By James Windle  & Clara Schenk

This paper challenges the common portrayal of White Power music as evolving from, or being an element of, Oi! punk. The paper traces the histories of White Power music and Oi!, and analyses a sample of 268 Oi! songs for racist or fascist lyrics. It shows that, while some Oi! artists and audience members were involved in far-right activism, the subculture was not itself fascist or overtly racist. Many of those involved in Oi! took action against racism and far-right movements, and almost no songs included racist lyrics. The paper proposes two arguments. First, drawing from Worley, media and scholarly portrayals of Oi! as racist or fascist may represent the demonization of the working-class. Second, that White Power co-opted elements of Oi! does not mean that White Power music emerged from Oi!. Rather it likely emerged from first-wave punk at roughly the same time as Oi!. The central argument being that the White Power music scene, and the far-right more generally, is parasitical. It feeds upon the resources of larger scenes and subcultures, often harming them in the process

DEVIANT BEHAVIOR, 2025, VOL. 46, NO. 10, 1329–1345

By The Media Accountability Project

Media depictions of gun violence deeply influence how we perceive the individuals perpetuating or victimized in incidents, whether we feel safe, and how society collectively racializes crime and violence. The language that the media uses to describe individuals involved in gun violence incidents has evolved but remains deeply and problematically tied to race and other identities, as seen by the different connotations of “domestic terrorist,” “thug,” and “individual suffering from a mental illness” used to describe gun violence-involved individuals of different ethnicities and races. The impact of these depictions on the public can be profound, as differences in portrayals of gun violence, based on the race of those involved and where incidents occur, may reinforce harmful racial stereotypes and influence public support for gun reform policies. Most research examining gun violence in the media, 1-3 however, tends to overwhelmingly focus on deadly mass shootings and school shootings—fatalities that comprise only a fraction of firearm deaths—and overshadows more common forms of violence that routinely devastates cities across the United States, especially in Black and Latino communities. To better understand the way that media representations of shootings are influenced by race and place, Community Justice partnered with researchers at Northwestern University and the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS) to collect large portions of the U.S. media landscape on gun violence and analyze it using advanced computational and statistical methods. The goal of the project is to determine the extent to which racial differences among the individuals and communities where gun violence occurs create real, measurable differences in the way that incidents are reported and ultimately viewed. By understanding the relationship between race and media coverage of gun violence incidents, this Media Accountability Project aims to help news outlets, journalists, educators, and community stakeholders build more just

Chicago: Media Accountability Project, Northwestern University, 2024 14p.