system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did a shaved head become synonymous with the white power movement? Why are they called skinheads?
gpt
"Skinheads" is a subculture originating in Britain in the late 60s, it resulted from a split in the "mods" subculture and was formed from the more violence-prone "hard mods" portion of the subculture where the fashion was for guys to have shorter hair and a working-class style(as opposed to the "peacock mods" who wore more expensive clothes and weren't involved in gangs).

These "hard mods" had very short hair(less than half an inch long) resulting in the name "skinheads", in the following decades the fashionable length got shorter until "skinhead" really was a perfect way to describe the look.

Skinheads, like any very large group, had people who represented a wide range of views and beliefs, and there were both racist and explicitly anti-racist Skinhead groups. Racist political groups did see a jump in membership from Skinheads during the era of their popularity, during which racially-motivated crimes were also on the rise, in the media the perception that they were racist  won out over efforts of the anti-racist groups which for the most part has fixed in place the perception that skinheads are racist which leads to the circular-reinforcing logic of "if you are racist you should be a skinhead".