Skinheads, Punks Push Anti-Racism Message to Peers

Jason has been a skinhead since he was a teen-ager, dressing the part and advocating the strong working-class ethic that has been at the heart of the movement since it began in England back in the late 1960s.

Jason, 22, grew up in Ocean Beach and works as a tool grinder for the company where his father works and where his uncle worked before him.

Although he has stopped shaving his head, the tattoos etched on Jason’s arms--one reads “skin,” the other “head”--make his allegiance clear, if often misunderstood.

“I’ve got people at work who won’t talk to me because they classify me as a skin and that I’m racist,” said Jason, who asked that his last name not be used. “I’m a skinhead, but I’m not racist.”

Jason and his 22-year-old wife, Dawn, a self-proclaimed skinhead since the 10th grade, are members of the new San Diego chapter of Anti-Racist Action, a national anti-racist organization of skinheads and punks.

Although the group has been here only for the past six months, members are plastering pockets of San Diego with “Smash Racism” posters and scattering flyers at music shops to explain what they’re all about, give directions to their twice-monthly Sunday meetings and invite people to attend.

About 40 people--including blacks, whites, Latinos, Cubans and Jews--have been attending the meetings, held wherever room can be found, members said.

Organizers hope a Nov. 10 self-promotion concert to be held near the San Diego State University campus will also attract people.

Although Anti-Racist Action is new to San Diego, the group has chapters scattered all over the country, including New York, Chicago and other cities on the West Coast, said Leonard Zeskind, research director for the Center for Democratic Renewal in Kansas City, which monitors extremist groups that espouse racial hatred.

“The ARA is a legitimate anti-racist youth group,” Zeskind said. “Any anti-racist strategy that is serious has to talk to them (skinheads) in terms that are their own language and by their own peers.”

In addition to spreading the word that punk and skinhead groups were anti-racist from their beginnings, this loosely knit core of people wants to clean up the local punk music scene, where concerts and shows have been littered by racial incidents.

“When I go to a show and the dance floor--as it is lightly called--is dominated by two or three people who like to wear swastika T-shirts and are built like football halfbacks, and they decide to dominate a show, it affects me and other people,” said ARA’s San Diego founder, 38-year-old George Matiasz, who is not a skinhead but has been part of the punk scene since 1979. The group’s aim is “to educate people that racism isn’t cool and to take control of your own scene.”

What the group hopes to eventually accomplish doesn’t stop there, however. Once it has more members and is more organized, Matiasz said, it plans to hold shows with music, poetry readings and other entertainment to raise money for community groups or political causes that are anti-racist in nature.

Matiasz, a longtime activist in political movements and what he calls anti-authoritarian issues, said he felt it was time somebody tackled the racism problem.

“I wanted to deal with the issue,” he said.

“It’s the basic thing of doing by example. It’s not good enough to have the truth but to make an example of your life and your scene.”

The skinhead movement began in the late ‘60s as a clique of working-class kids, both white and black, who, through their dress code of work boots, shaved heads and jeans, promoted the tough working-class image they wanted to be affiliated with, said Eric Anderson, a professor at Yakima Valley Community College in Washington state, who wrote his master’s thesis on skinheads in 1987.

The skinheads were also a reaction to the hippies who came out of the middle class about the same time.

The racist stigma traditionally attached to skinheads came about during the 1970s, when the economic situation in England worsened and the working class with which the skinheads had always identified became a class without work, Anderson said.

Some skinheads turned their resentment toward black and immigrant workers because they believed they were taking jobs away from them, he said.

People familiar with Anti-Racist Action say it can work to keep young people from joining racist skinhead groups.

“There are lots of people in the scene who aren’t full-blown racists but throw around racist slurs,” said another group member, a 24-year-old who calls himself Stinky Panch. “It would help to tell people not everybody likes to hear those words and maybe keep people from becoming Nazis.”

Racist skinheads are often neo-Nazis who condemn homosexuals, communists, minorities and others they fear are contaminating America and threatening the American way of life, Anderson said.

Although they haven’t had any problems yet, Matiasz and others in the San Diego ARA said they fear they might one day have a run-in with some of the white supremacists who follow men such as Fallbrook’s Tom Metzger, national leader of the White Aryan Resistance.

“Whenever you do good work, you hurt someone, and we’re going to try to hurt racists,” Matiasz said. “And these people are not known for their genteel attitude.”

Metzger said he has merely befriended racist skinheads and is not their leader.

“Tom Metzger is not the guru of the skins, never was and never claimed to be,” he said.

For now, group members say, they want to start doing more than just talking about fighting racism.

“We just hope to grow and get anything done possible,” said Stinky Panch. “Anything is progress.”