The violence of words: The conditions, construction and consequences of racist public discourse within a racialized social system

This book investigates the potential of racist public discourse to harm racialized individuals. In tackling this, this book uses multiple theoretical frameworks and data sources to highlight the need to pay attention to how we regulate racist public discourse. The first theoretical framework, Critical Race Theory, provides the foundation to look at the ways in which racist ideologies are the bedrock of post-colonial society, which created the conditions for racist public discourse. The second framework, Sociology of Knowledge, serves as a methodological framework to demonstrate how racialized knowledge is gained and transmitted to allow for the construction of racist discourse. By combining these two frameworks to investigate the consequences of racist public discourse, this book presents theoretical and empirical evidence to suggest the need to rethink the definition of harm as it pertains to racist public discourse. This topic is important given the heightened public discourse around race in social and political arenas where, increasingly, individual rights to freedom of expression are seen as being more fundamental than the impact of language upon marginalized groups. My hope is to add to the growing body of work that sheds light on the impact of harmful public rhetoric, to bring awareness of the harm caused, and highlight the need to regulate hateful racist speech.