Jim Goad writes:
As part of a pack of six white males in skinhead garb, I was acutely aware all morning and afternoon that some of the locals in this residential Queens neighborhood, especially the duskier ones, wouldn’t realize we were filming a movie. I couldn’t be certain that word wouldn’t get around that Nazis were terrorizing the neighborhood. It wasn’t entirely insane to think that at any given moment, one of us would get popped with a sniper bullet or be met by a dozen Latin Kings wielding baseball bats.
As we were moving from one location to another along the route of the chase scene, one of the other movie skinheads pointed out that a woman in a burkini was happily splashing around in a swimming pool inside the park.
The irony hit me that if this had been England in the 1980s, the Muslim woman would have had to worry about offending the skinheads. But this was America in 2016, and the skinheads, theatrical contrivance that we were, had to be careful not to offend the Muslim woman.
I lived in New York in the mid-1980s. Back then I don’t ever remember seeing a burkini or a hijab, and definitely never a burka. But these days in Brooklyn and Queens, you can’t spit out a pork-chop bone without it hitting a Muslim woman.
