Sinister racism creeping into SL...

I'm offended by "wife-beaters". Ban white t-shirts!

Even in context. I can't make myself give a damn.

I must have missed the context. Can you spell it out?

As far as I can surmise, boots + Oi = racist, right? Because some skinheads used to wear boots and say Oi?

And therein lies the problem.

Finished trolling?

I'm deadly serious. And you weren't trolling in your first post? Really? It has all the hallmarks of trolling and zero logic. You can't seriously tell me you've made it to adulthood with this kind of world view?

I'm inviting you to justify yourself, beyond labelling people who sell or wear Doc Martens racist. In context. Of course.

You've not provided any context. All that you said was that you saw someone selling boots, apparently using the word "oi" in the advert, and you think the word "oi" is racist (which it isn't) and that "Oi" is the name of a racist band rather than a non-racist musical subculture.

I give in. I was probably wrong.

You win.

That's precisely how i've been using it as well (not Jewish, but the word is just too perfect to not utilize it) ... wasn't even aware it can have some other context.

... i frequently wear shoes, too. and like to keep my hair short.

oi :/

(for the OP: since you have problem with some specific vendor selling wares which can altogether considered racist or whatever, might be more useful to rework that post to actually focus on that first, instead of starting with general introduction ^^;;

\o/

/me does victory lap of teh interwebs

http://www.garry-bushell.co.uk/oi/index.asp

Excerpted:

LET’S hear it for Oi! - the most exciting, despised and misunderstood youth movement of all time.

After 21 years we’re still winding up the mugs.

Back in 1981, Oi! managed to outrage all shades of polite middle class opinion, right, left and centre.

To this day the hippy Left perceive Oi as a kind of cultural cancer. To the establishment, Oi was an upstart from a tower block slum who wouldn’t keep in line. He was raucous and obnoxious, a human hand-grenade with a menacing disregard for authority.

At best, Oi bands and their fans were viewed as gurning barbarians gleefully pissing in the coffee house latte. At worst, they were seen as modern day brown shirts responsible for the riots in Southall, Toxteth and the rest. Either way, Oi was too hot to handle.

To the fast-talking wide-boys who adopted its name however, Oi was something else entirely. Stripped down to basics, it was about being young, working class and not taking shit from anybody. It was anti-police, anti-authority but pro-Britain too. A lot of the Oi kids liked a fight, and yeah, this is no whitewash, there was a far right element among them but this was 1980 when the far right were polling 15 – 20 per cent of the vote in inner-city wards. It would have been a miracle if there hadn’t been NF sympathisers in the audiences. What matters is that Oi never suffered from Nazi violence the way Sham 69 and 2-Tone had. The ag that blemished those early Oi! gigs was strictly football related.

Discovered in the summer of ’81 (well into its second wind) by a mass media rocked to its foundations by weeks of riots and youthful insurrection, Oi found itself on the sharp end of the sort of tabloid crucifixion usually reserved for the more macabre mass murderers. Corrupting its meaning, the same media immediately tried to bury it. Inevitably their version of events was as watertight as a kitchen colander in a tropical monsoon. They said Oi was for skinheads (but it was always more than that), that all skins were Nazis (and only a minority ever were) and that therefore Oi was the Strasser brothers in steel-capped boots (but the bands were either socialists or cynics…)

To really understand Oi, you had to be there….

Oi’s roots were in Punk, just as Punk’s roots were in the New York Dolls, but they weren’t the same animal. For starters Oi was the reality of Punk and Sham mythology. Punk exploded between 1976 and 1979 because stadium rock had been disappearing up its own jacksie for years. The album charts were full of po-faced synthesizer twiddlers and pretentious singers belting out meaningless pseudo-poetic lyrics.

Oi and DM are not racists. Many Skinhead aren't racists, but some are for sure. However there are also skinheads called SHARPs which means Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, they also wear DM and say Oi. Skinheads weren't initally a movement that had any racial overtones, it was about working class youth rebelling in the UK. It was about them being proud of their their working-class roots, and them rebelling against the class-system in the UK.

Well, you learn something new every day...

