In Conversation: James Spooner
As the filmmaker behind the Afro-Punk movie and cofounder of the Afropunk Festival, James Spooner gave a voice to Black punks everywhere. Now he's focused on telling his own story—in his own words.
When I first met James Spooner in the early ‘90s New York hardcore scene, everyone called him “Razzle.” The name didn’t have any sort of significant or special meaning, but it did describe something about his presence in a room that checked out: Razzle didn’t fade into the background of a show. Razzle made himself known.
In a similar way, when the Afro-Punk documentary dropped in 2003, we all felt it: James Spooner had now arrived, too. In the 20 years since, James has been a tireless advocate for Black punks everywhere—through the time he spent as cofounder of the Afropunk Festival, as director of the feature-length film White Lies, Black Sheep, as author and illustrator of the autobiographical graphic novel The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere, and most recently as co-editor for the anthology Black Punk Now. With hardcore finally hitting an unprecedented level of diversity on every level over the last few years, however, I wanted to take some time to dig deeper into James’ hardcore history, and specifically his time in New York—when we were both young kids of color, trying to find ourselves in the hardcore scene we loved, praying that heartbreak wouldn’t come for us.
Afropunk is 20 years old now, and over that time, I feel like you’ve developed this cohesive body of work—focusing on the intersection between punk and Blackness—and just being able to witness that has been amazing. So I kind of wanted to start by going back in time a little, because I know that it was about 30 years ago, for me, when I first really started trying to understand race, and specifically, when I was really starting to have my own awareness and awakening around that. I felt like I’d surrounded myself in white subcultures for so long that I lost my own individual story somewhere, and it was very much about reclaiming that story for me. Where did it start for you?
JAMES: Yeah, it wasn’t as clean a moment for me. I was on a bit of a roller coaster before I became “the Afropunk guy.” Going back even further to when I first got into punk, my very first experiences were very much submerged in racial conflict. I was basically surrounded by Nazis—very comfortable racists, you know? And I was one of two Black people in my little hometown scene in Southern California. So I had to make decisions early, and I think my earliest decision around race was that I was going to try to ignore it. I think, as a person of color in any white American community, it’s just easier for the people around you if you don’t remind them that you’re different from them, right? And therefore that seems to make it easier for you.
So that was me at thirteen years old. I just wanted to have a mohawk and be in a punk band and be Sid Vicious-obnoxious. But it became very clear, very quickly, that it wasn’t going to be as easy as all that. There were always going to be voices in the back of my head and people in my ear telling me, “So-and-so is going to jump you for your boots,” or “So-and-so doesn’t want you at this party.” And then I also had the experience of being around Black people who were questioning my allegiance to the Black community because I was a part of this quote-unquote “white scene.” So I had a lot of self-hatred. I had a lot of anger and I put a lot of that anger towards Black people because I had white friends who liked me and all the Black people seemed to dislike me.
Then I moved to New York, and literally overnight, that went all away. Because New York, as you know, has a diverse scene, so the race stuff didn’t feel like it mattered because I wasn’t being threatened around my race.
This was in what year?
JAMES: In 1991. I went to a show with this band called Bushmon, whose singer is now in a New York hardcore band called Ache, and they were an all-Black punk band. It might have been a show with another band called Funkface that had been around for like 20 years in New York—a funky, punk-type thing, and they were also all of color. But there were Black singers, and a lot of Black people on the stage, and it was like, “Holy shit. This is exciting.” I felt, by proximity, also cool because I’m like them. I think I had a mini-awakening, a mini-moment of pride. That’s when I started dreading my hair, or whatever little token moments to be like, I’m a part of this.
Fast forward a couple of years. The New York hardcore scene just felt very negative to me. It was very violent. There were a lot of kids who wanted to be tough guys, even if they weren’t actually tough guys, and there was no politics—or at least it wasn’t really political in any way that matters. So I started going to the suburbs for shows. I started going out to Jersey, Pennsylvania, Boston, wherever. I was just looking for a politically active scene.
I’ve never thought about it that way, but there was also a period of time like that for me—between 1991 and 1994—where I was pretty much only going to shows from as far north as Boston to D.C. or even Richmond sometimes. I was in search of something that wasn’t happening in New York City.
