Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture

Kevin Borgeson, Robin Valeri

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315474793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Skinheads go beyond the societal stereotype of hate mongers, bigots, and Neo-Nazis. The community of skins also includes traditional skins (those that adhere to the original philosophy of the British movement in 1969), Skinheads Against Racial prejudice (SHARPS), and gay skins, female skins and Neo-Nazi or Racist/Nationalist skins. Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture covers the history, identity, and culture of the skinhead movement in Europe and America, looking at the total culture of the skins through a cross-sectional analysis of skinheads in various countries.

Authors Borgeson and Valeri provide original research data to cast new light into the skinhead community. Some of the data is ethnographic, drawing on face-to-face interviews with skins of all kinds, while other data is compiled from the Internet and social media about various skinhead groups within the United States, Europe, and Australia. The book covers the history of the subculture; explores the unique cultures of female, gay, and Neo-Nazi skins; and explores manifestations of the culture as represented on the Internet and in music. The work discusses how skinheads derive their values and morals and how they fit into the larger social structure.

Chapter 1

Skinhead History

Overview

In order to understand skinhead culture one must look at how skinheads construct their everyday definitions of situations, in which they are engaged, as well as the knowledge system they use to make sense of their daily lives within the subculture and in the outside world. Skinheads do not live in a bubble and are affected by outside social influences. The movement itself was constructed originally in the 1960s on the bases of the beliefs, morality, and values that went with English working class life. Like other historical subcultures, skins today have adapted to the changing political, social, and moral circumstances of their society. For example, some skinhead identities are opposed to animal cruelty. In order to understand this relationship of subculture to the inclusive culture, it is helpful to examine some aspects of the sociology of knowledge. This chapter will first explain social construction theory and then move to how skinheads develop a knowledge system, including the types of rationalization they use in going about their daily life, while constructing a history of the skinhead movement as they see it in regard to its relative autonomy.

Social Construction of Reality

In 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality, a work written from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge. They focus on the “process by which any body of knowledge comes to be socially accepted as reality” By reality construction they mean the process whereby people continuously create, through their actions and interactions, a shared reality that is experienced as objectively factual and subjectively meaningful” (Wallace & Wolf, 1999, p. 277).

The main point is that the knowledge an individual gains from experience takes a form of a structure, which gives it its intelligibility and meaningfulness. When Berger and Luckmann refer to this structure, they mean “the social order, or the institutional world, which they view as human products” (Wallace & Wolf, 1999, p. 277).

For Berger and Luckmann, alienation from society plays an important part in the ways in which individuals, as members of groups, construct various versions of the knowledge system. They define “alienation” as a loss of meaning: there has been a disintegration of the socially constructed knowledge system (Wallace & Wolf, 1999, p. 277). Weaknesses of the knowledge system of society as a whole may indicate dysfunctions, which, in turn, can produce innovations in norms and ways of representing the social world in attempts to reconstitute a sense of meaning of what is happening and a way of distinguishing those who know properly from those who do not. For skinheads this is done by deciding “who is a real skin” and therefore who is not (this will be explored in the chapter on racist and non-racist skinheads). Who is a real skin depends on the understanding one has of the “true history” of the skinhead movement and the music and lifestyles in that history. Of course, there is not one history that all skins refer to. Whether one is a racist or non-racist skin depends on the culture from which they believe their subculture developed. Non-racists trace their origins to Jamaica, while racist skins believe that the “true” skinhead history did not start until the late punk movement—most specifically the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s (see below for a discussion).

Berger and Luckman argue that understanding society and its subcultures requires an account of the process of externalization and objectification. Externalization has two dimensions. First, “it means that human beings can create a new social reality”; second, human beings can re-create social institutions by their ongoing externalization of them” (Wallace & Wolf, 1999, p. 278) as things produced by them and, as such, external realities on the order of what Emile Durkheim called “social facts” (Durkheim, 2014). This implies that the skinhead subculture, like many subcultures, is fluid and changes with the times. While skinheads (whether racist or non-racist) have a hard-core belief system, some values will change with the times. For instance, most racist skins do not believe in the political process and believe that the government is “run by Jews who are trying to take over the world.” But, during the election cycle of 2016, racist skinheads came out and supported Donald Trump. While some adhered to the belief of a Jewish conspiracy, others saw Trump as an “exception to the rule”: he “was not affected by Jewish influence.” What was important was that Trump was speaking the language of White Nationalism and therefore he was not influenced by the “Jews and their agenda of world domination.”

