If W.E.B. Du Bois could call himself black, then I could be white. Fuck it.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2019-07-23 01:14Z by Steven

The only tribe I’d ever identified with was the punk rock scene. The few kids up north I had punk rock in common with also happened to be white, and soon I was the half-white kid who hung out with the whites. I’d been mistaken for Italian in New York and New Jersey before, and I’d always corrected whoever said it. I had read about Creoles, who must have looked like me, and I thought about how nice it must have been to live somewhere where everyone around you wouldn’t question what you are, because you’re all the same thing. Here, in prison, I was accepted as white, and as time went on, I seemed unable or unwilling to correct anyone on it, thinking it would complicate things. I was tired of the ambiguities my appearance presented and decided I wouldn’t tell anyone anymore about “my dark side.” If W.E.B. Du Bois could call himself black, then I could be white. Fuck it.

Leo Oladimu [Leo Felton], as told to Shawna Kenney, “I Was a Black Nazi Skinhead,” Narratively, November 12, 2018. https://narratively.com/i-was-a-black-nazi-skinhead/.

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I Was a Black Nazi Skinhead

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2019-07-22 22:02Z by Steven

I Was a Black Nazi Skinhead

Narratively
2018-11-12

Story by Leo Oladimu [Leo Felton], as told to Shawna Kenney


Illustration by Ben Passmore

When I went to prison I was black. By the time I got out 11 years later I was crazy, fascist and white.

A framed photo of American fascist Francis Parker Yockey glared down at me from a wall in my two-room studio in Boston’s North End. Next to me was a 50-pound bag of ammonium nitrate and other materials that I planned to make into package bombs and hand deliver to the offices of a short list of organizations I felt were at war with my culture.

Below me was the naked, athletic body of my 21-year-old comrade in arms. We’d just had sex, and I was as consumed by the tattoo covering her back as I was with the girl herself. Four black hatchets, bound together at the handles, formed the most beautifully rendered swastika I’d ever seen.

I hadn’t told her I was black. In a few months, though, she would learn my secret — along with the rest of the world — and I would begin my trip out of the most batshit-crazy ideological corner anyone has ever painted themselves into


Leo Oladimu in prison. (2014-04-18)

Read the entire article here.

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