The representations of racism in immigrant students’ essays in Greece

Abstract

Abstract Racism as a means for accomplishing homogeneity is at the center of this study which draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and focuses on descriptions of racist behaviors included in immigrant students’ school essays. We investigate how the dominant assimilative and homogenizing discourse operates in Greece and how immigrant students position themselves towards this dominant discourse. Our analysis focuses on the ways the immigrant students of our sample construct legitimizing and hybrid resistance identities. We demonstrate that legitimizing identities are found in the vast majority of the essays of our data due to the racist behaviors experienced by immigrant people. On the other hand, the explicit description of such behaviors appears only in few essays. We argue that in these few essays, via referring to racist behaviors of majority people against them, immigrant students manage to build hybrid resistance identities.