[Thoughts in response to Mimi Thi Nguyen's talk at Meet Me at the Race Riot. She criticized how riot grrrl gets remembered as a completely white affair, and any multiracial interventions are more like weird ghettoized asides.]
I’m a white girl. When I’m at a punk show, I look around and notice how few girls there are, especially near the stage where people are moshing. The mosh pit is such a central part of punk culture, and yet it’s a really bizarre and aggressive thing. I like that people can get really into the music and feel their bodies moving around in a way they normally can’t. But pretty immediately it becomes dominated by guys, and most of the girls get shoved to the sides or kicked to the ground. It becomes this weird thing where it’s ok to punch random strangers and act really aggressively.
Being a white person, I don’t look around and think about the lack of people of color, it’s just not something that is at the forefront of my mind because I view the world as a person of a certain identity. To a person of color at the show though, that absence is probably jarring. Why is it that punk culture is so white-male-dominated? The whole mentality is about resistance to the status quo, about being an other, fighting the dominant oppressive system… So then why does that very system recreate itself in the punk microcosm? White men from privileged backgrounds can’t ever have the experience of a marginalized person. They just can’t. So then what are they really fighting against when they say fuck the system?
Women are occupying a larger place in the punk scene, and it continues to grow as time goes on. But we risk a crippling moment when we start to historicize things like riot grrrl, looking back with melancholy that somehow indicates a present defeat. There has been an abundance lately of books and movies and tributes to the riot grrrl movement, which I think was a predominantly white, middle-class thing. That’s a failing of the movement maybe, but it also seems tricky to criticize these girls for doing only what they can do themselves: scream back in the face of sexism and abuse.
There probably were lots of important communities in the 90’s of multi-racial girls making important music and saying important things. For some reason those moments don’t seem to make it into the narrative of riot grrrl that gets told. So how do I, as a girl who was born in the 90’s gain access to those important voices of history? It’s important to critique the naturalizing histories that ignore the question of race. It’s important to critique books and films that dedicate a brief aside to those moments that engage with those dialogues. But where do you proceed from there? How do you make sense of that critique without a productive project to take on instead? And what about what’s happening today? Even twenty years later, it’s still hard to find non-white punk bands if you don’t know where to look. Is it just that there aren’t that many? Maybe the scene isn’t conducive to encouraging people of color to get involved because it’s so white. Even though you would think that the rebellious spirit of the culture would attract more people of color than whites in the first place. That is certainly not the reality.
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