Challenge Question Cycle

Subject: an essay entitled “Wagner and Power Chords: Skinheadism, White Power Music, and the Internet,” by Les Back

In class we thoroughly discussed the different ways in which internet may have affected the spreading and growth of the white supremacist skinhead movement.   However, we never touched on the quality and values of Back’s actual ethnography.  Do you think he presented the skinhead movement in an objective light?  Is it possible that somehow attempting an objective ethnography of such a hateful and bigoted group is potentially not ethical in itself?

~ Jonathan Koe

Good question.  I would say that Back didn’t present the white supremacist skinhead movement in an objective light at all.  He is writing under the assumption that his audience shares his distaste for the movement’s core values.  But he moves past that understanding to portray a nuanced view of the community.  His essay sheds light on the technological and musical modes of transmission of fascist ideology and culture.

For evidence that Back is in no way seeking to validate or perpetuate white supremacy, we need look no further than the paper’s opening.  He begins with a joke about a skinhead who is so stupid he doesn’t understand what a computer is and uses it as a weapon to mug someone with.  Back explains that this lame joke “masks a deadly serious reality.  The success of the White Power music scene today is in large part the product of the Information Age.”  From the start of his essay, then, Back takes sides against the movement.  For us to take his work seriously, he has to get that out of the way first.

But Back moves on to grapple with the striking diversity of the skinhead movement and shows a degree of compassion toward some of its members.  He writes about “gay skins,” quoting such a person describing a night club packed with gay fascists dancing to black reggae music!  Back then comments “These connections complicate the idea that this was a simplistically chauvinistic culture.”  His thesis, then, with regard to Skinheadism as an ideology, problematizes the simplicity of antiracist depictions of skinheads.  He empathizes with them, but does not attempt to explain, let alone excuse, their beliefs.  Instead, he mostly focuses on the functions of music and technology in creating a “translocal notion of race.”

While white supremacy is a difficult subject to write about, it is nonetheless important that scholars attempt to understand its roots and methods of propagation.  Back discusses notions of identity, pride and community in skinheadism; he points to the powers of music, fashion, ideology, and acceptance into the community as entry points for members; and he reveals how women, homosexuals, and even Jews have entered these social circles, particularly through musical-social channels.  Back’s work provides a fascinating case study of an isolated subject, from which readers can derive general insight into the intersection of music, technology, and culture.  Furthermore, in defending Back’s ethnography of the cultural underpinnings of an evil ideology, I recall a quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.”  Perhaps in developing a sophisticated understanding of the movement, Back will be better equip us to oppose it.  He closes with an optimistic analysis of the movement’s current direction.  He writes that the hyperconnectivity of the movement has “accelerated the tendency toward factionalism, which has mercifully haunted post-war fascism.” Back’s account of skinheadism is strongly aligned with the nonracist agenda and paints a picture of a marginalized community undergoing “attrition and division” as its heightened connectivity reveals it as a splintered fringe movement in decline.

~ Aaron Clayton-Dunn