Everyday politics, everyday racism: Censure and management of racist talk

Since the so-called discursive turn of the 1980s, a great deal of social psychological work has been directed at trying to deconstruct contemporary talk and text around ‘race’. Classic early work – notably that of Potter and Wetherell (1987) and Wetherell and Potter (1992) – used the topic of racism to outline many of the central methods and concepts of the discursive approach. At the same time, other scholars were drawing on work in classical rhetorical scholarship, sociology and political science to challenge some long-held theoretical and methodological assumptions concerning racism and prejudice in social psychology (e.g. Billig, 1988; Billig et al., 1988; Condor, 1988). These developments led to a rich tradition of work exploring race talk, which has sought to understand the ways in which exclusion continued to be legitimated in western liberal democracies characterised by an apparent norm against prejudice, and in particular against racism (see Augoustinos & Every, 2007; Goodman, 2014 for reviews).