ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that “discoveries” like this are only revelatory because, over the past thirty years, understandings of racism have become decreasingly psychosocial and, insufficiently attuned to the complex, contradictory, and often transient role racism plays in people’s lives. Put crudely much of the sociological and criminological work on racism—and especially that which is victimological in its emphasis—tends to predict too much racism among certain sections of the working class and too little in other, less deprived sections of society. The tolerant resident of the sink estate is lost from view along with those who, but for their affluence and erudition, would be easy to dismiss as unashamedly racist. This causes several problems. The chapter explains why the problems were less of an issue for the psychoanalytic and psychological work that attended to authoritarianism just after the Second World War.