The second part of Berger and Luckmann’s account of the reconstitution of knowledge is objectivation, which means “society is an objective reality that has consequences for the individual because it acts back on its creator” (Wallace & Wolf, 1999, p. 280). This is the creation of a sense of we-ness. What is created as a “true skin” has consequences; if one does not believe in the norms and rules of the subculture they can be kicked out of the skinhead movement as is dramatically illustrated by groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons. If members believe that one of the members is a “race traitor” he is banished from the group; the consequence is that other gangs can make them a victim of violence because they no longer have the group’s protection of their original group.

Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) approach also involves what they refer to as “internalization.” This means that “individuals internalize the objective social reality and there is no problem of identity, for everybody knows who everyone is and who he is himself (Berger & Luckman, p. 164). Those who accept the “normal behavior” of the group are identified as a “true skin.”

The main reason for using social construction theory to analyze the skinhead movement is that it allows us to look at the paradigm that skins identify with and the complexity of the relationships between identity and interpretations of history and culture in regard to the moral ideas and values that constitute the core of the skinhead subculture.

In this chapter, we refer to a history that not only refers to the experiences of male skins but female skins as well. What distinguished our research is that, in addition to recognizing and featuring women’s voices, we emphasize the different identities of men and women within the movement.

Since the 1980s, skinheads and neo-Nazis have been treated as two subtypes of the same thing. Hollywood and the news media are perhaps most guilty of projecting this image. A study done on the coverage of skinheads by the Boston Globe reports that between 1980 and 2000 there were 436 articles about skins, with “79 from 1980–1989 and 359 during the decade of 1990–2000. All but three articles represented skins as Nazi’s and hate mongers” (Borgeson, 2002, p. 12). Social Scientists have added to the problem of clarifying the skinhead movement. In 1995 Praeger Press released a book entitled American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime, by criminologist Mark Hamm, that many researchers in the field see as the ultimate in skinhead research. Hamm’s book was the first academic attempt to examine the skinhead phenomena. It focused exclusively on neo-Nazi skinheads, avoiding other identities. As will become evident in a later chapter, violence is an attribute common to all skinheads who join the movement, not just neo-Nazis. Gay skins assault other skins that they feel are effeminate, and such actions would be considered a hate crime under most state laws.

Recent research has begun to show a complexity of identities, which exist with-in the skinhead subculture. (see Borgeson, 2002, 2003; Wood, 1999). For example, Robert Wood has challenged the prevailing image of racist skinhead culture by demonstrating a greater diversity of attitudes than hatred among skinheads and correspondingly greater degrees of moral complexity. In the course of research on skinhead culture, we have found data consistent with Wood’s hypothesis that skinhead culture is not based primarily on hatred and anti-Semitism, and has a diversity of identities consistent with findings of other researchers (see Hamm, 1995; Marshall, 1994; and Healy, 1996). It is in regard to this that it is now possible to reconsider the origins of skinhead culture in punk. This requires rethinking the two major components of the culture: skinhead identity and skinhead history. Once this has been accomplished we can examine the current skinhead scene in order to see how the various identities, with their moral aspects fit into the larger American skinhead scene. The historiography of skinheads in America has traditionally been lax in representing the female voice within a skinhead culture. Our use of the term “skinhead” should be taken to refer to both males and females within the skinhead subculture, though we will discuss the issue of gender from both points of view.

Skinhead History and Identity

Since the publication of Marshall’s Spirit of 69 (1994), Marshall—a former skinhead—the skin movement has been identified in England of working class youth. Since England places a high emphasis on class division, the movement was more about expressive cultural ideology in the outward appearance of nationalism and self-pride in being working-class and a sense of unity with others who are seen as working class. The ideology is similar to that described in the Cultural Studies classic, The Making of the Working Class, by E.P. Thompson: Take pride in being working class, even if the social structure discriminates against you. For skinheads, the use of swears, tattoos, violence, and expression of working class pride is in defiance of the larger social order negating the issue of “a problem with working class people.” For the British, class is an issue that is dealt with on a daily basis, and this type of defiance is needed in order to function cognitively in a biased social structure. It follows that skinhead history is as much a history of rebellion as it is a history of style and music. In his book, Skinhead, Nick Knight describes skin-style as a “counter-revolution” (1982, p. 8), and traces it to the mods of the 60s and an even earlier manifestation in the Caribbean as this skin described:

If you really want to understand the skinhead scene you have to trace you have to look back to the beginnings of reggae and ska in Jamaica to get a true picture of where the skins originated from. The whole rudeboy phenomena in England came from there and they aligned themselves with others who were fighting for working class rights.

