Well since I was a kid there have been skinheads. This book is set in the late 80s and in Chicago in the late 1980s there was a lot of skinhead activity going on - just about every different imaginable kind of skinhead. I think people would sometimes just take whatever their own ideology was and say that they were that kind of skinhead. I know right now there's a lot of conflict in California between the nazi and the anti-nazi skinheads. I was reading in a British magazine today that there are Brazilian skinheads, so it seems to be kind of a global thing.
Skinheads are all over, but it started here.
It seems like disinformation. She embellished a little bit. Contemporary American anti-nazi skinheads have created a mythology and I don't know that it's entirely accurate. From the readings that I've done, the skinheads were part of the mod faction in Britain. You might expect American Skin to be a pretty violent novel.