A Brief History Of The Skinhead Subculture

Any serious investigation of the skinhead subculture reveals that while there is general agreement between academics and most skinhead factions that the skinhead subculture emerged as a hybrid of British hard mod and Jamaican rude boy subcultures, there is strong disagreement between racist and non-racist skinhead factions. Racist skinheads have contended that the subculture originated among youth involved with British fascist parties in the 1930's (Burdi, 1994: 14) but do so against a wave of compelling empirical evidence from both academic and non-academic sources (Hebdige, 1979; Marshall, 1991) that skinhead emerged in the mid-to-late 1960's in Britain largely as a result of growing associations between working-class white British youth and Jamaican immigrant youth. With little or no evidence to support their own claims, the racist skinhead theory of the subculture emerging from racist white youth in Britain or elsewhere can be disregarded with a high degree of confidence. What remains is a very surprising history of a subculture now widely regarded as synonomous with racism: the skinhead subculture emerged due to two cultural shifts in English working-class life - an influx of working-class Jamaican immigrants in the 1960's and a split in the prevalent mod youth subculture along class lines.

The need for labour in the post-WWII British service, transportation and health industries, coupled with immigration restrictions imposed by the United States, funnelled an influx of Jamaican immigrants to Britain. The population of Jamaican immigrants living and working in Britain more than doubled between 1958 and 1962 (Keough, 1999), with most settling in working-class communities in urban centres. Their spatial proximity to their white, English counterparts led to the development of "some kind of rapport" between the two groups (Hebdige, 1979: 52). Ethnic differences were perhaps compensated for by their similar class positions in a country noted for its rigid and well-defined class structure.

Jamaican youth brought with them a youth subculture from the shanty towns of Kingston - that of the rude boys. "Flashy, urban, rough and tough, they were glamorized in a string of reggae and rock-steady hits" (Hebdige, 1979: 145) and could be recognized by their closely-cropped hair, short sta-prest trousers, and pork pie hats &endash; elements that would soon be implemented in the skinhead bricolage.

With Jamaican and English working-class people living and working alongside each other, the rude boys began to interact with the dominant indigenous youth subculture in Britain at the time &endash; that of the mods. Mods favoured American soul for dancing, sharpened metal combs for fighting, Italian motor scooters for transportation, amphetamines for stimulation and meticulous suits (protected by army surplus parkas) for clothing. The right style of haircut, the latest cut of suit or dress, the newest imported soul record &endash; all became objects whose possession garnered the mod status as a "face" or "high number" within the subculture.

At about this time, the mod subculture was beginning to fragment along class lines. The bricolage upon which status within the subculture depended began to be beyond the economic reach of poorer mods. This obstacle to status was overcome with the emergence of the "hard mod" style. Hard mods marked themselves off from their more affulent peers with shaved hair, tight jeans, braces (suspenders), and work boots. This hyper-proletarianized style served as a distinct marker, separating them from both their mod predecessors and their middle-class hippie contemporaries. (Hebdige, 1979: 55; Hamm, 1993: 24). It served as "a conscious attempt by working-class youth to dramatize and resolve their marginal status in a class-based society," (Baron, 1997: 127) as well as their marginal status within the mod subculture.

Class similarites brought the hard mods in close contact with the rude boys, and overlaid elements of each subculture on the other. Socializing with West Indian rudeboys at dancehalls, the hard mods began "copying their (the rude boys') mannerisms, adopting their curses, dancing to their music." (Hebdige, 1979: 55-56). The resulting hybrid subculture &endash; combining elements of rude boy and hard mod style &endash; begat the skinhead subculture.

This new, multi-cultural, working-class subculture flourished only briefly, peaking perhaps in the summer of 1969, before falling into a period of dormancy from 1972 until the late 1970's. As the subculture began to decline, some disturbing indications of racism began to emerge. South Asian immigrants became targets for violence by skinheads (Brake, 1985: 76; Marshall, 1991: 36), and anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell became a popular political figure for some skinheads of this period. London newspapers quickly picked up on these two emerging trends, and began what Brake describes as "over-reportage" of skinhead links to racism and racist violence (1974: 193).

It was at this point that the first academic work on the skinhead subculture began appearing, nearly all from the University of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Scholars such as Brake (1974), John Clarke (1973; 1974), Tony Jefferson (1973), Julian Tanner (1978) and Dick Hebdige (1971; 1979) characterized the skinheads as group of working-class youth seeking a collective solution to the problem of status inconsistency through participation in the subculture. Others took exception to the lack of analysis of the racist actions of skinheads, criticizing the Birmingham school's work as romanticizing skinheads by ignoring any disturbing and negative aspects (Woods, 1977; Baron, 1997: 126-128). It is somewhat ironic that both media and academic attention to the skinhead subculture finally emerged just as it began its rapid descent into dormancy; moreover, this fact casts a shadow of doubt on the conclusions reached both by the papers and the professors.

