Washington Post Op-Ed: I was a ‘bad guy.’ But my whiteness meant I was never a threat.

I was a threat.

I was a violent, white-power skinhead for eight years of my youth during the 1980s and 1990s in Chicago. In those days, encounters with police were commonplace for me. Cops frequently harassed me for getting in fights and pushed me around when I made their shift more difficult. They threatened to make me take my dirty business elsewhere. They weren’t wrong. Though I feared getting locked up for the violence I was involved with and promoting, not once did I fear that my life was in danger. Why? Even though I was a “bad guy,” I was a white man in America.