Chapter 2
Racist discourses of discrimination and assimilation in an antiracist corpus
Racist views against migrants are not only disseminated via hate speech, which overtly demonizes the
‘foreigners’, but also via antiracist discourse, which, although designed to fight racism, may end up reproducing
inequalities. This ambiguity is captured in the concept of liquid racism (Weaver 2016). To examine liquid racism in Greek public discourse, we have compiled an antiracist corpus (around
501.000 words). The aim of this chapter is to show how this corpus was created and to explore how racist views infiltrate
antiracist discourse. Adopting a critical perspective, and drawing on Halliday’s Systemic
Functional Grammar (1994) and on the discursive practices of Reisigl and Wodak’s
Discourse-Historical Approach (2001), we detected in our corpus two main discourses connected to racism:
discrimination and assimilation. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis, we
argue that antiracist discourse, which programmatically fights against racist views, usually ends up perpetuating racist
intentions and views, covering and reproducing inequalities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Approaching racist and antiracist discourse: From contradiction to coexistence
- 3.The Greek antiracist corpus
- 4.Methodological tools for critical analysis
- 5.Racist categories in the antiracist corpus
- 5.1Discrimination
- 5.1.1References to Others as a problem
- 5.1.2References to illegal/legal Others
- 5.1.3References to anonymous Others
- 5.1.4References to temporary Others
- 5.1.5References to inactive Others
- 5.1.6References to Others as victims
- 5.1.7References to Others as recipients of help
- 5.2Assimilation
- 5.2.1(General) references to integration/inclusion practices
- 5.2.2References to mitigated racism denouncements
- 5.2.3References to learning Greek as an L2
- 5.2.4References to migrants’ positive stance towards practices of integration
- 6.The quantitative analysis of liquid racism in the antiracist corpus
- 7.Conclusions
-
Notes
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References