Belligerent shyness and puzzlement: a discursive analysis of ‘not racism’ and the post-racial on UK phone-in radio

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines some of the ways in which racism thrives at the very moment in which it is denied. Analysing phone-in radio calls in the UK which perform definitional disputes about the meaning of racism, I interpret how the idea of a colour-blind post-racial field is discursively established and protected. Using an anti-racist and race critical lens, the paper outlines connected features of the way in which racism is discursively defined as elsewhere. Drawing upon a particular characterization of the denial of racism as the circulation of ‘Not Racism’, within these calls I identify the twin themes of the establishment of the post-racial field through lament and puzzlement, and its enforcement, through counter accusations and the construction of anti-racism as hegemonic. Appropriate to this radio context, I find the nature of these utterances to be ‘dialled-up’ performative juxtapositions: persistent claims to being silenced whilst speaking, with a belligerent quality to the ‘shyness’ about racism.