'It's not racist. It's common sense'. A critical analysis of political discourse around asylum and immigration in the UK

This paper looks at a political speech given by the leader of the opposition party during the run up to the UK elections in 2005. Using this speech as a starting point, we attempt to trace the path of racism within a text that makes explicit claims to being not racist . Drawing on a number of theoretical and methodological resources, this paper approaches the analysis by focusing on a number of conceptually heterogeneous elements that, in relation with each other, function to produce, re-produce and stabilize racism . One of the difficulties commonly encountered in social psychological work, we would suggest, is that an explicit statement of allegiance to a particular methodological and theoretical tradition can also result in a restriction of theorization to a particular level of analysis . That is to say, a methodological process that constructs a pre-given category, presets the criteria by which racism can be identified and fixes the level of analysis at which it can be studied risks ignoring the multiple points of contact at which racism can be made visible or made to disappear. The concern here it that such a process can work to reinscribe the very racisms we aim to disrupt.