MIC CRENSHAW:

On Black Skinheads, Direct Action, and Antifascist Cultures

not the MPLS Baldies. but related.

Mic Crenshaw fought fascists in Minneapolis.

Across the 80s and 90s, skinhead culture split into separate and contradictory tendencies. Initially a transgressive celebration of working class cultures, skinheads' outsider aggression began to attract other kinds of extremists, like The White Knights, a neo-Nazi group based in East Saint Paul. The Minneapolis Baldies organized themselves and others into direct opposition, often breaking into open brawling, to defend their communities. This consciousness surrounding community defense spread to other cities, ultimately producing forms of national organization like Anti Racist Action, a precursor to whatever people think ANTIFA now is. Since then, Mic has become a widely respected musical artist and community organizer. This history is further explored in an excellent podcast and book (available from PM Press), both titled It Did Happen Here.

I was lucky to interview Mic late in 2025. Here he discusses the fact, necessity, and costs of violence; the role of culture in militant opposition; the relationship between Marxism and direct action; and the American conjuncture. We're honored to publish his insights. --J.A.B.

J.A.B.: You described that [this podcast / book / recent cultural work] represents a footprint of your life's work, across 80s, 90s, anti-fascist action.

Crenshaw: Yeah, for us, we identified our work in the 80s and 90s. This [podcast / book / etc.] is kind of the origin story of how my friends and myself got engaged in anti-racist work in Minneapolis. In the 80s, there was a local gang called the White Knights. Actually, they were from St Paul. A lot of them were from East St Paul. They started coming into the punk scene and agitating, harassing people, expressing their racism, and so we organized ourselves to be a counter force to that. That was the beginning of our politicization as teenagers. And ultimately, we founded Anti Racist Action, which was a regional network of people who would respond to racist and fascist activity in their communities.

There's been a few mediums in which I'm telling my subjective experience of that, but it's also presented the opportunity for us to engage others who were active. And so in the podcast, we not only talk about Minneapolis, but we we deal with what was happening in Portland and the connection, and these other groups of people who kept starting to come into this fight with their own kind of culture, and identity, and politics, around engaging this threat of white supremacist fascism. Also we started to see there are intersections between reproductive rights and anti-racism. There are intersections between the rights of lesbian, gay, bi, trans people, and anti-racist action. And I guess in some ways, it seems like just another iteration in this historic continuum of work that's still going on.

J.A.B.: You were all pretty young, traveling around the US, seeing these connections with other forms of oppression. In what sorts of moments did you find those connections?

Crenshaw: Yeah, well, we were recently on the book tour for It Did Happen Here, in Appalachia and the Southeast, Atlanta and parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, and we started to meet these people who were hosting us, who had their own local fights that were reminiscent of fights that we were fighting in the 80s and 90s. The landscape was very similar in terms of mutual aid and people who were living their lives in these spaces of marginalization because of their identities, their sexuality, their ethnicity, their countries of origin, their first languages. And people were finding each other and supporting each other. And that's exactly what's under attack, right? It gave us so many opportunities for us to go, well, what's the difference between what we were facing in the 80s and what we're facing now? And when you start to look at those questions, it's inevitable that you go, well, what's the difference between what we're facing now and what we were facing in the 30s? And what are the intersections between what we were facing in the 30s and the imperialism that created the settler colonial reality that we accept as the United States of America, or the so called New World and the West and modern civilization? What is this? What are these through lines that look like ICE agents today? And a president who is declaring war on Venezuela through these extrajudicial killings? And then you think, what's the difference between the extra judicial killings being carried out under Trump administration, and those that were carried out in Yemen, under Obama, and those that were carried out under Bush? You know what I mean? And you go, Oh, this shit is the same thing. You know, it's got different masks that it wears depending on how it's presenting itself and depending on the orientation of the people engaging it.

