Skinheads

In the late 1980s, shaven-headed youths called “skinheads” espoused white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies and became the media's latest folk devil. Racist skinheads appeared as the villains in movies, police dramas, and TV talk shows, going so far as breaking one host's nose in a 1988 brawl on the Geraldo Rivera Show. The characterization of skinheads as “racist terrorists” can be misleading, as skinheads come in many varieties and engage in various levels of skinhead activity. Nevertheless, since the 1980s, skin-heads have routinely been linked to hate crimes, political extremism, and bias-motivated terror; by 1990, more than half of violent racial assaults were attributed to skinheads.

The lifestyle known as “skinhead” emerged from the plethora of British youth subcultures in the late 1960s. Amid well-documented groups, such as mods and rockers, skinheads appeared as, essentially, a working-class response to the more middle-class hippies. Their style and ideology were designed to be polar opposites to the hippies (long hair/shaved head, feminine/masculine, classless/class identified, etc.). Much of their tastes in clothing and music came directly from their young British economic classmates from the Caribbean. The skinheads adopted the styles and love of ska music from the black “rude boys.”

The black roots of skinhead style were tested in the 1970s when British unemployment skyrocketed. Skinhead youth saw recent Indian and Pakistani immigrants as cultural interlopers and as competitors for jobs and a place in the economic sun. Neo-fascist political movements, such as the National Front, began indoctrinating skinheads into racist ideologies that included blacks as targets. Skinhead violence moved from “hippie bashing” to “Paki bashing” and then to attacking anyone and anything that seemed to threaten white working-class masculinity. Skinhead music, often called “Oi! music,” moved toward racist themes. Popular bands, like Skrewdriver, attracted skinheads with themes of racially returning Britain to the world dominance it enjoyed as a colonizer.

By the mid-1980s, skinheads were becoming more common in North America. They were usually seen as a subgroup of the punk rock subculture. As the American economy went into decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s, skinheads were quickly recruited by racist and neo-Nazi groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and the New Order. Reports of skinhead violence against homosexuals, leftists, Jews, the homeless, and ethnic minorities made national news. Most noteworthy was the murder of an Ethiopian university student by three [Page 338]skinheads in Portland, Oregon, in 1988. In 1990, a civil court determined that the skinheads had been directed to murder by WAR based in southern California. Tom and John Metzger, the leaders of WAR, were ordered to pay the victim's family $12.5 million.

By the early 1990s, there were approximately 3,500 racist skinheads active in the United States, according to Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith estimates. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) charted a rise in skinhead groups and skinhead crimes in the United States in the 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, skinhead terror arose in Eastern Europe; its targets were recent immigrants and Romanies (gypsies).

Not all skinheads engage in racial terrorism. The 1990s saw the growth of the SHARP subculture in the United States. SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) were similar to the original nonracist skin-heads of the 1960s. They feel that the skinhead subculture has been hijacked by racists and the media and often use violence to purge the skinhead scene of Nazis and other undesirables. As their styles are similar, racist and antiracist skinheads are easily mistaken for each other.

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