Chapter 12 Discourse and Racism Teun A. van Dijk Introduction For most people, and probably also for many readers of this chapter, the notion of racism is not primarily associated with that of discourse. More obvious associations would be discrimination, prejudice, slavery, or apartheid, among many other concepts related to ethnic or "racial" domination and inequality dealt with elsewhere in this book. And yet, although discourse may seem just "words" (and therefore cannot break your bones, as do sticks and stones), text and talk play a vital role in the reproduction of contemporary racism. This is especially true for the most damaging forms of contemporary racism, namely, those of the elites. Political, bureaucratic, corporate, media, educational, and scholarly elites control the most crucial dimensions and decisions of the everyday lives of immi- grants and minorities: entry, residence, work, housing, education, welfare, health care, knowledge, information, and culture. They do so largely by speaking or writing, for instance; in cabinet meetings and parliamentary debates, in job interviews, news reports, advertising, lessons, textbooks, scholarly articles, movies or talk shows, among many other forms of elite discourse. That is, as is true also for other social practices directed against minorities, discourse may first of all be a form of verbal discrimination. Elite discourse may thus constitute an i mportant elite form of racism: Similarly, the (re)production of ethnic prejudices that underlie such verbal and other social practices largely takes place through text, talk, and communication. In sum, especially in contemporary information societies, discourse lies at the heart of racism. This chapter explains how and why this is so. Racism To understand in some detail how discourse may contribute to racism, we first need to summarize our theory of racism. Whereas racism is often reduced to racist ideology, it is here understood as a complex societal system of ethnically or "racially" based domination and its resulting inequality (for detail, see van Dijk, 1993). 145