J.A.B.: You can correct me if this feels irrelevant. But one thing I noticed while listening to these podcasts, is that at one point, somebody starts talking about a theoretical element being introduced, and I think you described yourself as a communist. I was wondering what sort of relationship to Marxism you guys might have had then, or might have developed since, or what the word means or meant to you.

Crenshaw: I struggle to say that I'm a Marxist, because the people who I consider to be Marxist, that at different points in my development were mentors to me, they were avid studiers, to a degree that I've never been able to commit to. You'd go in their house and they'd have a bookshelf or bookshelves full of volumes of work. And I remember as a younger adult, you know, as an adolescent, being in these spaces and looking and just being, like, impressed and overwhelmed by the amount of books they expected us to read. And I'd say, I'd see their bookshelves. I'd go, did you read all those? And they say, Yep. And I'd be like, damn, I don't know if I'm gonna do that.

J.A.B.: [Laughs]

Crenshaw: But, the philosophical debate, ideological debate, was rich. We did read and we studied. And I think the reading and the discussion about what we read in these study groups was important to me, and I was introduced to that, that was the Marxist tradition. Going into the community and trying to agitate and engage through different forms of propaganda, at the time it was a newspaper. That was where the ideological struggle and debate really happened. As long as you're in the echo chamber of people who have similar ideas, you don't really have to debate. When you go into the community, you meet people who've been indoctrinated into this by this anti-communist rhetoric of the Cold War and American exceptionalism, then you're really tested. Are you just repeating rhetoric, or can you actually back up what you're talking about in an argument in a persuasive way? That was a struggle in which I never felt very adept, because people would look at me and be like, you're fucking communist? And my talking point that I would try to engage with would be like, Well, dude, that term has a negative connotation, but all we're really talking about is rights for working people, and a more equitable system. That's what we really mean. And people would be like, Nah, that shit doesn't work, because look at what happened. And then they come up with these examples of oppressive societies. So to this day, I took the good, and the good is understanding these basic principles, which is from each according to ability, to each according to need. And that working people produce wealth that is stolen from us and then benefits the few at the expense of the many. And that these systems of oppression have created this opportunity, that civilization may not be able to continue to support human life. Mass extinction is underway. It's a fact. And that any future that the human race has on the planet Earth has been so profoundly impacted by capitalism that it's altered the trajectory.

J.A.B.: It sounded like the Baldies self-consciously understood themselves as working class. Is that right?

Crenshaw: Yeah. That comes from the skinhead subculture, that is oriented towards working class pride and awareness. And it's interesting, because a lot of people in the skinhead subculture shun politics. They say, well, we're not political, or we're apolitical. But there were those of us who were like, No, everything is political. The personal is political. The music we listen to is political, the clothes you wear are political. And so we were of that latter stripe, where we were very aware of the impact of our choices, and the fact that the history that created the things we identified with, was the result of politics.

J.A.B.: I love that moment, of one of your friends realizing––wait, the British skinheads are pulling from the rude boys, and the rude boys are pulling from the Black Americans. And he's like, I'm a Black American, wait, hold on. I love this triangle of culture: the idea embedded in a culture, the culture being exported, and then picking up somewhere else, and mutating, and finding its way back. I love that part.

Crenshaw: I love that too. Marty Williams, big shout out to him, the brother who points that out. A very, very strong theoretical mind in Marty. He was one of my mentors as a younger Black skinhead, from Chicago originally, who lived in Minneapolis, but who was going back and forth to deepen relationships with other Black skinheads in Chicago. Being a teenager and being able, having the capacity to hold these ideas and to sharpen my political consciousness through conversation and dialogue with my peers, felt more empowering than anything [else] I could engage in at the time. I think the other activities that we were engaged in as kids was, either getting fucked up, trying to be in romantic relationships, or fighting. And so that political consciousness that we were able to engage and stumble upon and discover was, I think, one of the healthiest aspects of what we were caught up with. In fact, that was the most sustainable element of what we were doing, because it's still part of who we all are today.

