The Nonracist Racist : A Discursive Psychology Approach to Anti-immigration Sentiment in Sweden

Immigration is one of the effects, one of the symptoms of the ill-functioning and outdated machine that is the elite. Immigration and asylum-seeking have been frequent topics in public debates for years. The number of refugees making their way from war-torn regions of the world to Sweden makes the citizen versus asylum-seeker dichotomy highly relevant for social psychology research about discursively constituted identities. That is to say: how social-categorizations, emotions and attitudes are created in text and talk. Today, public opinion is largely produced online, this makes it possible to explore the motivations, strategies and goals of “the nonracist racist” on Facebook. This study utilizes a dual-edged approach in that coding is done both from an inductive- and a deductive direction. It adheres to a discursive psychology approach and follows Potter and Edward’s (2001) situated, action-oriented and constructed features of discourse. These theoretical features inform the deductive coding and are contextualized using Sakki and Pettersson’s (2016) three representation of otherness with subsequent six discourses produced by the populist radical right. Findings indicate that cultural comparison constructing cultural incompatibility is the main rhetorical resource for constructing the citizen versus asylum-seeker dichotomy. However, this dichotomy is not the most dominant “us and them” construction by the “nonracist racist”. “The elite versus the people” is the most common “us and them” construction. It carries significant weight that the seemingly unfiltered expressions of hatred on anti-immigration pages on Facebook are more concerned with what “we” are doing wrong rather than what is wrong with any “deviant others”. It is more about an internal clash of moral compasses than it is about a supposed clash of civilizations. Along with the occasioned feature of discourse, this partly explains why anti-immigration advocates for example position themselves as victims or defenders