SKINHEAD: The Evolution of a Subculture and Society’s View Thereof

July 4, 2014 theundisciplined 6 Comments

Well, June was a quiet month here at The Undisciplined, what with work and me running away from responsibilities for a while to spend some time in Malta. But I’m back now and working on the second installment about Catholicism, Conservatism and Irish Law. Until then, I thought I might fall back to my tactic of posting old essays I wrote from my earlier college days. This one is one of my favourites. The topic of the skinhead subculture and how it can mean very different things to different people was one I found particularly interesting, and thankfully this odd sentiment was shared by my excellent lecturer in Criminology, Ivana Bacik, the Barrister, Senator and Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin. You can follow her and her ceaseless work in areas close to her heart such as human rights, equality and in particular the protection of children at her website www.ivanabacik.com or on Twitter @ivanabacik. Anyway, the following is a somewhat updated version of the original paper I wrote sometime around 2008, and it doesn’t seem to have aged all that badly:
“Bollocks to the media really…“[1] This phrase could be said to quite adequately sum up the opinions of many ‘traditional skinheads’ on the current public perception of the skinhead subculture. These were the words of Gavin, an ‘ex-skin’ from the UK, when asked about the media’s portrayal of skinheads as violent, racist thugs in the Channel 4 documentary “The World of Skinhead”.[2] Like the majority of the people interviewed in this documentary – people from England, Scotland and Wales, as well as from Germany and the USA – Gavin considered, himself a “traditional” skinhead; someone who considers ‘skinhead’ a way of life, a subculture about music, clothes, style and perhaps most importantly a sense of belonging or purpose. These ‘traditional skins’[3] criticise political forces for infiltrating and politicising skinhead groups but even more harshly criticise the media for propagating the idea of highly politicised, ultranationalist, violently racist skinheads.
The skinhead subculture is a particularly fascinating one from a criminological and sociological point of view, both due to its fragmented nature and the sheer length of its existence. Skinheads in some form or other have existed essentially uninterrupted since the mid-1950s and are relevant in such areas of study as moral panic, labelling theory, youth subculture and trash culture.[4] And while from a youth subculture perspective they are not particularly unique, they have for some reason been generalised and vilified by the media and the public more than many other groups.
So what then is a traditional skinhead and how have they generally become, or become known as, violent, white-power ultranationalists? If you type the word ‘skinhead’ into Google you’ll get about 3,680,000 (up from 2,850,000 at the time of writing) results and within the first page of entries you’ll find at least 4 conflicting ideas of what a skinhead is. The world is so clearly divided on this topic that if you change your search from ‘skinhead’ to skinheads’ you instantly see a huge rise in the number of results referring to neo-Nazis rather than other forms of skinhead. The purpose of this article is to investigate the perhaps surprising origins of the skinhead subculture, to attempt to trace its confusing evolution into a number of, often diametrically opposed, subgroups and finally to understand the current public perception of skinheads and assess how accurate it may be.
Origins; Mods, Working Class Britain and Caribbean Influence
Depending on which region people get the bulk of their news from, be it North America, The UK and Ireland or Continental Europe and Russia,[5] their image of ‘skinheads’ will most likely be (respectively) of neo-Nazi white supremacists, violent nationalist football hooligans or a mixture of both. Therefore it may come as a surprise to some that arguably the origin of skinheads was a coming together of influences from the ‘mods’ of  late 1950s and early to mid 1960s Britain and the influx of working class West Indian immigrants around the same time.[6]
The ‘mods’ or ‘modernists’ were one of the UK’s most prolific subcultures and famous for their rivalry and violent clashes with ‘the rockers’.[7] They were style-conscious post-war youths who listened to modern American jazz and blues and dressed in sharp modern Italian clothes, often riding motor scooters such as Vespas.[8] With their mid-length hair, sharp suits and jazz music, they don’t exactly evoke the same image that one would normally have of skinheads. However the reasons for joining such a ‘gang’ or group are much the same. These were young people, primarily working class, with either too much time or money on their hands but no clear goals and a sense of disillusionment with a post-war society in which many of them had disposable income to spare, yet no prospects of progressing out of the strict British class system of the time. It is therefore perhaps not that strange that the ‘harder’ mods were the precursors to the first skinheads. The mods came from predominantly working-class backgrounds and certain members saw their movement as becoming too far removed from their roots. In the mid-1960s differences became apparent between the ‘peacock mods’,[9] who were less violent and more into expensive clothes and style, and the ‘hard mods’,[10] who were identified by their shorter hair and more working class image.