Dog Whistle Politics

midcan5

liberal / progressive
Jun 4, 2007
12,740
3,513
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America
Want to understand America today, read it.

Preface: LEARNING ABOUT RACISM AT HARVARD LAW

"Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and shari a law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today-and the crisis of the middle class-simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.

I initially sketched the ideas elaborated here in the Sixteenth Annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society, delivered at New York University in the fall of 2011. The professor honored by the lecture series, Derrick Bell, passed away less than a month before the lecture he had invited me to deliver. You may have heard of him . Leading up to the 2012 election, a rightwing media outfit promised a "bombshell" about President Barack Obama. It turned out to be a grainy video of Obama as a student at Harvard Law School introducing Bell at a rally, and then giving him a hug. The warm clasp, media provocateur Andrew Breirbart's group claimed, symbolized Obamas full embrace of an intellectual leader they described as "the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory [that argues] that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress 'people of color.'"

From: 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/opinion/alabama-puts-up-more-hurdles-for-voters.html
 
"Dog whistle politics" is an invention of bigots who can't find anything to complain about. It's almost as unproductive as Obama's "racism is in our DNA" comments. The only possible remedy for a dog whistle that no one can discern is to silence the whistler. Bigots live to silence any criticism of their bigotry.

"Dog whistle" is also a strategy that can be turned around on you. The term "middle class" is often used as a dog whistle. We don't have a class system in America, people are free to move from one class to another through their hard work, talent and skill. When you hear a liberal going on about how the "middle class is suffering", it's dog whistle code for "you need socialism to right the injustices of your suffering." Another one is "living wage" ...dog whistle for "you need socialism to right the injustices of your suffering." Then there is "social justice" ...dog whistle for hate the police and disrespect the laws of old white men. "Black lives matter" ...dog whistle for "white lives don't matter!"
 
Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism.

When a group of people notice that government is not serving them and begin to fight back then those in government and their cronies are threatened. They pull out the guilt BS. False accusations of racism have become very popular ever since a large number of white people voted for a black man for POTUS. It would be ironic if those hurling these accusations had a sense of humor.

Anyway. Hostility toward government is what all intelligent people, regardless of their race or color or whatever identifier you wish to attach, do when government is serving itself rather than the people. This dog whistle nonsense is just that. Nonsense. Those who buy into it are the same losers who buy into the idea that government is the answer to everything.
 
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Want to understand America today, read it.

Preface: LEARNING ABOUT RACISM AT HARVARD LAW

"Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and shari a law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today-and the crisis of the middle class-simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.

I initially sketched the ideas elaborated here in the Sixteenth Annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society, delivered at New York University in the fall of 2011. The professor honored by the lecture series, Derrick Bell, passed away less than a month before the lecture he had invited me to deliver. You may have heard of him . Leading up to the 2012 election, a rightwing media outfit promised a "bombshell" about President Barack Obama. It turned out to be a grainy video of Obama as a student at Harvard Law School introducing Bell at a rally, and then giving him a hug. The warm clasp, media provocateur Andrew Breirbart's group claimed, symbolized Obamas full embrace of an intellectual leader they described as "the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory [that argues] that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress 'people of color.'"

From: 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/opinion/alabama-puts-up-more-hurdles-for-voters.html
The specialty of the Right
 
"The specialty of the Right"

And something they cannot face honestly. "Let's start with an open secret: Republicans rely on racial entreaties to help win elections. In 2010, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, acknowledged that "for the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South."! Steele was echoing the remarks of another head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman. In 2005, he used a speech before the NAACP to admit that his party had exploited racial divisions, and had been wrong to do so. "By the seventies and into the eighties and nineties:' Mehlman said from a prepared text, "Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong,">

These apologies at once confess to racial pandering and also implicitly promise to sin no more. This is a promise that the GOP will struggle to fulfill, for this party is now essentially defined by race: it is almost exclusively supported by and composed of whites. In the 2012 presidential election, 88 percent of the voters who pulled the lever for the GOP candidate were white.' That means that whites made up roughly nine out of every ten persons who threw in with Mitt Romney. Even more startling, among state-level elected Republican officials nationwide, 98 percent are white." Notwithstanding some prominent minority faces pushed to the fore to suggest otherwise, this is a party of white persons.

