Ctrl+ALT-RIGHT: reinterpreting our knowledge of white supremacy groups through the lens of street gangs

ABSTRACT

For the last 30 years, gang scholars have explicitly disregarded white youth who are active in groups with overt or implicit ties to neo-Nazi/skinhead or white power ideologies from street gang research. This article argues that this decision to keep these two groups separate stems from a misinterpretation of the realities of these groups and this decision has had a long-standing impact on how researchers, law enforcement and policymakers understand and interact with youth active in these groups. The coining of the term ‘Alt-Right,’ and the re-emergence of white power youth in the international dialogue, underscores how the lack of systematic research severely limits our knowledge about youth involved in gangs with white power leanings. Based on these concerns, this article challenges the current understanding of both skinheads and their troublesome youth groups/gangs. By orienting the limited research on skinhead gangs within key street gang domains, this article draws attention to disconnects in the literature that have influenced how researchers approach the study of skinhead youth. This study’s conclusions support the purposeful inclusion of skinhead youth in future street gang research.

KEYWORDS:

• Street gangs
• racist organizations
• youth subculture
• alt-right
• skinheads
• myths

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Shannon E. Reid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4318-4271

Notes

1 (See Esbensen et al. 2012)

2 See Green, Johnson, and Adams (2006) for overview of this methodology.

3 For ease of comparison, Appendix A includes a table outlining each subheading for both skinheads and street gangs.

4 Howell and Egley (2005) provide an extensive review of risk factors influencing street gang membership.

5 Valasik and Phillips (2017) propose an analogous argument to explain why youth join ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). ISIS is a youth movement whose membership consists predominantly of marginalized youth from distressed and ostracized communities. Traditionally, these marginalized youths would have joined a local street gang or some other local near-group, but the international reach of the Internet and social media allows such individuals to join groups not constrained to a nearby neighbourhood or community.

6 Euroburg is an ‘amalgam of many European cities’ created by Klein (2009, x) that experienced street gang problems. Klein (2009, x) states that the descriptions and incidents offered in the text ‘are not fictional’ and he seems to be referencing Sarnecki’s (2001) work on youth co-offending networks, which references the offending patterns of skinheads in the Old Town of Stockholm, Sweden.