ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to summarize, contextualize, and appraise Potter and Wetherell's paper. This chapter transcended several limitations of mainstream work on race attitudes, offering an important new framework for exploring processes of racial evaluation. It summarizes some key dimensions along which the traditional and discursive approach to race attitudes can be contrasted, capturing the basic elements of Potter and Wetherell's argument. It also outlines an alternative perspective grounded in the analysis of the everyday linguistic practices of racial evaluation through which attitudes are shown to be produced as an effect of participants' talk. Indeed, the technology of attitude measurement underpins a vast body of research on racial prejudice dating back to the early years of the last century. Here it shows a research conducted by the first author and colleagues in South Africa during final years of the apartheid system, which was broadly informed by Potter and Wetherell's work.
