James Spooner, like a lot of kids growing up in Southern California in the 1990s, was into punk rock. But unlike most of the kids in the scene, he's black. Sometimes, this posed a problem.
"I was in this tiny desert town that was pretty much all white, and the punk scene was very racist," he recalled. "You would go to shows and it was blatantly white power, swastikas, all of that."
But when he moved to New York during high school, Spooner found "a gang of black kids" just like him. For the first time in his life, "I could be who I wanted to be," he said. "[They] made it OK for me, you know?"
The fundamental contradiction of black kids feeling left out of rock — which from its very beginning was based on black music — has played a large role in the creation of Afro-Punk. And while there have been many black artists who have been embraced by white rock fans, from Little Richard to Sly and the Family Stone to the Bad Brains, the Afro-Punk movement has found fans bonding and creating communities, organizing shows and shooting films in a whole new way.
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