Originally 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.