Eater.com editor Nick Solares is currently on leave after old pictures of him surfaced from when he was the lead singer of a skinhead punk band. Back then he was known as “English Nick,” and sang for Y.D.L. (Youth Defense League), who “while never explicitly racist,” otherwise sound fairly typical of hooligany, white nationalist-tinged oi! punk — songs about “taking back the streets” and so forth.
Solares disavowed his past in an apology post on Eater on Wednesday.
When I was a teenager in NYC in the 1980s, I became involved with the right-wing skinhead scene within the hard punk subculture. I am deeply ashamed by this, and I made the decision decades ago to disassociate myself from far-right politics and fully disavow the bigoted and dehumanizing ideologies they represent.
Even though it was the pre-internet age, there are plenty of records of who I was then, including photos and videos. Recently, records of me from that time — photos, video, and text — surfaced on an online messageboard, and some members of that community are circulating them to the media. The material connects me to the hateful and poorly informed beliefs that I held as a teenager, but which now I find morally reprehensible and completely disavow.
I was a British kid who wound up falling in with a group of white-pride American nationalists, and while I was part of this group I believed the hateful things that they believed, and helped spread the message. I was the lead singer of a popular hardcore band and fed off — and indeed contributed to — the darker impulses of the scene.
Plenty of photos are still freely available online showing Solares performing in front of Confederate and Afrikaner Resistance Movement flags in places full of racist symbology — none of which should be surprising to learn about a guy who admits he was involved in the skinhead scene.
It seems unfair to punish people for things they did when they were dumb teenagers, when they freely admit they were young and stupid (being a “dumb teenager” doesn’t just mean stupid isolated actions, it can also be entire stupid ideologies, as in this case), if it seems like they’ve learned from the past. It’s easy to see how a young, angry white kid could be drawn to punk, and then to the racist elements in punk, and eventually learn the error of his ways. Especially since that’s the basic plot of American History X.
I tend to take Solares at his word, but being that he apologized after the pictures started circulating, you can understand people wondering if the apology was 100 percent truthful or partly PR. It also seems entirely possible that he simply accepted the pictures as part of the public record and tried to forget them, and only addressed it reluctantly, once he had to, after people accused him of being a secret racist.
That cycle spun a few more times, when, after the apology, someone sent Vox editors a photo of Solares at a bar with Mervin Shields, the bassist for infamous neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver, which was uploaded to Google+ in 2012. Which could mean that either Solares was totally lying and has been a racist all along, or just that he just took a picture with a guy he used to know who happens to have some distasteful views, like you might with a redneck uncle. That’s the trouble with racism, it’s impossible to disprove.
Eddie Huang (famous restaurateur, author, and food writer) then wrote a response piece in Grubstreet, where he simultaneously recognized restaurants as a haven for people with troubled pasts, like Solares’, while calling out the food media for its snobby, Eurocentric tendencies:
Eater is an industry gossip site that feeds insiders snackable, by-the-minute macaron gossip that gives you a sugar rush and crashes your browser with ads. And Eater isn’t forgiving (it doesn’t do it anymore, but it used to doom struggling restaurants by putting them on “Deathwatch”). They have Ryan Sutton, who does an exemplary job with his reviews, but overall the site lacks depth and breadth and, above all, diversity: A look at the photos of dining rooms on Eater’s 38 Essential New York Restaurants shows a collection of curated restaurants promoting the same aesthetic monoculture. Eater is not all-powerful by any means, but the Solares story raises the question: Who is forming the identity of this industry? The people living in this city? The people cooking the food? The people serving us? Or the former skinhead assigning restaurant reviews?
Eater’s response has been curious, too. The site hasn’t responded publicly. Instead, editors invited the Eater staff to speak personally if they had questions. Robert Sietsema responded internally by saying, “I love and support Nick … we all have skeletons in our closet.” Helen Rosner, the site’s executive editor, compared it to shoplifting at the age of 23. There seems to be an unwillingness to examine potential bias or a willful misunderstanding of bias in his position and how it works.
But what makes it all worse is that one of the things Eater has done is help push a kind of restaurant consensus around that monoculture, which goes a little like this: notable chef, must speak English, must be media-savvy, must have design-driven dining room, must kowtow to the scene, must have small plates, must push diverse histories through French ricers, must have toast points, must love dogs. Eater’s not alone in doing this — plenty of others do, too (including Grub Street). But the result is a formula that has basically condo-ized New York’s food culture with some ultimately pretty conservative, even intolerant, values. Which means maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a penitent skinhead near the top of Eater’s food chain.
Pass the milk, this take is a little spicy for my taste. The gist of it seems to be “Eddie Huang willing to forgive Nick Solares for youthful mistakes, still thinks Eater sucks.” But hey, the criticisms are fair; connecting Solares to them just feels like it might be a stretch.
In any case, Eater’s editors apparently haven’t made a final decision on whether to punish Solares further. Barring any additional evidence showing that Solares’ involvement in the skinhead movement goes deeper than what he says it was, more punishment seems unfair. My guess is that he’ll be reinstated, but will probably be viewed with a little more suspicion going forward.
Which, actually, does seem like a fair price to pay for youthful dumbassery of this degree. You get photographed singing in front of some racist flags for some dudes with iron cross tattoos as a kid, you might end up having to deal with more sideways glances than the average adult. That seems fine. I’m just glad the most distasteful movement I was involved with as a youth was swing revival. (I had a bowling shirt with a martini on it, and oh man, I thought that thing was super sweet.)