JAMES: Yeah, I’m pretty well-thought about this because I’ve just been writing about it, but New York is like a bubble. If you were a New York band, you could play at any one of the 25 places under 14th Street, depending on your different scene, but it was very difficult to play shows outside of New York City. Like, you might be able to draw a huge crowd in New York—you could sell out the Bond Street Cafe or CBs—but you’d play to ten people in Jersey. Conversely, a lot of those bands [outside of New York]… Well, here’s a real example. I remember when Chokehold was huge. They would definitely get 300 people at a show. But I did a show for them at ABC No Rio in 1995 and ten people came. There just wasn’t a lot of crossover, so we had to do a lot of traveling. ABC was really the only place going out of its way to cater to bands from out of the city. So yeah, I wanted to be friends with people who were politically engaged or smart-thinking about these things, and the trade-off was that I was hanging out with a lot of white kids.
Which I think is when we met. You already had the dreads, but you read to me more as a progressive straight-edge vegan with a political vibe—which at the time was, like, a very Ebullition Records thing.
JAMES: One-hundred percent! I was way more West Coast, screaming stuff. Gravity Records, Ebullition, all that. And then we had our own version of that with Frail and Chokehold and the bands that wanted to argue with Earth Crisis [laughs].
Right! And that’s the thing to me because those circles, at that time, were especially white. You talk about a band like Frail or other bands from Pennsylvania at that time, like Flagman or whoever, they were all doing this weird J. Crew preppy thing back then [laughs]. And yet, I would say that neither you nor myself ever really talked about our identity beyond being hardcore kids around that.
JAMES: Definitely not.
Which is wild because this was supposed to be about anti-oppression activism.
JAMES: I went so far as to write a reactionary manifesto to push against Hardline and the right-wing politics that were creeping in at the time. I felt like the first enemy was Hardline and that version of militant veganism. I wanted to start a movement in the scene that was super lefty, so I wrote this whole manifesto laying out all these politics about being pro-choice or whatever—and it was completely absent of race. There’s nothing in it about race. Which is striking, because I am a Black dude writing this thing. It’s either that it’s not on my mind or I didn’t want to think about it. So all that work that happened from being around people of color, the internal work, just kind of washed away with the emo bangs [laughs]. I mean, I was 17. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to have this aesthetic and be a part of it. A couple of years later, I completely dropped out of the hardcore scene and I was just in New York going to mod parties—which is a trajectory a lot of kids took.
Were you disappointed with hardcore?
JAMES: I remember in 1996 there being all these hardcore bands that were becoming indie bands—like June of 44 or Slint or Rodan, that whole Quarterstick and Touch & Go Records scene. All that stuff was becoming really popular, and the hardcore kids I was hanging with were almost like thumbing their noses at hardcore by being into indie rock. I lived for a very short time in Columbus at the Neil House [a well-known punk house in the ‘90s that put on shows in their living room for several years], and that whole house were, like, no longer punks; they were all indie kids. And they were having a really hard time even navigating that because the Neil House was a punk hardcore space, and they were trying to get these indie bands [to play] and no one came. Elliott Smith played and 20 people were there. The other thing was that they weren’t about anything politically, or they quickly lost the politics because the indie rock stuff was not about that.
Is it also possible that you were a little overzealous? I mean, when I look at that Frail 7-inch you put out… It’s very maximal. There’s all this dense text and song explanations and political writing. It’s a lot.
JAMES: I don’t know. I feel like that’s my sweet spot. That’s the stuff I like now, you know? I feel like I came into my punk rock zenith with finding the Struggle record or the Downcast record…
The records that came with explanations of all the lyrics.
JAMES: Yeah! It was like, “Here’s a zine with a record in it” [laughs]. And being sixteen or seventeen, I was like, “This is what hardcore is supposed to be.”
That’s a very high bar to set.
JAMES: Totally. There were kids, like Scott Neimet who lived at the Neil House, who knew that we didn’t have to lose our politics. But he had the added thing of being gay and being out and being like, “I’m not going to just stop thinking about this because I’m an indie rocker.” Personally, I wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t until I was 22, and I was hanging out in New York again in a very white community, that I started thinking about this stuff again. I had my last identity crisis, and I was like, I can’t do this again.
I was really mad at punk rock because, like so many of us, punk rock raised me. But I feel like the conversations that I was having around race and hardcore, they were just very safe for the white people that I was around. Afropunk came out of wanting to have unsafe conversations.
