White power skinhead
White power skinheads, also known as racist skinheads, neo-Nazi skinheads, or "Boneheads" are members of a neo-Nazi, white supremacist and antisemitic offshoot of the skinhead subculture. Many of them are affiliated with white nationalist organizations and some of them are members of prison gangs. The movement emerged in the United Kingdom between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, before spreading across Eurasia and North America in the 1980–1990s.
Definition
Skinheads
The term "skinhead" comes from the shaven heads associated with members of this subculture. Michael German has argued that skinheads shave their heads to represent their separation from society. According to scholar Timothy S. Brown, the defining skinhead short haircut mostly emerged in reaction to the perceived shift in men's styles away from traditional masculinity, which was embodied by the "middle-class, peace-loving, long-haired student" of the hippie movement.Brown defines the skinheads as a "style community", that is to say a "community in which the primary site of identity is personal style", which allows innovative configurations to be made in new geographical and cultural contexts, or around opposing political ideologies – as in the dichotomy between racist and anti-racist skinheads. From a group perspective, John Clarke, a professor who studied skinheads in the 1970s, has noted that the "skinhead style represents an attempt to recreate the traditional working class community, as a substitution for the real decline of the latter which started in the 1960s."
White power skinheads
According to Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, the white power skinhead movement, which emerged within the skinhead subculture from the late 1970s onward, can be defined by "racism; proletarian consciousness; an aversion to organization, dismissed in favor of gang behavior; and an ideological training that began with or is based on music." They have mostly emerged from working-class backgrounds, except in Russia, where they have mostly emerged from the educated, urban middle class.Ghost skin
Short for 'ghost skinhead', white supremacists use this term to describe those who adhere to such beliefs or are members of such groups, but who also refrain from openly displaying their racist beliefs for the purpose of blending into wider society and surreptitiously furthering their agenda. The term has been used in particular to refer to covert white supremacists who seek to work in law enforcement.The term "hiding your power levels", originating from the anime Dragon Ball Z, is alternatively used by the online alt-right to reflect a similar concept.
History of the term
In an FBI Intelligence Assessment from 2006, the FBI Counterterrorism Division provided an overview of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement and mentions that use of the term came to the agency's attention in late 2004. In 2001, two law enforcement officers in Williamson County, Texas, were fired after it was discovered that they were members of the Ku Klux Klan.According to the Oregon National Socialist Movement website, explicitly cited by the 2006 FBI report, "Ghost Skins don't shave their heads, wear boots, braces or anything else that can visually identify them as Nazis. strive to blend into society to be unreconizable by the jewish enemy. When it serves purposes gladly act politically correct. are at war and use the weapon of deception to deny the enemy intelligence they could use against ."
On September 29, 2020, Jamie Raskin, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, released an unredacted version of an FBI report called White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.
History
Origins in England
The original skinhead subculture began in the United Kingdom in 1968–1969, probably in London and Southeast England, more specifically in the East End of London according to Clarke. It had heavy British mod and Jamaican rude boy influences, including an appreciation for black music genres like rocksteady, ska, and early West Indian reggae. The particular lifestyle and aggressive look of skinheads was a self-declared reaffirmation of the traditional working class puritanism and gender roles – in fact "a stylized re-recreation of an image of the working class", which seemed threatened in their views with contamination by the permissive and hedonistic culture of the British middle-class in the 1960–1970s.The identity of the 1960s skinheads, however, was not based on white power, neo-Nazism or neo-fascism, even though some skinheads had engaged in "Paki-bashing", i.e. violence against Pakistanis and other South Asian immigrants. Even so, black West Indians were also involved in skinhead gang attacks against South Asian immigrants, and the violence has been interpreted by Alexander Tarasov as a social conflict caused by the new presence of South Asian traders and shopkeepers within a community of white and West Indian poor factory workers. Clarke similarly notes that areas where skinheads became the most prominent were "typically either new council housing estates or old estates being either developed or experiencing an afflux of outsiders", either Commonwealth immigrants or middle-class whites in search of affordable housing.
The leading politician Enoch Powell and his inflammatory 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech gave a public voice to widespread anxieties concerning non-white immigration and the "threat" which was supposedly posed by South Asian immigrants. Although there is "little agreement on the extent to which Powell was responsible for racial attacks", the speech may have helped unleash "Paki-bashing" violence against South Asian immigrants, which was referred to as "skinhead terror" by The Observer in April 1970, with the "Paki-bashers" simply being referred to as "skinheads" in many contemporary reports. By the early 1970s, the reggae scene had ceased to be simply a "party music" and, under the influence of Rastafarism, got closer to community-oriented themes like black liberation and African mysticism, which participated in alienating some white proletarians from the community. In 1973 white skinheads launched a violent melee in a night club, chanting "young, gifted and white" and cutting the speakers as the West Indian disc jockey was playing Young, Gifted and Black by Bob and Marcia.
