See no colour, hear no colour, speak no colour: Problematizing colourblindness in Los Angeles punk historiography

This article considers the collision of recent attempts to historicize punk’s complicated relationship to race with the personal investments of those ‘who were there’. In recent years, a narrative has taken hold in academic studies and museum exhibitions in which a predominantly Chicana/o punk scene coalesced in East Los Angeles, California, in the late-1970s directly in response to a supposedly closedoff Hollywood punk scene. In turn, participants in the Hollywood scene have taken umbrage at a narrative that they feel unfairly paints their scene as racist, in contrast to their own understandings of the scene as largely egalitarian. In defending their scene – and, crucially, their own legacies – against these supposedly unwarranted accusations, participants such as Brendan Mullen (1949–2009), proprietor of foundational Hollywood punk venue, the Masque, and Alice Bag, lead singer of influential band, the Bags, have employed a rhetoric of colourblindness that equates any discussion of race and racial inequality with actual racism, and that treats racism as primarily an individual character flaw rather than a systemic force. Thus, I argue, in their desire to control the history of the Hollywood punk scene, scene members such as Bag and Mullen, by attempting to discredit those whose remembrances of Los Angeles punk history clash with their own, obfuscate efforts to present a more nuanced understanding of the roles of race and racism within this history.