You once said that Afro-Punk [the movie] was about “wanting to tell your life story through the mouths of as many other people as you could find,” and I remember thinking how I’ve said this exact thing about Anti-Matter. A lot of those original interviews were that—prodding and poking to find out about people’s attitudes towards sexuality and mental health and abuse, all these things that I was struggling with at the time and that I was unable to articulate for myself. Obviously, I know what my reasons were for that, but why shouldn’t Afro-Punk have been your first-person story?
JAMES: I think I knew right away that there was strength in numbers, and I needed to validate my own experience by proving to myself that this experience was ubiquitous. I interviewed 90 people for the movie, which is just insane. I went all over the country. I would have gone all over the world, but it was an issue of money.
If you watch the credits, I have a little picture of every person and where they’re from. I tried really hard to get all age ranges, and men and women—at the time, we didn’t really talk about nonbinary people, but I know there are people who identify as that now—and queer protagonists. All this stuff was just important to me because I wanted every single person to watch it and it would be a situation where they couldn’t say, “Oh, but that’s not how it is here!” I guess that was something for the white viewer. I wanted them to be like, “Oh shit. That person’s from Houston. I’m from Houston. Maybe it’s like that here, too.” And on the flip side, for the Black viewer, I wanted them to be like, “Holy shit, we are everywhere, and this is my story, too.” I couldn’t have done that if it were just me.
I think the part about your work that really resonates for me is that idea of whitewashing punk, or even just erasure in general. Like, even erasing queer people. I’ve spoken before about how no one ever talks about how Patrick Mack, the singer of the Stimulators—arguably one of the first bands to be associated with New York hardcore—was an out gay man, or how the owner of Rat Cage Records, who put out Agnostic Front’s Victim in Pain, came out as a trans woman. Even when I think of all the early New York bands, like Even Worse or the Mad or Antidote, all those bands had women or people of color in them, but we just sort of gloss over that part of their stories. So I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought about getting more granular about it with hardcore, as opposed to punk proper.
JAMES: Well, I would disagree that I have more influence or conversation around punk. I had complaints about the Afro-Punk movie that it was too hardcore [laughs]. Most of my experience under the punk umbrella is in hardcore. I saw Gorilla Biscuits more times than I’ve seen the Casualties. But even in the film, it’s like, who do I have that are somewhat known people: It’s Djinji Brown [from Absolution], it’s Chaka Malik [from Burn and Orange 9mm]. I would have to look at the box to remember everybody, but Cipher is clearly a hardcore band, and Matt Davis’s band, Ten Grand, was hardcore in that pre-screamo kind of way. But there was very little mohawky punk stuff.
Maybe it’s the way that the film was subsequently marketed, but obviously they were going with clips of Fishbone or other artists that I maybe don’t necessarily look at as “hardcore.” So maybe that was it.
JAMES: Yeah. You know, it’s funny because Angelo [Moore from Fishbone] has exactly one thing to say in my movie, which is, “No longer can you say I’m white. Look at motherfucking Bad Brains” [laughs]. But from a marketing standpoint, punk has always been easier to market because we know what that means. But you and I and anybody who has ever been involved with hardcore knows how difficult it is to talk about hardcore outside of hardcore. So for that reason, hardcore has been kind of safe; it has remained pure in a certain way. Because capitalists haven’t figured out a way to sell it at Target.
This is sort of leading into the next question, because I did want to talk about Afropunk’s sort of “capitalist” changes as an organization, and how you eventually left. But I really want you to walk me through this moment I read about that seemed like a breaking point for you: You mentioned that during the fourth Afropunk Festival, a band you were watching started playing a cover of [Buju Banton’s 1992 single about killing gay men] “Boom Bye Bye.” Walk me through that. Afropunk is still your baby. You’re still involved. You see this happening, and what is going through your mind?
JAMES: Well, the whole fourth Afropunk Festival was really out of my hands. To just even critique myself, I moved to L.A. that year. I was kind of burned out from just being “the Afropunk guy”—like, I wanted to have an identity outside of being this person who could get people shows or whatever, so my partner [Matthew Morgan] was really taking the reins. That was the year that we had this successful South by Southwest, we had a successful CMJ, it’s becoming more “legitimate”—you know, in scare quotes. So he had arranged something like $150,000 in sponsorship that year, which was unheard of because the year before we were, like, making copies at Kinko’s. It was a totally different thing. But it became very clear to me very quickly that the focus was on how to get more sponsorship next year. It was like, “We have to get more people to come. We can’t do what we’ve done in the past where it would be like 300 people at the gig because a sold out gig at CBs is not worth $150,000 to a sponsor.”
