punk - 2011 - White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race

White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
eds. Stephen Duncombe & Maxwell Tremblay
2011
Verso
371 pages

Editor Stephen Duncombe is one of those punk academics. In addition to editing White Riot he has written a book about zines and he explains in his intro to White Riot his punk background which included membership in a band called White Noise. Those are his punk credentials, and to prove his current cultural-studies-academic credentials he reflects upon his old band's name to segue into the contents of the book, a vast collection of writings on punk and race.

White Riot is a collection of reflections on race in punk from virtually every available source, from academic authors, including Dick Hebdige, the father of subcultural studies, and their articles, to popular magazine articles, letter exchanges, zine writings, interviews, and song lyrics. The book creates a sense that punk has always had a deeply problematic and fractured relationship to questions of race, from the Sex Pistols wearing swastikas to the presumption among glamour punks that they know what it's like to be of another race because of their weird punk appearance. A reader may recall such singular, uncomfortable, issues as all the supposedly ironic Nazi references in British punk's most famous icons, which are, of course, problematic. The overall view of punk this book creates should compel the reader to recognize a much larger and more profoundly strained scene that appears use its claim to a self-imposed social difference to trivialize the difference of others and reinforce dominant racial values.

Many of the written pieces are actually quite disturbing to read when considering that punk has, to a large extent, constructed itself as the youth culture of radical left politics and social tolerance. Minor Threat vocalist Ian Mackaye, who, even as a 17 year old, was an intellectual leader of the hardcore punk scene, sounds incredibly naive of issues of racism in society in an interview where he is discussing the Minor Threat song 'Guilty of Being White' and lamenting his experience in a Washington DC high-school with an almost entirely black student population. Of course, he was young when he made his statements and perhaps unlikely to repeat them now, but he was also so relevant to the hardcore scene that he was essentially a primary source of punk concepts  One musician-of-colour claims that her white audience gets upset when she shifts from straight punk-rock to picking up an instrument that's traditional to her cultural background, because she's being exclusionary, implying that punks are unwilling to enjoy music that deviates from the conventions they've constructed, and that those conventions transcend any notions of cultural specificity.

Too many punks claim that the experience of being snickered at for their hair-dye gives them the knowledge of the experience of racial prejudice, many subcultures make similar claims, in the documentary film Hells Angels Forever, for example, members of a notoriously racist subculture argue that they, the bikers, "are the real n***ers" because of their outlaw status. Towards the end of White Riot, an argument via a Maximumrockandroll letters section where a black punk, frustrated with the scene and the racism he experienced, is chastised by white punks for giving up on the scene,  meanwhile other black punks relate to the original letter with their own thoughts and experiences, indicating that, within punk, racial divides can emerge as soon as the subject is broached.

PS: Comrade Dr. Alan O'Connor, professor of cultural studies at Trent University, has contributed a piece to this collection about the punk scenes of Toronto and Mexico City.

Irish Republican Army - 1997 - IRA Man: Talking With the Rebels

IRA Man: Talking With the Rebels
Douglass McFerran
1997
Praeger
178 pages

This is a weird book for the simple fact that its written as though it is the story of researching a book about the Irish Republican Army circa mid-90s when the Troubles of Northern Ireland were winding towards a peace of sorts. McFerren, a former Jesuit, a teacher at a college in San Francisco, and an author of books, wanted to understand the conflict between Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland, so he took several trips to the six counties to interact with the Irish and listen to their points of view. The book is essentially its author reporting on these trips, discussing the little details he's noticed about walking around Ireland, little things his wife said, things that surprised him and challenged the ideas he arrived with. He is also just throwing into his that he's read something that said something, and the whole thing reads like a personal notebook rather than an investigation into a serious and violent conflict.

He very definitely speaks from the position of someone who understands Northern Ireland through the window of television reports of violence and repression, as he reports his surprise that he's not always witnessing violence, bigotry, and police brutality, when he's in Northern Ireland. The thing that seemed to surprise him most, and the thing that he has trouble letting go of even though its something virtually every decent book on this subject makes clear, is that the Troubles were not simply a matter of religious sects hating one another over religious differences. McFerren was a Jesuit, and was perhaps hoping to look more closely at the religious aspect of this conflict, which resulted in him speaking strangely about certain components of the IRA. When he discussed The Green Book, an IRA operations manual, parts of which journalist Ed Moloney published in his book, A Secret History of the IRA, McFerren noted it downplayed religion when, given the text's purpose, had no need to make mention of it.