J.A.B.: Something I think about a lot––something everybody thinks about a lot––is this relationship between action and consciousness, praxis and theory, whatever. It comes in different ways. But you guys were so engaged in terms of action, on these fights, and you had such a principled relationship to violence. Everybody I hear in that podcast has a really thoughtful relationship to violence, and they also see it as like a necessity, at least at that time, a commitment to that kind of action. And I sense that you now maybe have a slightly different relationship to it. But I'm kind of wondering if you have some thoughts about how we think about violence in action today. There's still a taboo around it, of course. If I'm gonna talk to people about Palestinian militants, I know that like eight out of 10 people are gonna think that I'm kind of crazy, at least in some respect, but I don't know. I'd just be curious to hear any more thoughts you have on it.

Crenshaw: I always want to interrogate it when we get into it, because it's a dangerous discussion. This goes in cycles, the political repression as a form of violence that's exacted upon our communities and individuals, our organizations, our culture. It's a dangerous time to be questioning authority. It's a dangerous time to be oriented in an explicit way where you're saying that the state, the institutions of the state, the dominant order, is problematic. We're under attack. When people want to look at us and question the legitimacy of violence, I always have to turn that question back on itself and say, Well, why does the state have a monopoly on the legitimacy of violence? The effort by mainstream media and government spokespeople is to paint those who want a more equitable and just society––those who want peace on Earth, and who believe in organizing to bring these changes about––to paint us as terrorists and to define us as such with executive orders and so on. But the reality of it is, that the people who are getting away with murder, who have killed the leaders of the past, and who are mobilizing resources to disappear people today, who are deputizing fucking rogue actors to have uniforms and conceal their identity and tear families apart in our cities––that's the fucking violence. At best, we were talking about community defense. We were not on the offensive. The idea to go out and hurt people based on who they are and how they look was not what brought us together. What brought us together was common interest, and cultural activity that was centered around music and fashion and having a good time. While we were doing that, the people who were organized around hunting people down, and harming them based on their identity, came into our community. And we responded to that by saying, Those are not minds that we will change through debate. The only language that those people understand is the language of violence, and if we don't defend ourselves, protect ourselves, then we're going to get hurt, or we're going to get killed. And we had a history to draw on to inform our choices. Like the Greensboro Six, where people from the anti-racist organizations and the Communist Workers Party were gunned down in, I think, 1976. I'm pissed that I can't remember the dates right now, but there are repeated incidents. What about George Floyd, killed in South Minneapolis, a few blocks from where we all used to kick it at. Eric Garner, I mean endless names. Black men being lynched on a monthly basis in this country, and every time it's ruled as a suicide without a meaningful investigation. So the violence of our existence is one that makes self-defense and community defense a requirement for survival. That's just a fact. We would be gaslighting ourselves, putting ourselves in danger, to deny that.

J.A.B.: Right. Another one of your friends mentions how conditioned by violence the Baldies were as a group, from youth, feeling it, seeing it, experiencing it everywhere. By the time they got to the point of confronting racist skinheads, it was normal.

Crenshaw: Whether it was personal or interpersonal, there was violence in the communities. Growing up a Black kid in working class communities, in poor communities, we had to fight it. It just was part of it. And then a lot of us had, some of us had, abuse in our own households. Whether it was corporal punishment of getting spanked or whipped, or abuse between the adults that we witnessed. So by the time we wind up on the streets as young adults, fighting was just in our blood, right? I think I would rather be somebody––for the bumps and bruises and scratching, whatever mental scars that might be there––I'd rather be somebody that knew how to defend myself than somebody who was ill-prepared.

J.A.B.: How serious are these fights [with the fascists] getting, how many people are involved?

