Discourses of Deprivation and Ethnic and Racial Otherness

Abstract

This chapter discusses ways in which discourses and fear serve to establish a sense of community, while simultaneously erecting barriers to outsiders. Two discourses are discerned that reinforce the difference between "us" and "them": (1) a discourse of deprivation, deployed by the middle-class social workers, to distinguish themselves from the working class residents; and (2) a discourse of ethnic and racial otherness used by both the restaurant management and the visitors, who evoked collective fear and barriers for non-whites and Muslims. As the chapter shows, a mechanism of "ethnic leveraging" was brought into being, through which the white working class residents attempted to elevate themselves as a group by passing on the stigma of "being particularly problematic" to ethnic and racial others.