The skinhead subculture would remain dormant from 1972 until the late 1970's. Lacking cultural space in North America conducive to "youthful working-class expression of discontent and open, ugly antagonism to the middle class" (Moore, 1993: 30), the first wave of the skinhead subculture made no impact on the shores of North America whatsoever. To become a viable subcultural style for North American youth it would require precisely this kind of cultural space, one that came to be articulated by the creation of punk rock. "Because it tolerated or even demanded displays of hostility to perceived middle and upper class standards, because it was often violent, and because generally it seemed at least in theory or observable stance to identify itself with lower or working class fashions and mannerisms," (Moore, 1993: 52) punk rock was the ideal means to creating cultural space conducive to a revival of the skinhead subculture in England and its introduction to North America at roughly the same time. In fact, punk also paved the way for the revival and North American transplantation of the mod subculture (evidenced in the popularity of music groups like The Jam and in the creation of North American mod groups like Toronto's The Mods [Manley, 1993: 58]) and an interest in ska music (spearheaded by Jerry Dammers' Two Tone music label).

This new generation of skinheads even created their own version of punk rock music. "Oi!", as it came to be known, shared with punk the volume, distortion, anger and utter disregard for musicianship. However, it distinguished itself from punk rock in its incorporation of pub-style sing-alongs, strict adherence to a particular musical style and structure, and its lyrical content. The Montréal skinhead band The Discords recorded what may have been the first North American Oi! release in 1982 (Ibid.: 29). To this day in North America, punk rock and skinhead youth subcultures are closely related.

But this symbiotic relationship between punk and skinhead has not always been a happy one. For reasons that remain largely open to speculation(3), the skinhead revival in England became distorted when large numbers of skinheads became involved in the neo-Nazi National Front political party and other overtly racist activities. The tabloid press quickly picked up and dramatized these elements, rapidly transmitting the new subcultural style of explicitly racist skinheads around the country and, eventually, around the world. When skinheads began appearing at the fringes of the North American punk subculture in the early 1980's, there was initially much confusion over what they represented. Were North American skinheads racist like their English contemporaries, or would they tend towards anti-racism, like the rapidly politicizing North American punk subculture of the early 1980's?

The original North American skinheads split off in both directions. A report by an American visiting the 1984 Berlin "Chaos Days" punk festival in the pages of international punk fanzine MAXIMUMROCKNROLL noted that "skins in Europe are different from skins in the U.S. All skins in Europe are Nazis." (Eiden, 1984: 10). At the same time, this issue notes several instances of skinheads physically assaulting punks at concerts (Thatcher, 1984: 32), and one commentator blames a racist skinhead gang for virtually shutting down the punk rock music scene in New York City. (Dictor, 1984: 49). Other evidence points to racist skinheads forming gangs like Chicago's Romantic Violence by 1984 (Hamm, 1993: 5). So, while it is apparent that anti-racist skinheads were involved in the burgeoning North American skinhead subculture as early on as racist skinheads, it is also apparent that racist skinheads were likely the first to organize themselves into "crews" or gangs, and to begin physically attacking the punk rock subculture they operated within. This phenomenon spread beyond New York City and Chicago. In 1986, skinheads in Florida were arrested after clubbing a group of youths leaving a punk rock concert. (Suall and Lowe, 1988: 142). In October 1987, skinheads in Portland, armed with bats, pipes, knives and axes, were stopped by police en route to do battle with the clientele of a punk bar. (Ibid.). In Edmonton, weekly confrontations and violence between punks and racist skinheads began taking place as early as 1990 (Edmonton Anti-Fascist League, 1997).

With both racist and anti-racist skinheads operating within the North American punk rock subculture, and with the racist skinheads organizing themselves into "crews" and physically assaulting punks and other skinheads, it is not surprising that anti-racist skinheads eventually organized themselves to combat the racist skinheads. The Baldies, North America's first explicitly anti-racist skinhead crew, formed in Minneapolis in 1986 in response to the presence of a neo-Nazi gang called the White Knights. (Author Unknown).

In 1987, the first SHARP chapter was organized in New York City to combat media portrayals of skinheads as violent racists, as well as to rid the New York City punk/hardcore scene of racist skinhead gangs like the National Front skinheads (Young and Craig, 1997: 179). "They produced leaflets explaining the original multi-cultural roots of the (skinhead) culture." (Moreno, 1995). The SHARP model rapidly spread to other cities, and by 1988 there were SHARP chapters in Europe as well.