Crenshaw: The violence evolved from hand-to-hand combat, to blunt-force objects, and bladed weapons. And around the time, after a couple of years of group fights with blunt force objects and bladed weapons, somebody was blinded. Lost sight in one of their eyes. People were getting cut open or or knocked out, or bones broken and going to the hospital. But eventually, it occurred to me: there's only one way for this to escalate. Eventually there's going to be gun play, and people are going to start getting shot and killed. And eventually that did happen in Portland, and that happened out west in Vegas, with Dan and Spit, who were murdered in the desert by neo-Nazis. I have to see that as part of a continuum. Whereas in Portland, in 2020, or 2021, Michael Reinoehl was engaged in a situation with some Proud Boy types, and he shot one of them in self-defense and killed him, and then he was later hunted down by Trump's federal forces and murdered in Lacey, Washington. Kyle Rittenhouse shot two people, I think, got away with murdering them in Wisconsin. There was a guy who ran over Heather Heyer and others in Charlottesville. At least in 2020 they hadn't taken 180 billion out of the social safety net to finance this kind of violence. It's hard to say how many people have been have died in ICE detention, or have died trying to defend themselves from being kidnapped and disappeared, but at some point that information is going to come out. And our communities aren't safe. There are daily reports of multiple engagements. We have a suburb of Portland, southwestern suburb of Portland called Hillsborough, that's declared a state of emergency because of these ICE raids. And in my community, every day, I'm getting updated about ICE is up here attacking people. So I have a lot of questions about, what's the continuum? Is this going to be something that is a slow burn into like a full-blown Civil War, or sustained civil unrest? It's hard to tell. But just using like a linear system of logic...This is the first year of a four year administration. So where are we going to be next year, and the following year? It's a very concerning moment. It's a frightening time. I have to ask myself questions about self-defense, community defense, protecting my family, detention, incarceration, consequences, all these things are constantly on my mind.

J.A.B.: You've mentioned that, after the first or the second time the Baldies went out to Portland, people seemed really grateful that you guys had been out there. I was wondering what that looked like.

Crenshaw: I visited here [Portland] once, stayed for maybe six months, something like that, and then I moved back to Minneapolis for a time. I relocated to Portland permanently in 1992 I've been here ever since, and I was welcomed into the community with a lot of respect because of what had preceded me in terms of mutual aid and support for community defense and direct action. The Nazis here were really a scourge on the public, and you can hear people talk about that in the podcast. So the the organized effort, that became national, was something that Portland was engaged in. People were coming together here, and it wasn't just skinheads; it was a lot of people, what some people would call Big Tent organizing. There was a serious effort underway. There had been a man murdered out here. His name was Mulugeta Seraw, and he was an Ethiopian college student. He was beat to death by Nazis here. So when I moved out here, the people who killed him were on trial. It was a good time to be engaged in the work. I was going through a personal transition where I actually wasn't trying to be engaged in violence. That was part of my my growth, I guess, my development, was to make that choice and say, leaving Minneapolis, starting over in Portland, I'm going to figure out ways to engage this struggle that aren't centered in confrontation. So what I tell people is that, self-defense is always on the table, because we're vulnerable to attack, because of the society, the world that we live in. And we can never afford to ever think that we won't be forced to defend ourselves. So we have to prepare for that. It's part of the work that we have to do. Even if it's just in mental awareness: if I don't want to fight, but I'm confronted by people who are looking to hurt me, how do I protect myself? If I'm committed to non-violence, what systems and what relationships do I have in place that are going to save my life or protect my loved ones? And it does become a matter of community, because we have to protect each other, we have to protect ourselves, and we have to stand up to these threats so that the people who are part of the threat, understand that it's not safe for them to go around threatening everyone. We can't rely on the state. The state is fucking out here lying their ass off. Did you see that briefing about ANTIFA?

J.A.B.: Yeah, insane. I showed it to my students.

Crenshaw: Thank you for showing it to your students, man. We have so much work to do. But one of the best things we have going for us is the fact that they keep getting on live television and stepping on their fucking dicks. Please, please keep proving to the public that you're full of shit.

