"We see below that in such cases the charge is often reversed: the person who accuses the other as racist is in turn accused of inverted racism against whites, as oversensitive and exaggerating, as intolerant and generally as `seeing racism where there is none', as Right-wing British newspapers like to put it (van Dijk, 1991). Accusations of racism, then, soon tend to be
seen as more serious social infractions than racist attitudes or actions themselves, e.g. because they disrupt ingroup solidarity and smooth ingroup encounters: they are felt to ruin the 'good atmosphere' of interactions and situations. Moreover, such accusations are seen to impose taboos, prevent free speech and a 'true' or 'honest' assessment of the ethnic situation. In other words, denials of racism often turn into counteraccusations
of intolerant and intolerable anti-racism."