Racist skinhead violence began to spill out of the social boundaries of the skinhead and punk rock subcultures as people not involved in either subculture found themselves attacked by racist skinhead gangs. In November 1988, a gang of racist skinheads in Portland chanced upon and subsequently attacked three Ethiopian students, beating 27-year-old Mulugeta Seraw to death with a baseball bat. Only when attacks of this nature, when victims outside of either the skinhead or punk subculture became targets for racist violence (and approximately six years after the subculture's arrival in North America), did the police, the media and academics finally began to take interest in North American skinheads.

From 1988 to 1996, a correctionalist approach to the skinhead subculture dominated academic discourse. David Matza (1969: 15-18) defines a correctionalist approach as one that examines the deviant phenomenon in question without a sense of appreciation or empathy, focusing on causation, with the goal of eliminating the phenonmenon. Studies of this nature tend to pay little attention to detail, resonate with moralistic overtones, and rely mainly on "newspaper accounts, police reports and reports of social investigators" (18) for their data. While certainly avoiding the romanticizing tendencies of previous research on skinheads, the reliance of the correctionalist approach on research material derived from journalists, human rights groups, and law enforcement agencies (e.g. Suall and Lowe, 1988; Moore, 1993; Christensen, 1994) produced distorted analyses of the skinhead subculture (Baron, 1997: 126; Wood, 1999: 132). The first published work on skinheads came from human rights and anti-racist groups (Centre for Democractic Renewal, 1986; Suall and Lowe, 1988), police officers and agencies (Christensen, 1994), and journalists. These works shared a common disregard for the origins of the subculture in Britain, preferring to focus on the racist skinheads of North America as their point of departure. By relying almost exclusively on the materials produced by these human rights groups, police agencies and journalists, academics took many of the a priori assumptions of those materials for granted. Moore's 1993 "cultural history of American skinheads," for example, stemmed from a journalistic account of the 1987 murder of a homeless Black man by two racist skinheads. Consequently, Moore dismisses anti-racist skinheads as "punks from Chicago" (151), and the multiethnic origins of the subculture as "debatable myths" (156).

The correctionalist approach had another effect: in presuming that skinheads were to be automatically associated with racism and treated less as a youth subculture than as a social problem, academics inadvertently favoured the racist skinhead as the authentic skinhead. By using racist skinheads as their point of departure, they effectively marginalized the non- and anti-racist participants in that subculture. Many of the correctionalist studies of North American skinheads then transmitted a message confirming the authenticity of racist skinheads back through the media, apparently taking up Barak's admonishment that criminologists must "become part of the social construction of public opinion" by guiding the interpretation and presentation of "newsworthy items." (1988: 566; 576).

With racist skinheads thus placed in the position of legitimate heirs to the subcultural throne, academics de-emphasized other kinds of skinheads (Wood: Ibid.). The authoritative weight of such academic treatises, reliant as they are on media and agency reports as data sources, and transmitted through media interactions (as "experts" on skinheads), reified racists' claims to the skinhead subculture, while undermining attempts within the subculture to contest the authenticity of the those claims. The racist skinhead is privileged as the "real" skinhead by academics, the media, the police and human rights organizations, leaving anti-racist skinheads to be depicted as "bad copies." (Bell et. al., 1994: 37).

Beginning in 1997, more recent academic investigations into the skinhead subculture have managed to avoid the distortions and inaccuracies characterized by their predecessors largely through ethnographic field work (Baron, 1997: Young and Craig, 1997) or through analysis of subcultural artifacts and similar primary sources (Wood, 1999). The resulting "naturalist" examinations of the skinhead subculture have been quite revealing and indicate the route for further research to take. These works have, for example, noted the heterogeneity of the skinhead subculture (Baron, 1997; Young and Craig, 1997); the presence of politically-delinated skinhead factions (Young and Craig, 1997); and the non-racist origins of the subculture as well as the non or anti-racist orientation of a majority of its participants (Wood, 1999).

This study seeks to continue in the vein of the more recent naturalist work done on the skinhead subculture in the hopes of providing greater understanding of a large and influential segment of the subculture - one that has been largely overlooked by the media and academia alike. SHARP Montréal's motto, "Taking It Back, Making It Strong!" emphasizes the importance its members place on reclaiming the skinhead subculture from both the racist skinheads and those academics, journalists and law enforcement officials who have granted racist skinheads legitimacy. By explaining how this particular group of anti-racist skinheads comes to establish and maintain its own boundaries of identity, this study aims to contribute to a broader understanding of both the heterogeneity and commonalities to be found within this fascinating youth subculture.

(3) Hamm (1993: 32-33), for example, postulates that this was the doing of Ian Stuart, a National Front activist and lead singer of punk band Skrewdriver, who released the first "white power" album with their 1984 sophomore release Hail The New Dawn. However, evidence of racist skinheads in England and the United States exists well before this album was released.