J.A.B.: There's been this Zionist recently saying really insane stuff, talking about how "we messed up Holocaust education, because now, people see strong people attacking weak people and think, oh, the Israelis are the bad guys." Holy shit. Did you just say that out loud?

Crenshaw: It's beautiful. You know what I'm worried about. And I don't want to get ahead of myself in terms of theoretical stuff. But I am worried about AI and deep fakes. We know that these guys will shamelessly lie, and we know that their points of view are so abhorrent that they're not going to be popular. What lengths are they going to go to, to manufacture consent? We've seen the way that terror has been utilized to create a climate of fear so that people will demand, whatever, you know, tactical shit the government wants to deploy. It's a dangerous time to speak the truth and to stand for what's right. But what choice do we have?

J.A.B.: Something struck me, about how violence only escalates, and comes with such serious persecution, especially in this culture of surveillance that is so developed now. So let's say I'm trying to avoid violence, almost at all costs, and I need that community. I was struck by how much the Baldies were community focused. You guys were primarily really close friends, you had these same places where you were always hanging out, always organizing shows, unified by culture in some ways. And I thought, Man, I don't know that I have or have had something like that, exactly. And I wonder if it is different today. Maybe in part because of screens, or––

Crenshaw: I think about that often. Because I've often been asked, What's the difference between what we're doing and what you guys did? Or what could we do better? And what I've seen as different, is that we were best friends and we had unconditional love for each other. It doesn't mean we didn't betray each other or violate each other's trust or anything, but the guiding principle that made it so that we could fight for each other, was love. And we spent so much time together, without screens. Sometimes we would just walk the city for hours going into the abandoned warehouses and exploring and taking pictures. Because, you know, so many of us were in high school, and a lot of us were creative minds. There was always one person who was in photography class, and they'd have a camera, and thank God, because they documented a lot of our adventures, and that's what you see in the pages of the book, and those are a lot of the pictures that are the placeholders for the podcast. And so I say, the difference is we were best friends. You know, a lot of the organizing that I see now, you have a lot of people who don't have that connection trying to do what's right. But the challenge is that they haven't forged a bond of trust, and they haven't figured out how to vet each other, because they haven't had the time. And what do you do with that? But the work still has to be done. So if everybody isn't going to take the time to be best friends, like that seems unrealistic, what do you what do you want us to do? What should we do? And I don't have an answer for that. I just know that when you have trust and love, you're more likely going to do what needs to be done, with the kind of determination that's needed, than if it's just an intellectual, performative thing, that's being fed by insecurity.

J.A.B.: Will you say more about that? Fed by insecurity?

Crenshaw: Well, there's a lot of pressure to want to perform what looks like the right politics. Because we don't want to be seen as bad people. And that, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing, but it's not enough, because if that's what's driving you to do things that could end your safety, end your life, undermine the safety of those around you, you might not be resilient under pressure. If insecurity and performative reasons are why you're doing what you're doing. You know, there was some quote. I forget what it was, but I'm going to try to figure out how to paraphrase it. You know, settlers aren't connected to the land the way the indigenous are. So the indigenous are going to fight in a way that the settlers aren't, because their connection to the land is all they've known, and it's all they actually have. And settlers are connected to ideals about power, and ownership, and hierarchy, and their place in it. So we have to interrogate ourselves, like, what are we connected to? And I think being a descendant of a class of people who were historically displaced from the continent of Africa, and brought here as a colonized people inside of a colony, we have some really complicated questions to ask ourselves about what we're fighting for, and why we're fighting, and we don't all agree on it. Black people, African-American people, are not a monolith, by any means, neither are Native American people, neither are white people. And time is relevant, because as a human race, how much time do any of us really have now? Some of us can speak, in idealistic times, that we all want the same things, right? What do the white supremacists say, the 14 words? Do you remember what that shit is? Let's read that right now. It'll be informative.