Like the mods, skin style was smart and clean; however, it was always clearly linked to working-class backgrounds. Clothing needed to be affordable, practical, and identifiable. The look of skins, with Levi’s, t-shirts, short or shaved hair, and “braces” (suspenders) has changed little in the 50 plus years skins have been in existence. Even short hair was a statement in an era already used to longhaired hippies. Short hair was practical in a fight, easy to maintain, and had an immediate effect on observers. As Knight states, “short hair is associated in the public mind with convicts, prison camp inmates, and the military. It was exactly this mean look which the skins wished to cultivate” (1982, p. 13).

Not all skins believe that their origin had to do fundamentally with style. Others, and many observers, tied it to economic reality:

The whole scene was based on class. The working class weren’t making the same kind of money as those who were in the upper middle class. So for them they adopted things that were affordable. One of the things they adopted was the short hair. The buzz cut was something that one could do at home and did not have to go to a barber for. Sure, it probably had something to do with fighting as well; but, I see it solely as a reaction to being working class.

When “skins” began to arrive on the scene in Britain in the late sixties, it began as a movement of working class youths. There are some who say, that skins were a reaction against the upper middle class hippy movement.

If you really want to understand the skinhead scene you have to trace you have to look back to the beginnings of reggae and ska in Jamaica to get a true picture of were the skins originated from. The whole rudeboy phenomena in England came from there and they aligned themselves with others who were fighting for working class rights. Although some would say that the scene started with the mods, I disagree because they didn’t really listen to the same music.

In contrast, the skinhead movement in America was an offshoot of the punk movement, imported from Great Britain.¹ Punk came at a time when young Americans were trying to find their individuality and place in society. The women’s movement was starting to take shape and people began to lose faith in American political institutions in the aftermath of the Nixon administration and the Gas crises. The civil rights movement was affecting education, work, and the relationship between minorities and whites. Punk surfaced as a way for the youth of that period to express their opposition to the dominance of mainstream motivations (Lamy & Levin, 1985). Even though the defiance could be thought of as an essentially symbolic (Hebdidge, 1979), through music and dress, the power of the punk image attracted disenfranchised youth. Kids started putting pins in their cheeks, dressed in surplus army clothes, and in other respects pushed an apocalyptic dark side of defiance to its extreme. As one former skin put it:

The people that were punks were very similar to me, except I chose the skins. A lot of us came from towns where we didn’t fit in. Becoming a punk or a skin kind of made you feel wanted. I always said that I walked tall and proud in my skinhead boots. Without the skins I just would have been a pencil headed geek who sat around all day and watched cartoon network.

Today, skinheads adhere to several identities, thus their community is more complex than previous research has suggested (see Borgeson, 2002). It is rare to find this even lip service to the need to situate the movement in the inclusive and often overlapping cultures within which it can be perceived as a movement. Although many books have focused on “American skinheads” (see Hamm, 1995), they lack placement of the community within the larger United States culture within which they operate. For example, Mark Hamm’s book, entitled American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime, focuses on skinhead history as it developed in Great Britain but not as it transpired in the complex multiplicity of cultures and social movements in the U.S. Such a linear narrative too easily leads to the confusion that all skinheads think the same way, and that their culture is homogenous, undivided, and indifferent to everything but momentary objects of their defiance. Hamm’s emphasis on neo-Nazi skins, in particular, largely ignores the cultural formations that surround the other skin identities described more recently by other researchers. One of the main purposes of this chapter, and the book in general, is to examine these aspects of identity, content, and cultural complexity that bear on our understanding of the skin movement and its multiple manifestations, and of the differences social change in recent years seems to have made in the current state of the movement.

No matter the identity, there are similarities in the value orientations of skins, which run through the skinhead culture. According to Marshall (1994) and Wood (1999) these comprise a working class ethos of pride, loyalty, and unity aggressively expressed a defense of an ideal of identity, loyalty to fellow skins, and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the community—in particular in defense of the ideal of racial purity among skins and throughout America. How these values are connected to the aspect of style is difficult to say (Marshall, 1997). It is clear, however, that music, clothes, and differential association play an enormous role in substantiating the idea of a skin culture. The music is derivative of the transgressive versions of Jamaican reggae (ska) and punk (Oi!) and the clothes create a stereotype of working class identity (jeans, Doc Marten work boots, polo shi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Skinhead History
• Chapter 2: Racist and Non-Racist Skins: An Analysis of Why They, Join, Stay, and Quit
• Chapter 3: Gay Skinheads: A Part of or Apart from the Skinhead Movement
• Chapter 4: Female Skinheads
• Chapter 5: Skinhead Music: The Beat Goes On
• Chapter 6: Exploring Skinhead Identity through an Analysis of Skinhead Websites, Social Networks, and Social Media
• Chapter 7: Conclusion: Who is a True Skinhead?
• Index