“As long as I live, no reporter will be unemployed”: Race, Rap, and the Gang Violence Crisis in Swedish Media Discourses

• In Event: The Intersection of Media and Crime: Interrogating Crime Control, Violence, and Marginalized Identities

Abstract

In 2022, Sweden elected the most far-right government in its history. Facilitated by a moral panic around rising gang violence in the nation's urban peripheries, parties across the political spectrum invoked law-and-order rhetoric, asserting the need for ‘tough on crime’ measures, including record expansions of police and prisons. What may appear as a dramatic shift from “Nordic penal exceptionalism” resulting from the swing towards far-right authoritarianism, has long been unfolding. Since the 2013 Stockholm uprisings, media discourses have painted youth of color as a threat to the social fabric of Swedish society. This paper examines the role that public discourses around drill music have played in fueling the moral panic around youth, gangs, and gun violence. Analyzing media coverage of the murder of Swedish rapper Einár in 2021, I illustrate how the discursive entwining of the war on gangs with debates on the dangers of ‘gangster rap’ constructs violence and crime as functions of racialized, spatialized, and cultural difference. In this way, the crisis of gun violence is deployed to place the blame for the failures of the Swedish welfare state onto the shoulders of the working-class racialized communities who disproportionately experience the brunt of both interpersonal and state violence.

Author

• Jasmine Kelekay, Howard University