Derek is a leader of a Skin-Heads’ gang and he went to jail after killing a black man that was trying to rob his property. The time of imprisonment is a long and a painful period, which changes Derek and directs him onto the way of redemption. However, when he comes back home he faces the most difficult task: he has to save his brother, Danny, who grew up following the footsteps of his elder brother by embracing the ideology of Nazism and racism.
The main characters of “American History X” are two brothers. The eldest one is Derek; he is a Nazi-skin and he lives in Venice Beach, a district of Los Angeles. He is a “borderline” character, a typical representative of several metropolitan areas of the United States of America. Derek is a Nazi extremist and he follows the racist ideology based on “Mein Kampf” written by Adolf Hitler. In this book, Hitler was stating his beliefs of the superiority of the White race over the Black or Jewish ones. However, according to Derek, his gang (White Power) does not possess the characteristics that Hitler shows in his “Mein Kampf”. He says that “White Power” does not follow the fanatic segregation of the rural America, but it constitutes a vanguard of the metropolitan white racism.
The father of Derek taught him that the “whites” and the “blacks” should not be equal and that black people receive too many privileges (he makes an example of black people hired for a fire brigade job instead of white people) because of their ethnicity and not because of their merits. This segregation is brought to a peak when the Derek’s father gets killed by a black man. At this point the hate of Derek grows up becoming real racial hate. At this point Derek becomes a pure Nazi-skin by shaving his head and joining the “White Power”. This hatred is developed even against the new lover of his mother, Murray. Since this man is a Jew, Derek cannot help showing hastiness against this person, justifying it by the fact that Murray “stole” his mother.
After the death of the father, Derek becomes the head of the family. Trying to protect his family, Derek becomes a tyrant, especially in manipulating the actions of his younger brother called Danny. Derek’s family is a typical working-class American family: his mother is a weak and sick woman, who is not able to maintain the family after the death of her husband and cannot stop the racist drift of her son. Moreover, after Derek accuses him of being a Zionist and a black-supporter during a family lunch, saying that he is not a part of their family and he will never be (at this point Derek shows him the swastika tattooed on his chest), his mother has to break up with Murray because of his Jewish origin. Derek’s sister is a girl with neoliberal ideas and she never gets along with Derek because of his racist and xenophobe ideas. Finally, Danny (the youngest brother and the other main character of the movie) loves Derek and sees him as a hero. For this reason he wants to follow the racist ideas of Derek and to join his movement (White Power).
However, Derek is not a typical Nazi-skin, who is covered with tattoos and has a very low level of intelligence. Despite his violence and rage, he is a clever man with an analytical mind. Occasionally though, he truly becomes a “monster”. One of such occasions happens during the night, when two black men (they turn out to be the same men that Derek and his friends defeated during the afternoon in a basketball match) try to steal Derek’s car parked near his house. Derek brutally kills one of them, while Danny is watching the scene. In the eyes of Danny Derek is not a killer, but a hero, who took revenge on a random black man that represents the killer of his father. Derek gets in jail and here he will have to go a long a painful process of ideological revision and inner maturity. This process will bring him to repudiate his racial doctrine.
The redemption of Derek passes through hard moments, especially when some former friends (other Nazis in jail) assault and rape him in the shower room. When Derek goes out from jail, he is no longer the same person. He has got his redemption and has no hatred anymore. After going back home, he faces a tough task to get Danny out of the same racist and xenophobe community (White Power) that Derek used to be a part of. In particular, Derek confronts and beats up the head of the community, Cameron; this man is used to manipulate young boys into making “dirty jobs” like assaulting black people. Derek will also quarrel with his former best friend and his old girlfriend (both members of the White Power).
The only way Derek manages to bring Danny away from xenophobe ideas is by telling him what happened to him in jail and by explaining the reasons why he quit this ideological and violent route. Now Danny understands the falsity behind this ideology and he completes the essay “American History X” given to him by his black professor as a punishment for having done a previous essay on human rights based on “Mein Kampf”. The family of Derek seems to have finally reached peace, but the past can be redeemed but not deleted; this is confirmed by the dramatic end.
Two events leave a tremendous impact in the life of Derek: the murder of a black man and the rape in the shower room. If in the first scene Derek appears as a violent, self-confident and almost invincible man, in the second scene he appears as a weak and vulnerable man. This transition underlines his evolutionary route, which passes from a dark and a violent past into the peaceful and redeemed present.
The director wants to show the audience that xenophobe ideology is a sign of ignorance, failure, frustration, and poverty, all mixed up with hatred and the desire for revenge. The use of contrast between black and white colors represents the two time layers of the plot: the dark past of Derek and the light of the present, thus showing the evolution of the Derek’s behavior.
In jail, all the past certainties of Derek crumble one after another. First of all, the people whom he considered friends and with whom he was sharing some ideals (the other Nazi-Skins) show their real faces. They have no ideals whatsoever, they are simply angry and arrogant. This is shown when Derek sees them dealing drugs with some Hispanic people (Derek hates drugs and especially hates dealing with other ethnicities). Again, his certainties fall apart when this gang rapes him in the shower after a quarrel. Now he has no protection anymore inside the jail and at any point of time he might be killed by some black convicts, who want to take revenge for what Derek did outside the jail. At this point, all his previous certainties and xenophobe ideas are completely defeated. His co-worker in the laundry room, Lamont, helps Derek to get through the detention period. He never helps Derek directly; neither does he admit that he is helping him not to be killed by the other black convicts. However, on the day Derek is released from prison, he says to his new friend that he is sure he survived there thanks to him. Lamont does not say anything, but smiles. At this point Derek is completely reborn.
Just right before Danny hands in his essay, everything seems to work smoothly. Derek and Danny both got saved and redeemed and they will finally follow a new road far from the hatred and racism. But the dramatic epilogue, where Danny gets shot to death by a black guy with whom he had a quarrel in the past, seems to convey the real message of the director. The xenophobic mainstream is just a vehicle, while the real message is the hatred. The main idea of the director is not to show the wrongfulness of racism is or the lack of integration between different ethnicities; the real issue is that hatred destroys everything around, even on the way to redemption and salvation, like in the case of Derek. Through the words of Derek, the director says: “a life is too short to be wasted with hate”. There are no clear distinctions between black and white people; we can see both positive and negative characters despite of the ethnicity. This shows that hatred is not related to the color of the skin, but it is something that is a part of mankind. Hatred destroys both all people equally.
It is impossible to say with absolute certainty if Derek will turn back to be a Skin-Head or he will continue on this painful road despite the death of his young brother. However, the director in the end leaves a quote saying that a life is too short to be wasted with hate. Therefore, I believe that Derek will not follow again the same path and will not make the same mistakes (like after the death of the father). Instead, he will choose not to hate and will finally relieve his heart from all the pain inside.
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