There were a lot of fights about what we were doing and who we were programming. The festival was ten days, but the actual core of the festival happened for four days in the Brooklyn Academy of Music parking lot—and two of those days were all hip-hop. Like, clearly I don’t have an issue with hip-hop. But I did say, “There are six hip-hop festivals in New York. Why are we becoming another one?” So I already felt out of control when I showed up, but I tried to put my best foot forward and I tried to be a good face for the company. I had to look on the bright side: It was the first Afropunk Festival that was all ages; it’s the first one that was free, and there was a skate park that we built. This is rad, there are Black kids from Brooklyn just skating here, you know?
Anyway, one of the many live hip-hop bands were performing, and I am coincidentally standing next to two queer women, a couple of friends of mine. Somebody had already said something homophobic in a previous band, so it was already there in the back of my head, and then this band on stage starts doing a medley of dancehall songs. One of them is “Boom Bye Bye.” I look over at my friends, and they’re like, “Nice.” I was just like, fuck man, this is not why I did this. This is the opposite of why I did this. Like, I talk about Black shit a lot, but I am very much of the belief that all oppressions are connected, and one thing I can say about myself with pride—even back when I was an idiot in Apple Valley—is that I have always advocated for queer people. So I don’t know what came over me, but I just walked up on stage. They were in the middle of a song, and as soon as the song was over, I grabbed the mic and I just dressed them down. I had to explain to the audience that if this is what you’re here for, then this is not for you. I really tried to nail home that this is not what punk rock is about. This is not what Afropunk is about. I remember looking out at the crowd and seeing [two of] my friends, who we call AP OGs—the original Afropunk community members—and they’re queer, and they’re wearing volunteer badges, and I’m just like, “This shit would not even be happening if it wasn’t for gay people.” I embarrassed [the band] and I embarrassed Matthew, my partner, but it was definitely something that I’m proud of. It was my last moment in Afropunk.
It’s a good last moment. I’m sure there was some uncomfortable conversation afterwards.
JAMES: He didn’t bring it up. I think the next year, I was still peripherally involved—I programmed the films for them when there used to be a film component to the festival—and [Matthew] was like, “If you want to come, just do me a favor and don’t get on stage” [laughs]. He knew it was right, it’s just that I’m sure he got some shit for it from the band or whatever. The ultimate irony is that Afropunk became this very queer space. There’s now completely new owners—it’s owned by the people who own Essence magazine—so I don’t know if it’s going to shift, but for all of the 2010s, that was a very queer Black space.
I also think that’s consistent with your sentiment that all bands are worthy of critique, which I know can be difficult when you’re advocating for a community and you may not want to critique your own community.
JAMES: In most genres of music, there are no opportunities for me to get on stage. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been in a band worth mentioning, because I’m just a regular audience member who believes in the virtues of punk, but I believe the hype, you know? That wasn’t even the first time I got on stage to yell at the audience or yell at the band or make some kind of statement.
A friend of mine reminded me of the first time she ever saw me, which was years before we met. It was at a random show at Gilman Street—maybe Fifteen or somebody was playing, a pop punk band. But there were all these tough guys there moshing and pushing people around because Integrity was supposed to play in Berkeley that night and the show got canceled, so they all went to Gilman. Imagine a pop punk band like Fifteen is playing and all these Integrity dudes are there, being extra aggressive. So I got up on the stage and screamed at them [laughs]. I did the same thing at More Than Music Fest. It was the same situation. I was like, “You’re fucking ruining it.” Or going to Earth Crisis shows with “Fuck Your Vegan Power” written on my arm—when I’m a vegan. But that’s not the kind of vegan I am, that’s not the veganism I want, where we’re forcing people with militant [positions]. So just believing the hype makes me believe that, yes, anyone is allowed to get on stage and say their piece, even if they weren’t booked to do that.
