#2. Black Flag – “White Minority”

“We’re gonna be a white minority
We won’t listen to the majority
We’re gonna feel inferiority
We’re gonna be a white minority”

Black Flag, “White Minority,” c. 1980

Context is everything. So, let’s get this straight right now, once and for all: very much unlike Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White,”¹ this early Black Flag song from the 1980 12” EP Jealous Again is not racist! If you look closely, I think you can you actually see lead singer Ron Reyes’  tongue planted firmly in his cheek as he falls into the crowd of sweaty white boys in the last few seconds of this live footage taken from the seminal punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization.

Which is not to say that those sweaty white boys in the audience actually understood the satire and mockery, just as I surely didn’t when a cassette copy of Black Flag’s The First Four Years started circulating amongst my friends as an early teenager.² But despite the sympathy I now feel upon looking back at my naive and acned adolescent self, I think the responsibility to comprehend the ridicule in the lyrics to “White Minority” remains a function of the listener’s insightfulness, and not the artists’ heavy-handedness. As writer Travis Fristoe notes: “Is there an obligation to make your message so obvious that there’s no way to misinterpret it?”³ Indeed, a superficial perusal through the punk canon, with song titles like “White Riot,” “God Save the Queen,” and “White Minority,” could lead one to make problematic conclusions. But being as post-modern as punk rock is, racism and other structures of oppression are rarely so overt within its confines. Rather, these structures are often hidden within forms like the pictures of dead bodies on the covers of crust records, the “women’s” or “people of color” special issues of our fanzines, some mumbled aside during in-between-song banter on stage, or in the lyrics of the bands that you would least expect: Crass, for example, in a fit of pretentiousness during which they must have completely lost sight of the magnitude and complexity of white privilege, actually uses the word “nigger” in their song “White Punks on Hope.”⁴ (Seriously, how has no one called them out on that?)

Conversely though, anti-racism in punk is also sometimes a little covert. So, if you can’t understand how “White Minority” is satirizing the racist, convoluted, and ahistorical idea that many white folks seem to have about how they are suddenly “victims” of an unjust system upon losing one or two of their unearned privileges, then please just listen a little bit closer.
Likewise, if you can’t appreciate how goddamn beautiful Greg Ginn’s frenzied, buzz-saw guitar intro is, please listen much, much louder.

¹ Ian MacKaye continues to insist that the song is somehow anti-racist. He obviously hasn’t read the lyrics since he wrote them when he was 17 years old. I wish he would just start being accountable for the awful words he penned when he was a teenager so we could all just move on. Until then, I point you to this Maximumrocknroll interview from 1983 in which MacKaye comes across as a total chump.
² While I admit I am no expert, I still maintain that The First Four Years is the only Black Flag record you need to have, and that it proves Henry Rollins was probably the worst singer throughout the band’s entire history.
³ Travis Fristoe, from issue number 8 of his zine America?
⁴ Crass, “White Punks on Hope,” from the 1979 double LP Stations of the Crass.

Tags: Black Flag, Crass, Greg Ginn, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Jealous Again, Minor Threat, Racism, Ron Reyes, The Decline of Western Civilization, The First Four Years, Travis Fristoe, White Minority, white privilege