More Things That Are Now “Racist”: Thor, Heavy Metal Music, Viking Cosplay

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According to a new study from Leeds Beckett University, Thor, heavy metal music and dressing up as a Viking are all racist because they reinforce oppression towards “ethnic minorities”.

Despite the fact that progressives have spent the last month lecturing everyone about how dressing up in “ethnic” costumes for Halloween represents a hateful act of cultural appropriation, we now learn that dressing up as a stereotypically white cultural figure is also racially insensitive.

According to Professor Karl Spracklen, “Folk metal’s obsession with warriors and cultural purity, displayed through tales of Vikings and dressing up as Vikings on stage, reduces belonging and identity in a muti-cultural, cosmopolitan society to a few exclusive myths. It is showing white men how to be white men and showing women and ethnic minorities their place in European society.”

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“The bands in the research are all trying to identify with some reputed folk culture that existed before modern times–a culture of pure white people, mono-cultural and mono-racial. In some bands, there is an explicitly racist purpose for their adoption of Thor’s hammers, Viking imagery and heroic pagan myths,” said Spracklen.

According to the esteemed professor, folk metal is also a toxic expression of white privilege which, “preserves an old-fashioned power structure where white, male Europeans are superior.”

“Folk metal serves as a comfortable leisure space for those that have lost power in recent decades: the white European, working class men who have faced challenges to their assumed privileges from women, globalisation, immigration and postmodernity. However, at the same time it should not be easily dismissed in this way, and I believe it remains central to the idea of heavy metal as a form of leisure that makes masculinity and whiteness the norm.”

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