J.A.B.: 'We must secure the existence of our people in a future for white children.'

Crenshaw: Right. So let's just remove the word white, and let's just say human. How about that? There's nothing wrong with the statement if you don't make it exclusive of anyone who isn't identified as white, right? In a lot of Native American cultures they talk about seven generations, right? We need to carry ourselves in this lifetime as if we're securing a future for humans who aren't even here yet. That should be something that isn't only available to the most destructive racial construct in the history of humankind, which is that of whiteness. We can say things like, Well, other people oppress other people, and other people went to war, and other people had slaves, but none of the other civilizations were at this critical juncture, where the technological advancement has happened so quickly in terms of the change of the means of production, that it caused mass extinction, and capitalism has become so dominant where it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. I'm curious. I probably won't live longer than––God willing, I'm not going live Longer than another 50 years. What am I, what are we, as a human race, going to see in the next 10 to 20 years?

J.A.B.: I know. I've just been looking at more reports, that say we'll have three degrees of warming by 2038. The number attached to three degrees of warming is 4 billion people. And these projections are projections, fine, but so far all of the official projections have been way underestimating the severity of things. It is going to get really, really, really bad, obviously. I guess I hold some hope, anyway, that things will somehow change. As they sometimes do. But I don't know.

Crenshaw: I don't either. Today's a beautiful day out here. Driving across the country from Minneapolis to Portland, back in the late 80s, you couldn't really drive 50 miles without having a significant number of dead insects on your windshield. Now I noticed that now you can drive a couple hundred miles and you might only have a couple of dead bugs. What happened to those bugs? What does that mean for us?

J.A.B.: I remember the same exact thing, in the summers in Minnesota. That's gone. That's disappeared in my lifetime.

Crenshaw: You guys got lightning bugs anymore?

J.A.B.: We do. Actually, we're really lucky where we are. There's a lot of conservation projects around here. What about you?

Crenshaw: Nah. Portland never had a lot, from the time I moved out here in the 90s, but you're definitely not going to see any now. But I've noticed the decline in the Midwest. I always feel lucky when I see a handful.

J.A.B.: Things you used to take for granted as a kid. I had one other thing I wanted to ask about. You guys all started making zines, and then spreading zines across the country with specific stuff that had been happening in your city. The Baldies [and Anti Racist Action] became this very intercity phenomenon. You talk about Lawrence, Kansas. I know nothing about Lawrence, Kansas. But everybody was reading each other's zines, and the scene reports in them. That seemed like another interesting case: you've got this very strong commitment to action, and then you are shaping and building your own consciousness around it, and sharing it, and spreading it. I was just wondering if you could say any more about that.

Crenshaw: Independent media is a tool for sharing culture, sharing ideas, sharing art, keeping each other informed. I feel like it's a natural part of human organization across communities. I feel almost like one of the one of the hallmarks of a community is to have some form of documented communication that takes place, whether it's radio, or print media, or poetry, or newspapers, or zines, it's going to be there. Community hubs, where people can access these materials, whether it's the public library, or the record store, or the info shop, or. Whatever it is, it's just part of how we are in community, and in communication. We see the consolidation of corporate media as a means for expressing the ideals of the dominant culture, but also repressing, excluding, and censoring the ideas of working people and marginalized people. So again––community defense. We have to defend our ideas. We have to defend our ability to communicate with each other. And it transcends safety, right? Sometimes we need to express as a means of beauty, and camaraderie, and bringing people together and celebrating life. So it's not always this militant thing, but it's our right, and we have to be able to engage in that. And when we don't see our ability to communicate being held and supported by the state, then we have to create our own independent means to do that.

J.A.B.: Hopefully there's a little bit of that in this little project that we're putting together.

Crenshaw: Thank you for sharing the links. It was refreshing to see some poetry. And I'm honored to be included in whatever you guys are working on.

J.A.B.: Well, I'm really excited about this. It's been great talking to you.