Research in social psychology and sociology has identified interlocking patterns driving racism in Britain and other white-dominated societies. The first of these is the racialised way in which people, especially those who identify as white, tend to conceive their own national community and therefore to evaluate immigrants and co-citizens. The second is the racialised distribution of power, which fuels perceptions of people of colour as less competent than white people. By linking people of colour to various physical, economic or cultural threats, political and media discourses periodically amplify latent, lower-level racism, transforming negative emotions such as pity and contempt into even more harmful ones such as fear and anger. Cooperative and friendship-inducing intergroup contact can go some way in reversing these processes, but it is frequently obstructed or undermined by racial segregation and negative contact.