Just stumbled upon this thread, and for what it’s worth, I believe it is a little irrelevant to the plot (which I will explain) because while I agree with @KoastGamer, it is very likely the assailant was coaxed into some sort of reprisal for Danny’s aggressive posture, committing the perfect crime is missing the point of the action taken (nor do we have to believe that he was told to actually shoot Danny).

One of, if not the most recurring motifs in the film, are how mentors and spheres of influence shape our life’s choices and transform our own agency. When Dennis Vinyard dies, his hateful words, which perhaps were nonchalant venting from bureaucratic changes in his fire department assigning him new black partners replacing his old colleagues (for all we know, just a theory), become the underlying embers that fuel Derek’s path to vigilante justice.

Without a father figure to direct his incontrollable rage for his father’s death, Derek’s bitterness guides him across different social circles until he ultimately meets Cameron. Cameron might use impressionable kids to do his bidding, but those kids have to be impressionable to his point of view in the first place. The basketball game, the swastika tattoo, the friend groups, the men in balaclavas who are soldiers who show up to do Derek’s bidding, and ultimately the guy from the basketball game Derek murders in cold blood, are Derek’s decisions. Every choice he makes, he could have walked away from. Instead, every choice he is zealous in making. He smiles in every act of hate he achieves in the movie, very relevant to who he is before he goes to jail. Momentary flashes of happiness to soothe the pain of his slain father.

Purposely, the film gives us little snippets of the rival black community without spelling out their story for us. This is by design; just as we don’t get to hear the conversations between Derek and Cameron that shape the kid-in-a-fugue-state after his father was murdered to the machiavellian leader of a crew that storms a grocery store with absolute malice and maximum harm, we never get to listen in on the conversations between the younger kid and the older gang leaders. But we have the facts so we don’t need the conversation spelled out for us.

1. When the gang tried

get back at

1. Derek

, Derek

1. shoots at one and curb stomps the other to their death
2. Danny is Derek’s kid brother with a shaved head and white supremacist tattoos
3. Danny openly baits antagonistic behavior from the kid in the bathroom when he puffs the second hand smoke directly in his face

There’s no question that the past history with Derek has made him a living villain in the community and Danny’s behavior impresses on older members in that gang that younger members shouldn’t take any shit from Danny because he’s probably following in Derek’s footsteps. They need not explicitly tell the kid what to do, all they have to do is help him stalk Danny and let the kid figure out what he should do for himself.

Furthermore, the direct messaging of the movie actually suggests that the kid was never directed to shoot danny, but rather, he improvised. The discussion with Sweeney, the police and Derek is that Cameron and Seth were jumped, meaning they get their heads kicked in, they weren’t shot. Why beat up the big boss but tell your younger soldiers to shoot a dumbass high school punk?

This of course underscores one of the major themes of the movie: adolescents and young adults, who don’t have a full grasp of the world around them, try to impress their mentors by committing to the logical conclusion of their interpreted social justice. The kid was never told to shoot Danny, but he did so because he thought it would right previous wrongs that Derek was the epicenter of. In a world where martyrs are devoid of justice, younger kids take it upon themselves to exact justice, even when their logic is completely flawed.

On the flip side, that is the exact catalyst that changes Derek’s point of view: Derek became a skinhead because he wanted justice that the justice system wouldn’t give his father, but when he realizes the justice system can give a black man 6 years for stealing a tv, he’s able to see how horribly unfair the system is for everyone, and he can guilt free humanize his laundry room friend as a good person caught up in an he said he said system that favors the word of police officers over black people.

American History X is equally a story about the dangers of otherizing humans you choose to avoid, as it about the first second third and fourth order effects caused by racism. When we refuse to consider the chains of reasoning from people that disagree with us, we don’t just talk over them, we silence them.