In my 71 years on this planet I have never raised a hand to any woman.
Hell, I've never even contemplated such a thing. That's the way I was raised, and I like to think that I would have arrived at that same conclusion irrespective of my upbringing. (Yes, I am well aware that there are many women around who could kick my ass, but for the most part, men are bigger and stronger than women, and that's the genesis of my conviction. It's cowardly and it's wrong.)
But having said that, if I ever came face-to-face with Lauren Boebert I would be sorely pressed to re-evaluate my way of thinking.
To watch that execrable creature harangue Joe Biden as he was paying respect to dead and dying veterans, including his own son, engendered a rage in me that I thought I was no longer capable of harboring. Even now, almost 20 hours later, I still finding myself grinding my teeth in abject fury. As far as I'm concerned she has forfeited the right to walk among decent human beings.
As a Christian I don't say this frivolously ... may God damn you, Lauren Boebert.
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That is all.
In America during the 1980s, white nationalist recruitment was on the rise and so were misconceptions about any youth with a shaved head. It was in this hostile climate that Marcus Pacheco co-founded Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, better known as S.H.A.R.P. For Pacheco, a half-Puerto Rican New Yorker, being a skinhead was about identifying with a particular lifestyle tied to the genre of music he was into, not an ethos of hate. And like a lot of youth subcultures, being a skinhead had more to do with belonging to a group than a defining ideology.
After years of brawls between S.H.A.R.P.s and neo-Nazis breaking out at shows, clubs, and in the streets of New York City, Pacheco left and moved to the Bay Area. He still lives there , working as a respected tattoo artist. Presently white supremacist skinheads and other hate groups are experiencing a period of growth and emboldening in America. In the wake of new clashes between these groups and their anti-racist counterparts, we reached out to Pacheco for some insight into the true origins of American skinhead culture, and how he and his friends tried to use the S.H.A.R.P. movement to stop the influence of hate groups.
Can you give the backstory of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice?
It was in something like 1987 when we started S.H.A.R.P. I came up with the name, but my friends and I were the ones who really started pushing it. Initially it was just a response to all the negative media attention that the skinhead subculture was getting, specifically because they were characterizing [all] skinheads as synonymous with neo-Nazism. I don’t know how much you know about the skinhead subculture, but the origin of skinhead style stems from the combination of the British Mod and the Jamaican Rudeboy subculture. Initially it wasn’t political or racist at all, because they were actually adopting the look and music from Jamaican immigrants that were living in London.
Even the shaved heads was a style they borrowed from the Jamaicans, and the initial skinhead music was Jamaican music like ska on Blue Beat, all that rocksteady stuff from the ‘60s, and soul. When my friends and I and a lot of other skinheads got involved in the subculture, it was a reflection of that original style. When the media started pushing this idea that skinheads were synonymous with neo-Nazism, it made it really difficult for my friends and me. We were also really against the whole idea that it should be promoted that way. We made patches and flyers and stuff like that and just made ourselves identifiable. We also wanted to slow down the wave. At that point it became really cool and trendy to be a neo-Nazi. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was for a lot of young kids. One thing that I recognized at that point was that a lot of these kids just wanted something to belong to, something they thought was cool and tough.
THE PRESS - The Complete Press 1984-1994
Some of the people in my group of friends were from this band called The Press. It was a New York Oi! band and they were in the midst of having a record produced by a guy named Roddy Moreno, who was a skinhead in the U.K. He had a couple record labels—one that put out Oi! music and the other one put out ska music. When he went to New York to meet with [The Press] to get the tapes and all that stuff, he found out about S.H.A.R.P. and what we were doing, and he brought it over to the U.K. He started promoting it through the record label and that’s how we were able to have more of a world wide impact. At the time we had a PO box in New York and after he started promoting it in the U.K. we started getting mail from all over the world: Germany, Switzerland, Italy, England. We started getting invited to do local television programs and myself and a couple of my friends were on that infamous Geraldo show where he got his nose broken by some neo-Nazis from California that they flew out there for the show.
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I was in the 1st grade. My father had taught me that if anyone hits me first, to hit them back. So when I got home from school, I expected him to be all proud of me. His reaction was "You hit a girl?!?" Then he hit me. I've never hit a female since, even the ones who hit me. 