I wanted to ask you about this story I read about your daughter, when she was twelve. You said “she hadn’t felt any negativity from white kids in a number of years, but she did tell me more than one Black student has told her, ‘I’ve never seen a Black emo kid before.’” So I immediately thought about an essay I just wrote for a book that just came out called Negatives—which is a photobook about second- and third-wave emo—and how the crux of that piece was talking about how everything that’s ever been written about emo is critical of its whiteness, and yet, how one of its most principle figures, Pete Wentz, is Black. People on Twitter literally freaked out a few years back when he posted a picture of himself with his Black mom. Do you ever feel like there’s almost an unwillingness to see Blackness?
JAMES: I mean, we saw that when Beyoncé came out with the “Formation” record and the world was like, “Wait… she’s Black?” Like, obviously, they knew she was Black. But they didn’t know she was Black-Black [laughs]. With Pete, it’s clear that some of that has to do with his skin tone, and him having [straightened hair], and just passing—in much the same way that I passed. It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t want everyone to think I was white. It was just that I wanted to have emo bangs like everybody else. But when you’re in the spotlight like that, it would mean a lot to people of color for him to be advocating or repping his Blackness.
You’re bringing this up at an interesting time… I was just in Las Vegas because we had an opening at the Punk Rock Museum that kind of highlights the early years of Afropunk, as well as some of the Black and brown festivals that are happening today. But the reason we opened this weekend was because it was also the When We Were Young Festival—so there were thousands of emos who descended on Vegas, and I think something like 6,000 people came to the museum over those four days. So I was there all day on Friday, standing by the room, and when tours would come through, the tour guide would hand it over to me. And I got a sense of that scene that I never had before. These are people who are in their thirties, and I don’t know a lot of these bands—like Plain White T’s or whatever—but what I realized when we were talking to these people is that they don’t have the same punk values that I have, and that makes sense because they’re not coming into it from this underground space of outsiders. That generation grew up with emo on MTV or with an American Apparel on every corner. Emo was just another identity. You could just as easily have become pop or hip-hop. I’m sure a lot of those kids gravitated towards it because there is an outsider element to it, and I don’t want to take that from them. But their political empathy may not have been as strong, because a lot of these songs are about girlfriends and stuff.
So when I was giving the spiel, and talking about how eventually Afropunk got bought by a corporation, and how 100,000 people come to the festival now—most of the responses were like, “Oh, that’s great! Congratulations!” Because they came up on Warped Tour. I was like, “No, no, no, no!” It was like I had to re-explain punk to them, and say no, that’s not punk [laughs]. But how do you tell somebody who grew up listening to major label bands that major label bands aren’t punk?
Again, I’m coming from this very Frail level of what punk is. Like, do you remember the whole Ebullition/HeartattaCk [fanzine] thing against barcodes? I was waving that flag. I recognized that a lot of bands had barcodes [on their records]… Your band probably had barcodes…
Of course.
JAMES: And we were over here saying, “You guys aren’t punk because you have barcodes!” [laughs]. I mean, I could see the flaw, but also, in my heart I really believed it.
I’ve always looked at this stuff from the lens of a sixteen-year-old high school dropout, who had zero in family or financial support, who was basically told, “Get the fuck out of the house.” I often felt like a lot of these arguments were putting me in an untenable position, where it was like, I can’t do the things I want to do in punk without feeling like a sellout, but then if I get a “normal” job, I was a sellout working for the man. So what the fuck am I supposed to do?
JAMES: It’s definitely difficult in that the sellout question in punk is so wildly different from the sellout question in hip-hop—where a lot of these people were coming from the same economic backgrounds. Hip-hop was underground because it had to be; people weren’t taking it seriously. But its sound is palatable, it’s enjoyable in that way where the rhythm moves with your heart. Hardcore is disgusting [laughs]. You have to train yourself to understand what’s going on. So it’s not supposed to be for everybody. And that’s hard if you’re coming from a background where your parents aren’t paying for you to go to college or paying your rent. If we didn’t know at the time, we’ve since found out that many of our friends were on a trust fund or whatever. So I understand, and I’m not mad that artists are making money. But I also feel that once you’re in venues playing to thousands of people—it sounds like punk, it has some of the tenets of punk, there’s moshing and that kind of stuff, but it doesn’t feel the same. Like, I can’t get on that stage and yell at the crowd or the band. I [still] feel like that’s what punk is supposed to be about, that everyone in the room are equals. And that gets lost at a certain scale.
