The meanings we share: collaborations from systemic-functional linguistics to critical race studies

Abstract This paper explores the potential of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a critical tool for interrogating the discursive construction of race and racism in institutional contexts, drawing on data from a doctoral study of media discourse on racism in football in Brazil and England. Rejecting an approach that treats language and race as independent, parallel variables, the analysis treats discourse as both shaped by and constitutive of structural inequalities, with a particular focus on the ideational metafunction and the Transitivity System. In dialogue with Critical Race Studies (CRS), the paper demonstrates how dominant ideologies are embedded in linguistic choices that regulate the visibility of racialised experiences. By analysing who is given agency, who is backgrounded, and how experiential meaning is distributed, the study exposes the discursive strategies through which structural racism is sustained in supposedly neutral mediatic environments. The findings underscore the importance of semiotic scrutiny in revealing the sociopolitical operations of language and suggest that SFL provides a robust framework for CRS by enabling the analysis of ideological reproduction at the level of grammar. The paper positions this collaboration not as a merger of disciplines but as a dialogic exchange in which linguistic method and racial critique mutually enhance each other.