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The original ending of the screenplay featured Derek in the bathroom mirror, and he begins to shave his head again.

This is a much, much stronger ending than the cut we wound up with.

There's a lot going on in that movie. It's exposing a lot about the human condition and how every movement turns out to exploitative.

Derek first associates with a local white supremacist group, becoming a leader at the ground level. He kills a black man who is trying to steal a car or a radio from it, or something. He goes to prison.

In jail, he thinks he'll be protected by the AB, but they wind up raping him (literally), and the only person who looks out for him is another black inmate. This experience changes Derek. He questions his prejudiced ways, and he ultimately decides that he had been exploited.

After he serves his sentence, he confirms this by visiting his old cadre. He shows up at one of their parties and confronts the creep leading them from the 'upper office', an old man trying to build an army of teenagers.

Then, Derek begins to de-convert his younger brother, Danny (who is the narrator of the film). The day that Danny returns to school to submit his paper 'American History X', he is killed by a black student who, earlier, we'd seen being exploited by older gang members and hazed into committing a killing (not totally unlike the murder committed by Derek earlier in the film).

Originally, this causes Derek to go back and shave his head, indicating that prison had just been a special case, a unique moment away from the real world, a suspension of ordinary circumstances. I think the typical person is going to think that prison was a learning moment for Derek, where his prejudices were exorcised. I don't think that's the point. When the cynical hammer of this film's message hits you, you realize that there is no such message. Derek's circumstances had changed. That's all. It was an accident he wound up with the black guy working the laundry. When your circumstances change, you've got to adapt.

The message I take away from this movie nowadays is: humanity sucks. No matter what group you're involved with, it's structured by someone who is fucking everyone beneath them. Hierarchy rules all, and you do what you must to get through it. All you can do is be a wild animal and defend yourself and your loved ones.

It's a really cynical fucking movie, but it deals elegantly with the relationship between the brutality of the hands we're dealt, and the types of vulnerabilities these create, and the myths we come up with to explain the situations of our lives, wherever they happen to be.

A Jew got offended during dinner at one point. That might be the most poignent scene.

"My eyes have seen the glory of the trampling at the zoo, we washed ourselves in niggers blood and all the mongrels too, we're taking down the zog machine, jew by jew by jew, the white man marches on"

The very last scene was removed from the movie showing Derrick shaving his head after that monkey kilt his little brother.

I felt like the ending of the movie justified the curb stomping.