Sluggoster
When did the Racial Skinheads begin?
- In the late 1970s when the National Front began recruiting skinheads and football hooligans as its public face, to strike fear in the public and minorities. Skinheads were already known for violence -- although that was exaggerated in the newspapers, and violence was a normal part of working class life, and many higher class boys were football hooligans too. Skinheads had the same racial attitudes as the rest of the working class: some were bigoted and others were not. Most skins got along well with black Jamaicans, whom they saw as laborers like themselves. (And there have been a few black skinheads ever since.) But they had problems with Pakistanis, who were upwardly mobile (middle class attitudes), moving into their neighborhoods (East London), and refusing to assimilate. By putting their religion before their adopted homeland, some Pakistanis engendered the attitude that later led to 9/11, 7/7, and calls for sharia law in Britian. So much of the "racial" sentiment among British "racists" is not about skin color per se, but about misbehavior by immigrants (whether the misbehavior is real or imagined). Anyway, so some percentage of skinheads had bigoted or anti-immigrant attitudes. The NF exploited this and their love of violence to get them into their political cause.
- Both traditional and racist skinheads started to appear in the US around this time, and American WP groups quickly adopted the idea, pushing it further in the "Aryan blood" direction. The American form must have then spread to Germany, Russia, and other countries, because there's a difference between British and non-British WP skins. Most knowledgeable WP skins admit that skinheads have diverse beliefs, and that both racist and non-racist skins are equally legitimate. But some yahoos put up propaganda crap like "A skinhead is somebody who's a patriot to the White race", implying that all non-racist skins are illegitimate. You see that in the US, Germany, and Russia, but not in Britian because it's obviously nonsense there. Mods and skins are part of Britain's historical pop culture, many people have known or seen skinheads throughout the decades, and while some associate them with racism, others know about their association with reggae and soul, simple drinking-football fun, and the long history of black skinheads. Sluggoster (talk) 09:09, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
June 2010 edit
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