In The New Yorker, Kalefa Sannah has a piece on the classic NY hardcore scene titled “United Blood“:
Like many punk-influenced bands, Agnostic Front and Cro-Mags had an instinctive revulsion toward mainstream politics. But they didn’t have a replacement; what they had was a bundle of repudiations and provocations and half-formed grievances. In depicting New York as a battleground, they encouraged a tribal solidarity that sometimes bled into racial solidarity. New York hardcore was a largely white movement based in a largely non-white neighborhood, which means that hardcore pride could be difficult to disentangle from white pride. (Bad Brains was an exception, and a complicated one: John Joseph says that he fell out with the band members because they wouldn’t stop playing Louis Farrakhan speeches in their tour van.) Some musicians suggested that there was, or should be, a difference between “white pride” and “white power.” And in the Maximum Rocknroll interview the members of Agnostic Front argued that working-class whites should be no more “ashamed” of their identity than “blacks and Hispanics”—two minorities, they added, that “occupy most of our prison spaces.”
A comprehensive book on implicit (and explicit) whiteness in music needs to be written.
