I did not know, for instance, RAR was crucial to a political movement against a racist National Front campaign in England gaining popularity at the time. RAR galvanizes elements of the punk and ska and reggae and new wave communities into a thriving social movement that culminated in an east London Woodstock-like event, drawing over 100,000, including on the bill over 40 bands, and contributing significantly to the defeat of the NF agenda in the general election of 1979.
Nor did I know the intellectual force behind the NF movement came from Enoch Powell, infamous for his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968, a prominent racist political figure in Britain from the 1960s to the 1990s, a classics scholar no less, maybe the British version of William F. Buckley jr., and staunchly hostile to immigration as a threat to the ethno-nationalist (read: racist white) identity of Great Britain. Powell spewed another version of the replacement theory ("In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man"), and inspired more conservative elite panic over post-WW2 migrations of imperial subjects of the British empire to the metropole, and called for forced deportation of immigrants.
So another historical episode ringing a lot of bells with the illiberal extremes of now; including violent anti-immigrant hysteria and conservative elite panic over democratic reforms and formerly colonized and still discriminated against groups clamoring, justifiably, for more civil rights.
Nor did I understand what a pivotal role classic rock played in inspiring the RAR movement. Both Eric Clapton ("The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don’t belong here, we don’t want them here.") and Rod Stewart ("This country is over-crowded. The immigrants should be sent home.") made incendiary public statements in support of Powell's candidacy for Prime Minister in the late 1970s. Clapton's racist rant at a show in 1976 is credited with launching Rock Against Racism.*
RAR's development centered around this "militant entertainment" fanzine called Temporary Hoarding (lots of cut and paste stark graphics and situationist like sloganeering; looked better than most zines) and, crucially, multiplying small cell groups of RAR music event organizers sprouting up all over Britain and Europe and eventually all around the world; building up over 200 local RAR groups between 1976 and 1982. They'd pull a few bands together, calling the shows "Carnivals Against Racism," and bring together antiracist and antifascist young people.
All the talking heads behind RAR and Temporary Hoarding that appear in the documentary keep it simple. The story Red Saunders, a photographer and RAR founder, a kind of righteous John Belushi character in the '70s and Baby Gramps as an elderly talking head in the doc, is direct action simple: The NF was inspiring bullying parades of Union Jack-wearing white racists marching through West Indian and Pakistani neighborhoods and triggering increasing street violence against non-white people all over Great Britain. RAR didn't like the racist violence and figured they were not alone. They intrepidly organized antiracist and antifascist music fans, music fans opposed to the NF agenda, white and Black, West Indian, Pakistani, and other foreign immigrant groups, bringing them together to organize more RAR music events. They rallied bands and artists to play these events that opposed the violent racism of the NF: The Clash, Tom Robinson, X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse, The Specials, The Jam, Dennis Bovell, Linton Kwesi Johnson, the Fall, Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Gang of Four, Mekons, Delta 5, Au Pairs, Misty in Roots, Aswad, etc. Impressive class of '77 list. And Pete Townshend of The Who showed up for the classic rockers. All these people come together in RAR shows, which raised public awareness that antiracists, standing together, unified, overwhelmingly outnumbered the violent racists.
They didn't vanquish the racists for good, of course, but they contributed to a political defeat of anti-immigrant racism in Great Britain at its wolfish extremes. Powell loses to Thatcher, which brought its own set of reactionary politics but the NF agenda was pushed out of mainstream politics. In comparison with Hitler's Germany or the techno-fascism of Japan in the late '30s, and other catastrophic spasms of reactionary violence, here is a humble victory against racism and fascist violence in the modern culture wars organized, successfully, with music. Yay, our team!
Admittedly, as a pure musical document, even the most exciting moments, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, are little more than a tease. The musical performances are secondary to the RAR story I share above, naturally. Still, I found the coda of Tom Robinson's "Winter of '79" at the mammoth RAR event at Victoria Park touching. And the doc makes a case for the new waver band 999 being underrated. I'm not sure they're right but I like it as a revisionist proposition. Maybe they are? Now I gotta listen to some more 999, which is something music documentaries are supposed to do.
So Rubika Shaw's documentary, White Riot, does that and tells a still relevant story about the culture wars, fascist violence against multicultural reality and protesting for peace in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Good story.
*- This is also a time, 1976-1979, Powell on the rise, when David Bowie is quoted to have said, "I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader" and was accused of throwing a Nazi salute during a publicity event. But at the same time was talking in the press about how Britain needed some strict right wing conservatives to take over and clean up the moral mess liberals have generated, presumably including indulgent libertines like himself. Being provocative, transgressive, was the coin of Bowie's androgynous alien glam rock realm and so a bit of a red herring in this discussion. By the early 1980s he was renouncing all his former remarks glamorizing fascist authority as drug ravings and pointing out his lifelong apolitical multicultural anti-violence bonafides, plays with Nile Rodgers, etc. Not his best moments.
*-Syd Shelton, photographer, put out a book about RAR in 2023. Haven't read it yet.