Emergence of the white power skinheads
The skinhead scene had mostly died out by 1973. Around 1977, a second wave started to emerge from the disintegration of the punk subculture, which was radicalized as "street punk" when some of its members accentuated its aggressive character. Although the punk movement emphasized nihilistic and narcissistic values instead of the working class heritage, their opposition to the middle and upper class, the adoption of Nazi imagery by some punks to maximize shock value, and the development of an underground network of punk fanzines, inspired and facilitated the parallel emergence of a racist skinhead subculture. The latent right-wing and anti-immigrant leaning, present within the skinhead movement since the late 1960s, became progressively dominant in the United Kingdom, fuelled by the job crisis, the economic decline, and an increase in immigration during the late 1970s–early 1980s. By the early 1980s, the white power skinhead subculture had spread across most of Britain, largely "through face to face interaction among the fans at football matches." The cartoon character Black Rat, created in 1970 by French artist Jack Marchal, was adopted by young neo-Fascists in various European nations and became an essential marker of the fringe culture.Music played a key symbolic role in the political polarization of the skinhead subculture. Marchal recorded a French rock album named Science & Violence in 1979, and German students of the neo-Nazi party NPD formed the first German nationalist rock group in 1977. A new music genre, Oi! – a contraction of "Hey, you!" pronounced with a Cockney accent – emerged as a skinhead version of punk rock in the late 1970s, contrasting with the sometimes multiracial bands of the left-wing and unpolitical skinhead resurgence, which rather drew influence from the original Jamaican ska roots of the late 1960s. Coined as a nickname for the new genre by British journalist Gary Bushell in 1980, "Oi!" soon became synonymous with "skinhead". Unlike many of their followers, however, early Oi! band members were generally not neo-Nazi or even affiliated with right-wing organizations, and they increasingly distanced themselves from some of their fans, who contributed to recurrent riots at concerts.
In July 1981, the "Southall Riots" were sparked when hundreds of skinheads were welcomed at an Oi! gig which was performed in a predominantly-Asian suburb of London. Some skinheads began to attack the neighboring Asian stores, and 400 Asians later responded by burning the venue with paraffin bombs while the skinheads were fleeing with help from the police. The event led to a moral panic in Britain and the skinhead subculture was firmly associated with right-wing politics and "white power music" in the public's opinion by 1982. According to Brown, some lyrical themes of Oi!, such as social frustrations, political repression and working-class pride, were common to other genres such as country music or blues, but others like violence and football hooliganism "could be easily interpreted in extreme right-wing terms." The phrase "all cops are bastards" was popularized among some skinheads by the Oi! band The 4-Skins' 1982 song "A.C.A.B."
Political links and radicalization
From the late 1970s the National Front, a British neo-fascist party which was losing ground in electoral politics, began to turn toward the skinhead movement to obtain grassroots supporters among the working class. The Rock against Communism genre, relaunched in 1982 by Skrewdriver leader Ian Stuart Donaldson in association with the National Front, appeared in reaction to the Rock against Fascism movement. To draw new adherents, the National Front attempted to use the white power music scene to re-frame its message from overt hate of foreigners and minorities to self-love and collective defence of white identity. Donaldson and the National Front founded a record label named White Noise Club, which released Skrewdriver's album White Power in 1983, the eponymous song becoming "the most recognizable neo-fascist skinhead song". In 1987, a music festival was organized by National Front member Phil Andrewon on Nick Griffin's Suffolk property, and was attended by hundreds of racist skinheads from across Europe who gave the Nazi salute and sang along a chorus that demanded "white power for Britain".A split within White Noise Club led to the establishment of Blood & Honour in 1987. Donaldson had become involved with the West German label Rock-O-Rama and felt the need to create his own global neo-fascist skinhead movement without any political party affiliation. The music promotion network quickly turned into the "major reference point for young neo-fascists and neo-Nazis throughout Europe who came to Britain to attend the gigs of Skrewdriver and other bands." Even though skinhead violence helped damage the National Front's public image, the movement draw thousands of young people to neo-fascism and provided the party with a new medium to diffuse their message. In an effort to clean up both the British National Party's discourse and public image, Griffin publicly distanced the party from the skinhead subculture after he became its chairman in 1999. The party expelled skinhead members, although it has allowed white power band members to join and has accepted donations from neo-fascist skinhead concerts in the early 2000s.
In 1990 the European Parliament's Committee of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia reported that the violent and racist skinhead subculture was "by far the most worrying development since the last Committee of Inquiry report ." The death of Donaldson in a car crash in September 1993, followed by that of Nicky Crane who succumbed to AIDS in December of the same year, led to the takeover of Blood & Honour by Combat 18, "a more extreme, semi-terrorist neo-Nazi splinter group", and eventually to bloody internal feuds between Combat 18 supporters and Blood & Honour loyalists in the mid- and late 1990s. In 1985, a French worker at the Brest Arsenal, Gaël Bodilis, created the label Rebelles Européens, which had an allegiance to neo-Nazism. It was associated with the FNJ, the youth wing of the Front National, the neo-fascist Troisième Voie and later with the neo-Nazi organisation PNFE. The label rapidly grew as the second-largest white power music label in Europe, although the European white power rock scene only managed to enter the mainstream market in Sweden, where the band Ultima Thule reached the top of the charts in 1993.