Displacing xeno-racism: The discursive legitimation of native supremacy through everyday accounts of ‘urban insecurity’

Abstract

Socio-cultural approaches to fear of crime have suggested that responses to questionnaires may channel broader social attitudes towards other culturally-related topics which also shape the public meaning of ‘crime’, such as immigration. Building on this idea, this article uses a discourse analytic framework to examine how xeno-racist ideas, claims and positions are metonymically worked through everyday opinions about ‘urban insecurity’ as a crime-related construct. The analysis of open-ended interviews with ordinary citizens in Barcelona shows that the position of a ‘threatening Other’, typically afforded by the insecurity narrative, is pervasively constructed in xeno-racial terms, whether explicitly or by implication, but is rhetorically rejected on the narrative grounds of its alleged criminal acts. This xeno-racial version of the criminalized Other is itself managed in interaction as a sensitive topic through a set of deracialization strategies that displace rejection from the language of immigration towards culturally contiguous languages of incivilities, cultural differences and socioeconomic disadvantage. The article deepens the ideological versatility of discourses that subtly warrant the structural privilege of ‘natives’ vis-a-vis ‘immigrants’, thereby legitimizing a tenacious system of native supremacy.