Taking racism seriously: sketching a future for discursive psychology of racism through a focus on anti-Black racism

Over the past three decades, the discursive turn in psychology has illustrated the social, political, and contextually sensitive nature of race and racism. In distinction to ‘mainstream’ psychological approaches which might treat race and racism as merely cognitive or socio-structural phenomena that influence our social lives, discursive psychological work has treated race and racism as embedded in our social life, with a concerted focus on how race and racism are oriented to and managed in our social interactions. In this paper, we identify the significant contributions of discursive research on race and racism in contrast to mainstream psychological approaches. We then outline ways of advancing the discursive psychology of race and racism through a focus on anti-Black racism to argue that discursive psychological studies can provide a situated investigation of race and racism through (1) prioritizing experiences and responses of Black people to racial encounters and policies; (2) demonstrating how anti-Black race-talk engages with the routinization of Whiteness, and (3) showing how aspects of socio-historical context inform the production and negotiation of race and racism. These will propel discursive psychological studies on race and racism to engage with broader contemporary psychological scholarship and provoke impactful avenues for future research.