Skinhead culture emerged by 1969 in Britain out of the styles of white mod and black Jamaican rudeboy gangs and as a reaction against hippy values. It was a world of scooter rallies, ska and skinhead reggae, and football matches where there was more action among the spectators than on the field. Some did target South Asians and gays for violence, though apparently not to any greater degree than other kids of the time.

A second wave of skinheads in the late seventies and early eighties came out of the punk scene, although ska retained its skinhead fans. A second wave of ska mixed ska rhythmes with punk organization of the scene and yielded such bands as Madness, Selecter, and The Specials. Streetpunk bands with a skinhead following were labelled Oi by a music writer Gary Bushell, from a Cockney exclamation abundantly used in the songs of the Cockney Rejects, one of the first and best of the bands. According to the record sleeves, oi was a working class reaction against the art students who had overrun the punk scene. Some of the other oi! bands of the time were The Oppressed, The Business, Sham69, Cock Sparrer, Blitz, Last Resort, Condemned84 and Combat84.

Forget everything you have ever heard about skinheads. Skins know who they are and recognize each other, but there is not much agreement as to what exactly separates skin from nonskin. For a lot of us, beer and brotherhood, oi and ska, defending the working class, and standing by your mates are a big part of it. Well, you can't automatically assume a taste for large quantities of beer: there is a growing number of straight-edge skins who avoid alcohol, tobacco and drugs. For most of us, racial politics are NOT a part of it

The skinhead subculture had already taken root in the U.S. by 1977, where it was viewed as a dramatic but not particularly political variant of punk. There were Black and Latin and Jewish skins, many of whom hung together in the bi-racial 2-Tone bands. The style "stood for unity," said James DePasquale, 18, who became a skinhead four years ago. "Everybody who had a shaved head, you considered them a brother," he said in the May/June '89 issue of the Utne Reader.

With the help of fascists like Bob Heick, leader of a national Nazi youth group called The American Front, fascism also took root in American by 1985, when Nazi skinhead violence exploded at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco that summer. "There were always idiots," says Tim Yohannan, editor of Maximum Rocknroll. "Now there's idiots with ideology."

Skinheads distinguished each other with the terms "baldies" for the leftist non-racist skinheads, and "boneheads" for the white- power Nazi skinheads. Boneheads had no music scene of their own to speak of, since Skrewdriver was never allowed into the United States, and domestic white-power bands were wooden amateurs who lacked broad appeal. So the bones crashed the punk clubs, sometimes taking a razor blade to the locks of a longhair or ripping an anti-racist button off a peace punk's shirt.

As in Britain, American punks, skinheads, or "baldies" have fought back in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, where punks and "ska" skins have joined forces for more direct action. In January, 1989, more than 150 anti-racist skins from at least ten cities came to Minneapolis to form an umbrella organization for the anti-racist skins scattered throughout North America. By the end of the weekend, "The Syndicate" had been organized, and future anti-racist activities were planned.

The Twin Cities emerged as a center of anti-racist skinhead activity in 1987 when a group of baldies challenged the neo-Nazi White Knights. the White Knights were effectively driven out of Minneapolis by a campaign of physical confrontations that reduced the neo-Nazi group to a handful of die-hard white supremacists and their leader, a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The January Minneapolis skinhead gathering, while predominantly white, included African-American, Native American, Latino and Asian skinheads. The average age of participants was 19. Their passionate desire to clear the skinhead name is rooted in the belief that skinhead culture has something to offer all nationalities.

While the question of racism has been pushed on the skinhead movement, the media seems to ignore what many skins consider equally important: the question of class. The skinhead movement quite explicitly places its hopes for the future of the united action of the working class. It is as much by addressing and twisting the class question as by appealing to racism that the neo- Nazis have been able to establish a beachhead among white working- class youth. There is a deeply felt contempt for the rich in some quarters of American society that can be tapped with either revolutionary class politics or the half-baked Nazism of a Tom Metzger and his racist, anti-Semitic organization, White Aryan Resistance. But while the boneheads were puppets of Metzger, the Syndicate did it themselves.

By the time the mainstream had declared the death of punk in 1979, or 1980, or 1981, etc., the influence of punk, the skinheads's Oi! and anti-racist 2-Tone and the do-it-yourself ethic had spread all over the world. Independent labels were created by the dozens throughout Europe, North America, Australia, and a few countries in Africa. Especially around urban areas, independent fanzines could be found with music critique of all the newly formed bands and their demos, interviews, comics, Xerox art, poetry, fiction, news, investigative reporting, political agendas and more. It was a renaissance for those who were stranded form or chose to avoid the elitist upperclass artists and intellectuals who communicated only with their peers in art and academic journals, and the commercial culture targeted for everyone else who presumably did not deserve to have a voice.

Many people are ignorant of the many post-punk subcultures because they are not as easily pegged and defined as the simpledays of the Sex Pistols. The perpetual process of sharing cultural ideas and developing new hybrids of music blur the distinctions between one style and the next. Punk has evolved into or influenced popular styles like hardcore, hip-hop, jazz/speedfunk, industrial, goth/glam, metal, thrash, speedmetal/speedcore, and other styles that defy labels.

Younger kids involved in musical subcultures are looking back toward the roots of the past generation, reviving ska (for the second time) with bands like the Red Skins, the Potato Five, the Deltones and International Jet Set. They started an anti-racist organization founded in San Diego called S.H.A.R.P. (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), in addition to the aforementioned Syndicate. It has already spread to England, Europe and Australia. There has also been a rise of anti-Nazi fanzines like Zoot and Spy Kids. In Washington D.C. there is still a significant group of people who consider themselves sussed skinheads, who are actively breaking down racial and cultural barriers by taking in African-American, Asian-American, Mexican- American, Jewish, immigrant and homosexual/bisexual skinheads into one integrated cultural-pluralistic community.