'Black this, black that': racial insults and reported speech in neighbour complaints and police interrogations

We examine the location, design and uptake of reported racial insults and abuse across two interactional sites: telephone calls to UK neighbourhood mediation centres and police interviews with suspects in neighbourhood crimes. In the mediation data, talk about ethnicity and racism was formulated almost exclusively in 'reported speech', as a listed complainable item about neighbours rather than as the reason for the dispute. In the police data, suspects reported racial insults as counter-complaints against other parties, and police officers quoted insults reported in witness testimony as part of their interrogation. We found systematic, oriented-to practices for constructing and reporting racial insults, involving pairing national or ethnic identity categories with another word (for example, 'Paki bastard', 'gypsy twat', 'bitch Somali'). Although speakers often 'edited' insults ('nigger this', 'white that'), they nevertheless maintained two-word formulations, indexing the swear-word and stating just the ethnic or national category. Speakers further oriented to the 'two-wordedness' of racial insults in their carefully managed use of one-word formulations. Insults regularly contained locative phrases (for example, 'fuck off back to your own country') and generalizing devices (for example, 'and stuff'). Finally, we found a continuum of response types, from explicit second assessments done in ordinary talk, to minimal but aligned acknowledgements in mediation calls, to no affiliative response in police interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the impact and relevance of racism in everyday life, as well as providing insights into the sorts of daily conflicts that occur between neighbours, as these are recounted in two institutional settings.