teacher in a course he calls American History X, and Danny’s first assignment is to write an essay about how everything in Derek’s life led up to this moment in his own life.

He did not give up on Danny but tried to motivate him to process his life and experience to help him and thus short-circuit the transmission of white male supremacist culture.

He had not given up on Derek, either, we later learn in a scene when Dr. Sweeney visits him in prison after he has been raped and brutalized by other white supremacists. In prison, through his interactions with an African American character Lamont (Guy Torry) with whom he works the laundry and through his recognition of the hypocrisies of the other white supremacists, Derek overcomes his white supremacy and upon release attempts to save his brother from its insidiousness.

Throughout the film, Danny is writing his essay and processing his family life, the murders Derek committed which he witnessed, and Derek’s history.

He remembers his dad, a firefighter who was killed by an African American drug dealer while on the job, spewing many of the racist talking points Derek would later echo. He traces the flawed and angry beliefs to Derek’s pain and anger and to his father’s desperate anger and anxiety. He begins to see the counterproductiveness and misplaced nature of this white supremacist rage.

The counterproductiveness of racism is reinforced the next day when Danny returns to school with his essay, only to be shot to death in the bathroom by a young African American he had provoked the day before.

The film’s action underlines a question Dr. Sweeney asks Derek in prison, “Has anything you done made your life better?”

This question is a key one we need to keep posing in our culture, as it invites white people to recognize that racism does not in the end serve their self-interests or in any way make their lives better or happier.

Sweeney’s character is a model for recognizing that saving American culture and society from white supremacy means changing hearts and minds through the difficult task of empathy and understanding for that which is inimical to us. To save ourselves we must save our apparent enemies.

While we must, of course, say “no” to white supremacy, we can’t simply condemn it; we must understand it and, yes, even as distasteful and difficult as it might seem, seek empathetically to understand those who cling stubbornly and desperately, often even gleefully, to such beliefs.

It would be useful to approach white supremacy the same way Karl Marx famously approached religion, by understanding the deep wound it salves and the inhumane social conditions that inflict that wound. Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” White supremacy can be understood as in part the sigh of frustrated white people who otherwise feel powerless in this world. Simply saying “no” to white supremacy without also understanding and seeking to address the socio-economic and political structures that do disempower the majority of Americans will likely prove ineffective in achieving a true transformation.

A film like American History X may have limitations in addressing American racism in that portraying an overt and extreme white supremacist might make it difficult for white viewers to identify with Derek’s racism and to explore their own less overt racist cultural beliefs or attitudes, which, by the very fact of living and breathing in American culture, we all inevitably absorb. That’s possible. It may, however, move Americans to explore the underlying everyday racism at work in American culture and think in more complex ways about the damage white supremacy does to all, including the white supremacists.