The Attraction of Skinheads
In American History X the skinheads gather around an older man Cameron Alexander, a "white power" writer and recruiter of youthful neo-Nazis. His rhetoric of race reduces all the social problems in America to one thing-minorities. The trouble is, complex social problems never have one single underylying cause to be addressed, but the skinheads lack education and don't understand that minorities are being used as scapegoats. Cameron exploits kids who don't know what to do with themselves or their lives, who don't know what to think, or how to think. They fall for his story-like most of the German people fell for Adolph Hitler's in the 1930s. Hitler made the Jews a scapegoat, while the Skinheads blame anybody who isn't white and protestant.Of course, there is more to it. The film shows the Skinheads acting like terrorists; that is, they are disempowered people, young adults who think they are fighting for a "cause" and doing something good for themselves and society. They are full of rage about their lives, and minorities make a handy target against which to channel their rage. Also, a neo-Nazi gang is like any gang-the gang supplies a place to belong and fit in, a place to be part of some bigger purpose. Gangs are a res
In this case, they retaliate by blaming minorities for their troubles and becoming abusers themselves. But it seems unlikely that one such conversation would turn a person in such an extreme direction. In the movie, almost all of them were adolescent males. ponse to social conditions, and gang members are not necessarily evil but they are impressionable. They are often hated by society, but experience love and loyalty in the gang's membership. Now he works for the Simon Rosenthal Center and travels the country as an expert on racism. It's a little too simple an explanation. In real life, even if his father talked racial hatred all of his life, it wouldn't necessarily cause the son to become a Nazi. " They pitied me because I didn't hate all the people they hated! Perhaps the difference is that despite all that, I was loved. As Daniel put it in American History X, "Hate is baggage. But I never believed it and never bought into it. The die-hards, on the other hand, hadn't learned how to love anyone.
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