I get that. But I also feel like that underground has never gone away. It just lives a parallel life to everything that happens above it. At the same time, I think one of the reasons hardcore has been able to persist—and especially with the moment we’re in now—is because every now and then you get those blips where punk or hardcore goes above sea level. Everybody gets that glimpse of the hardcore dolphin jumping into the sky. And then a few people are gonna dive in after it because they want to see more of that. That’s how we grow, that’s how we don’t die.
JAMES: That’s the intro band. Like, some people’s intro band might be Thursday. Everyone has their first show. The book I’m writing right now, it’s very critical of the mainstream, but one of the takeaways is that the underground could not exist without the mainstream. Because the mainstream is constantly scooping, taking, stealing whatever it can from the underground, and the underground has to keep reinventing itself. It’s just a cycle, and it would be really boring if neither were happening.
In the beginning we talked about how this conversation has really been a life journey for you. We’ve also talked about how hardcore is bigger than it's ever been, but it’s also more diverse than it's ever been. I actually never dreamed that we’d get to this place, where I see representation across the board the way it’s happening now. But seeing all this, is there ever a point where you want to see your work feel unnecessary?
JAMES: Yeah. If you read interviews from the early 2000s, when I was still involved with Afropunk, there are definitely quotes where I would say we will have succeeded when Afropunk is irrelevant. I saw that from the beginning. The Afropunk “brand” becoming irrelevant to the punk scene is [the current organization’s] own doing. But weaving in your point about reaction, punk rockers don’t know what to do with themselves if they’re not reacting to something. Every movement within the punk scene, every piece of growth has been a reaction—whether it was straight-edge reacting to drugs and alcohol in the scene or Riot Grrrl reacting to the machismo in the scene. Even Martin [Sorrondeguy] from Los Crudos singing in Spanish was a reaction to his white fans, you know? But all of those reactions push the envelope and ask people to do something, to take a stance.
So Afro-Punk, the movie, was a reaction. Afropunk, the festival, being 20 years old, has entire generations of Black kids who grew up, found punk, and found Afropunk in the same breath. I still meet people to this day who are like, “I have always dreamt of going to Afropunk.” But then they go and they’re like, “Wait. This is an R&B festival”—and they walk away from that feeling like, “Fuck this.” So they go home and they start their own festivals. That didn’t just happen once; by my count, it’s happened twelve times. There are currently twelve Black and brown and POC punk festivals happening in this country and in Europe. I’ve talked to every one of the organizers—who incidentally, of the twelve, only two are not Black women—and all of them have been like, “Yes, I saw your movie when I was a kid, it blew my mind, and then I went to the festival and I was disappointed.” So in their reactions, personally, I got what I wanted times twelve. And they keep happening! New ones keep popping up, and these festivals couldn’t exist if they didn’t have bands to bring, and if they didn’t have audiences who wanted to see themselves represented.
The last thing I’ll say on that, and this goes back to your initial point, but if you remember, I feel like the thing a lot of Black and brown kids in the scene had in common was that we were not going to talk about being Black and brown. I don’t want to call anyone out specifically, but I don’t remember going to very many Black-fronted hardcore bands shows and hearing them talk about anything to do with race or their personal experience [as Black people]. And now I go to shows and what I’m witnessing is that the white kids in the audience who are there to see Soul Glo or Zulu or any of these bands—you have to come meet them where they are. Like, if you’re uncomfortable, that’s your bad, and that’s what’s so exciting. It’s not a novelty anymore. It’s like Los Crudos times infinity: I don’t even speak your language, but I have to come to you and listen to you scream in a language that I don’t understand. That’s what’s happening for every culture in hardcore right now.
For some reason, I always think about the song “Break Down the Walls” whenever I talk about this stuff. But this morning, I got a visual that I’d never had before, which was that for so many years I’d only ever heard the perspective from the other side of the wall. And now, more than ever, I feel like I’m finally getting the perspective that I wanted to hear from my side of the wall.
JAMES: I love that. I think that’s a beautiful analogy. I feel like I’m part of that puzzle. I don’t feel like I’m the Ian MacKaye to straight-edge or the Kathleen Hanna to feminism and punk, but I am a piece of this puzzle that has given permission to punks of color—and by extension, queer punks and women—to just be able to say, “We belong here, too, and we are no longer going to be silenced.”
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This interview was EXCELLENT!
This was such a good interview. I want to go watch the Afropunk movie again. RIP Matt Davis.