Interactional approaches to discrimination and racism in everyday life

Everyday interaction can be a source of pervasive racism and is therefore an important context for exploring racism and prejudice. This chapter highlights the role that everyday interaction plays in perpetuating or resisting racism by reviewing the insights of interactional approaches, such as membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA). We show how these, and related, approaches reveal how racism and discrimination are constructed in language and social interaction, for example through covert and overt references to race, ideological functions of discourse, denials of racism, and negative evaluations of minority groups. This review highlights the benefits of language and social interaction as a lens through which to understand racism and discrimination as the accomplishments of mundane social practices.