i've seen people ask this question many times, yet i've never heard anyone offer a solution (especially to gentrification in general).
I mean, I feel like from what I can glean of the history of ska and SHARPs that a lot of these motherfuckers managed to address these issues pretty well.
anyway, let me rant, because I think about this shit a lot:
The idea of becoming a race traitor seems to be fucking crucial. Noel Ignatiev wrote a couple of books (Race Traitor and How the Irish Became White) about how whiteness is not really a culture or an ethnicity, it is the
absence of culture. "White" people were once Irish, English, German, Czech, Jewish, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, etc etc, and each had their own local cultural customs, many of which were sanitized or sacrificed in the name of assimilation, in order to obtain the financial and power-based benefits of inclusion in white supremacy. The creation of the white identity was a move made on the part of the American bourgeoisie to reduce worker solidarity and multi-racial slave revolts (yes, there were white "slaves" - indentured servants forcibly ejected from Europe, many of whom escaped to become what we know today as Hillbillies, and often interbred with and aided rebel slaves of other races).
The reason we see the problem described in OP, I am thinking, is that many punks fail to think more deeply on the nature of whiteness and to move forward with creative responses to it. I say "creative" to distinguish it from what I'd call "reactive" responses to whiteness: White guilt, PC language policing, becoming a well-mannered ideologue such as the colleges crank out en masse. I think most of that shit is pretty bunk and mostly just thinking white people not managing to overcome Christian mores. Punks seem to think that because they've dropped out, or because they look different and get fucked up alot, that they have revolted and that's that. But the truth is that when one ceases to keep rethinking themselves, and to keep creating new ways and means to freedom, they cease to be rebels and have just formed a new status quo. Thus describes most "punks", "dirty kids", "hardcore kids", etc etc. I don't say that to spit hate, but to say step it up motherfuckers!
For me, and it might be something of a digression, carrying this revolt into the realm of race has made me go back to my country roots. When I was a kid if you called me "hillbilly" I would have fucking tackled you. But when I left home I found I didn't fucking fit in anywhere because I always bore the "I give no fucks // broke dirty drunk" mark of poor white kid from the woods. Where WASP motherfuckers get quiet and well-mannered, I get fired up and cast my aspersions and curse like a wildman and it gets real lit up real fast. Come to crack a book on the subject and I find that all that old country shit that I always got annoyed at was what remained of all the "old ways" of my rebel ancestors, but the message coming to me was: Either hate yourself or accept the Wal-Mart, Tractor Supply Co, Toby Keith and Mountain Dew corporate-sponsored version of myself. Fuck that, I'm not doing either of those, and I sure as shit am not going to become a yupped-out city lib. Tried that shit and it sucked. So I re-learn my history. (Great spoonerism: "My history" is a "high mystery" if you change the first letters of those two words around and sound them out) I find that there are fucktons of elements of that history that, if brought into the light, force "whiteness" and the coalescence with power it demands to corrode and die. The term "redneck" is partially from sunburned necks from field work, but it's also from The Battle of Blair Mountain wherein a bunch of hillbilly miner fucks from West Virginia put red bandanas (red for COMMUNISM) on and fought the national guard because they were anarchists fed up with the bosses. They ran moonshine because they hated paying taxes. They say "we don't call 9-11 around here" and have tons of guns and hunt for a living sometimes, grow their own fucking weed, and if the Shit Hit the Fan, they'd be doing just fine - at least, the ones who are real-deal hillbillies and not drive-thru suburbanite Fox News screwballs.
ANYWAY, I bring all this bullshit up because what I find remains hidden in the pop-country blaring lights neon trailerpark ghetto are scraps of a working culture that was once multi-ethnic and radically opposed to The System in all its forms. Punks don't have a working culture because a whole lot about what they're doing is based in Oedipal rebellion! They are simply rebelling against their parents and failing to CREATE a damn thing!! Where they go beyond rebellion against their folks, they only
react!
I don't know about white people who aren't rednecks in any way, but for me, this is one point of departure I see: Creating cultures that are fusions based on what is similar. When I hang out in East New York or any ghetto, I find that I have tons of shit in common with black folks and latinos. We eat good, we party hard, we're fuckin poor, and the sensibilities of "high society" be damned. Once that's established, I find myself to be among friends anywhere. But I'm bringing something to the table; I have a culture from which I've descended, and people of other cultures have something to compare their world with, and from here, we can intersect. If Ignatiev is right, and whiteness is the absence of culture, then most white-skinned folks by default bring nothing to the table, nothing to fuse with, and just seem to be empty in the eyes of a lot of blacks, latinos, and country folks. They can counteract this by either reverting to whatever culture in their heritage was debased by whiteness, or by resisting both their history and the present by creating functional cultures (read: can support children, has customs, has a means of subsistence that ain't just the dumpster and EBT) to blend into their neighboring cultures. White people by default show up to the culture potluck with nothing to share and have to work hard to not just be cultural leeches. Time to envision what that work looks like!
tl;dr, Betray "whiteness", and
create something, and we might be a little closer to addressing the problem..
apologies if long and ranty and digressive
