Originally appeared in The Toronto Film Scene in 2015; some language has been updated to be correct in 2023 with the exception of direct quotations.
One thing our society is very often guilty of is ignoring the voices of the people whose opinions should matter most. We seem to think that if our intentions were good, it doesn’t matter if people are offended because we didn’t mean for it to happen.
Read MoreOriginally appeared on Wear Your Voice on 29 November 2017
Recently, I was involved in a Facebook “discussion” in which there was a majority of people (mostly white but also some white-passing) who were arguing that when people see a skinhead, they shouldn’t automatically assume that they’re a neo-Nazi or even racist. One of the biggest non-white supporters of this theory was a white-passing Indigenous person and a light-skinned Black man. Both had grown up seeped in punk and rudeboy culture and saw the relation between those (mostly) harmless subcultures and the skinhead subculture. But what they all failed to realise was that most people — particularly visibly non-white people like me — don’t have the luxury to give any skinhead the benefit of the doubt.
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