ABSTRACT
What exactly are we supposed to take ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ to mean? What specific forms of ‘genetic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘institutional racism’ do we face today and what causes them? How do these different forms of racism manifest themselves in discourse? Is it possible to distinguish racism from adjacent or possibly overlapping discriminatory phenomena like antisemitism, nationalism, ethnicism and sexism? What analytical – including discourse-analytical – criteria, if any, can be used to set at least relatively clear boundaries between these different ‘-isms’? These are only a small number of questions that still await satisfactory answers, despite the vast amount of specialist literature in the areas of social science, history, philosophy and even discourse analysis (see Van Dijk et al. 1997 for a recent discussion).