Thanks for the post Gabe (and for not shredding me any more) and sorry if I misunderstood certain things about Oi. But like any such movement, there are undesirable elements which get fixated on by the media and therefore are those that we remember in a negative light.

Btw, I'm not part of the hippy left, I just don't like bigotry which is what I thought this was.

Again apologies for any misunderstanding.

Interestingly enough, in the metropolitan area I grew up in, there was an oi boy anti-racist group. They would go around kicking in the heads of racists, skins or otherwise.

Loads of anti-fascists dress like that.

Well finally some valid & coherent counter arguments from people who know what I was getting at!

And can I just say that I've never been so glad to be wrong about something.

Good show on having the grace to a) admit you misunderstood b) actually learn something. So many people just go down swinging when these flamefests occur, instead of listening to each other. I know your intentions were in the right place - I think a lot of people are simply tired of all the "ist" and "ism" and "ic" words being thrown around at even innocuous things. True racism is a horrific thing and needs to be stamped out,sadly, this is the kind of stuff it leads to:

http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/ap/2006/04/28/ap2706954.html

Yeah really. I have several pairs of Docs and I wear em because they are comfortable and I like the look. I'm also not racist. People shouldn't be so racist against footwear...

Ok, I know you're joking about this one, but why post in support of someone who obviously misunderstood "Oi" as much as the OP??

You obviously didn't bother to check the facts/links either. It was never about the shoes or any piece of clothing for that matter. They were a minor part of the (supposed) association but picked up on by people who either don't know what they're on about or just can't see the wood for the trees.

See the posts By Ordinal, Fade and Gabe Lippman who seemed to be the only ones in this thread who knew anything useful on the subject. No offence.

Doc Martens may have been good for many things, but they never managed to improve my mile times much.

But how many ex-punks wore Nike Waffles besides me?

I've seen the phrase Oi used on TV (BBC no less). I've heard it in real life. And every time it's used just like "Hey!" So Id on't see an issue with Oi itself.

Doc Martens, again, nothing racist there. They're boots. That's it.

The combination of the two? I don't see any racist connection without a direct reference to the band, or any other racist movement. But in and of themselves, even together, are not racist.

Oh, and just to add tot he Skinhead thing, I don't know how prevalent it is in other parts of the world, but around where I live there are 2 kinds of skinheads. There are the typical racist group (always going to find them, kind of like cockroaches). And then there are teh ANti-Racist Skinheads (no idea why they adopted the skin-head, but go fig).

I had a good friend who was one of the anti-racist kind. If you said the N-word, or any other slur around him, you'd suddenly find yourself waking up on the pavement with a broken nose.

What I think all of this boils down to is that it really comes down to the *person*, not the clothes they wear or the things they say, but the decisions the actual person makes.

This was the part that made my blood run cold, and everyone seems to be overlooking the implications of this comment.

Can you say witch hunt?

Don't like the way someone looks? Put em on the list. Don't like what someone just said? Put em on the list. Don't like the house someone built on their property? Put em on the list. Don't like the way someone just looked at you? Put em on the list. Don't like......ect

As a left wing, bleeding heart liberal, I would expect to be put on that list by someone within a day.

OMG!! I got my hair cut short recently, wear boots, and use the word "oi" as well!! (but I'm american/irish)

I"M SOoooOO Confused!!!!

As has been stated before, you've got this backwards. The racists/neo-nazi/white-power "skins" adopted the look, not the other way around. Among the skins here in NYC, we tend to use the term "boneheads" to refer to the racist/etc idiots that are, thankfully, pretty rare here. Rare, and quiet because the rest of us "regular" skins (some folks refer to us as traditional skinheads, or trads. :hrug:: ) will happly kick the crap out of any boneheads that make their presence known in our town.



And that is the meat of it, right there. Any of y'all with more questions about skinhead culture can feel free to look me up in SL, or email me or whatever.

Proud to be a skinhead in RL and SL,
S

REally? That's good to know, thank you.

It's funny actually, I made it through about 90% of the posts before making my reply, then went back and saw the *next* post after the one I stopped at mentioned SHARPs (Forgot that was the term). Made me feel silly.

I'll say this though, if other SHARPs are like my friend, there aren't many that I would rather have at my back.