Photo by Erez Avissar

I don’t remember the first time I heard a racist joke at a punk rock show. Rather, I don’t remember the first time I was grabbed into a sweaty half-hug by one of the laughing white members of my Midwest punk scene and told don’t worry about it. We don’t think of you that way. I don’t remember the first time I saw a teenage girl shoved out of the way so that a teenage boy her size, or greater, could have a better view of a stage. I don’t remember the first time that I made an excuse for being a silent witness.

I don’t remember the first time I noticed the small group in the back corner of a punk show at the Newport (one of the many venues that I fell in and out of love with in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio), all of them, in some way, pushed out of the frenzied circle of bodies below, and the alleged loving violence that comes with it. I do remember the first time I became one of the members of that group in the back corner of shows. At 18, I hung in the back corner of the Newport and watched NOFX with the rest of the kids who didn’t quite fit, or at least became tired of attempting to fit. I looked around and saw every version of other, as I knew it. The black kids, the girls my age and younger, the kids most fighting with the complexities of identity. We sat back and watched while NOFX tore through an exceptionally loud version of "Don’t Call Me White", and watched below, as a monochromatic sea crashed against itself.

-=-=-=-There is nothing simple about this. What we’re sold about punk rock is that anyone can pick up an instrument and go, something that we’ve been proven time and time again by a wide number of awful bands. But even in a genre that prides itself on simplicity, the complexities of erasure and invisibility in punk rock go deep. It is hard to hear the word "Brotherhood" without also thinking of the weight behind what it carries with it in this country, and beyond. When I still hear and read the punk rock scene referred to as a "brotherhood", I think about what it takes to build a brotherhood in any space. Who sits at the outskirts, or who sits at the bottom while the brotherhood dances oblivious and heavy at the top. In the punk landscape, we are often given imagery that reflects the most real truths of this scene: the exclusion of people of color, of women, of the queer community, and that exclusion being sometimes explicit, sometimes violent, but almost always in direct conflict with the idea of punk rock as a place for rebellion against (among other things) identity.

A friend recently posed a question to me, similar to one that Lester Bangs wrote about being posed to him (in 1979’s "The White Noise Supremacists"):

Well, what makes you think the attitudes of racism and exclusion in the punk scene are any different from that of the rest of the world?

The answer, of course, is that it isn’t. Or at least it is all born out of the same system. In the '70s, the answer was perhaps easier to digest. That punk rock, born in part out of a need for white escape, just wasn’t prepared to consider a revolution that involved color, or involved women as anything that the scene deemed useful. That, of course, also being a reflection of the time. Today, we sit back and watch seemingly evolved artists talk about tearing down these large political structures and uniting the masses, and making safe spaces for everyone who wants to come out and enjoy music, but the actual efforts to build and create these spaces fall extremely short, as evidenced (in one example) by Jake McElfresh, who has a now admitted history of preying on underage girls, being allowed to play Warped Tour. A touring music showcase catering to, mostly, teenagers.