Yet this open secret receives surprisingly little attention. From conservatives, there's the occasional mea culpa, but much more typically there's a firm insistence that the GOP does not notice race, followed by the outraged retort that any suggestion otherwise is not only unfounded but a contemptible playing of the race card. From the Democratic Party, there's a resounding silence. Even from liberal commentators there's only murmured objections.... " p 1, 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López
 
The OP can't seem to decide his position. First he suggests the right is engaged in coded racial messaging, then he argues that they are opening pandering to racial groups.

Maybe he should read another book.
 
The OP can't seem to decide his position. First he suggests the right is engaged in coded racial messaging, then he argues that they are opening pandering to racial groups.

Maybe he should read another book.

It's because Ben Carson is #2 behind Trump for the GOP nomination.

They don't have a 'magic negro' to run this time... looks like it might be Hillary if she can keep from getting herself indicted. If not her, it's gonna be an old white man. Hillary is lukewarm at best with blacks, she ran a somewhat racist campaign against Obama... pioneered the Birther Movement. Oh, she'll go on Oprah and slobber all over Whoopie on The View... talk like she's black to a black congregation in the South... and she'll win a chunk of the black vote who seem to only know how to vote for a democrat.

But Ben Carson spells trouble and midcan knows it. Even if Trump wins the nomination, he could very easily tap Carson as his VP. A black man on the GOP ticket is something that scares the sheets off midcan. Time to roll out some propaganda to head this thing off at the pass. Because if the GOP can pick up 20% of the black vote, the Democrat can't win and midcan knows it.
 
Racism has gone so deep into the psyche of Americans, especially conservative Americans, they do not even see it and instead use the 'race card' as a deflection. Amazing how people can be so easily programmed. Below is a bit of an answer for those who can still see.

"LOPEZ: You know, for me, I heard this the speech and the end, and I thought about the way that it seemed connected to a strain of American conservatism that holds that the "real racist" is he or she who brings up race first, brings it up directly and says that it must be considered. It stems from the idea of colorblindness -- a once-liberal idea that essentially held that our race or ethnicity was not all that defined us but we still need to be mindful of how race continues to shape our lives, our options."

University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe’s very telling resignation speech

"The protesters at this school are saying we are concerned about and we must confront the great moral outrage of racism. And [in this section], the president is saying that we must worry about declining standards of etiquette.

Rather than address the substance of the students' concerns or the structure that put the students in the position that they felt they had to engage in protests, the president is criticizing them for protesting loudly and, I guess, shutting down their football games. And right there, you see the kernel of the problem on this campus. The university president fails to understand the circumstances the students are contending with and essentially dismisses them or, until his resignation, his obligation to listen to them and address them because the students did not ask nicely, they were not dressed in their Sunday best.

In some ways, this kind of fundamental misunderstanding is understandable.

There is a stereotype of African Americans being threatening, and that is embodied in the president’s language, his use of words such as “intimidation.” There is also revisionist myth making about civil rights protests that asks or at this point virtually allows some of us to only look back on them in this odd way. You hear people say things like 'look how neatly dressed they were, they were so polite.'"
 
I thought this interesting and relevant. 'Racial climate at MU: A timeline of incidents so far this fall'

Racial climate at MU: A timeline of incidents this fall

A 'magic negro' - if you wanted an example of a dog whistle there is no need to look very far is there?

.

In March 2007, American critic David Ehrenstein used the title "Obama the 'Magic Negro'" for an editorial he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, saying that:

He's there [Obama] to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.[12]
 
David Ehrenstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ehrenstein was born in New York City. His father was a secular Jew with Polish ancestors, and his mother was of African-American andIrish descent.[1] His mother raised him in her religion, Roman Catholicism.[1] He attended the High School of Music and Art (different from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts)[1] and then Pace College (now Pace University). He now lives in Los Angeles. He is openly gay.[2]

His writing career started in 1965 with an interview with Andy Warhol which was published in Film Culture magazine in 1966. Ehrenstein wrote for Film Culture until 1983. During the 1960s he also wrote for December and the Village Voice. In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles with his partner Bill Reed and began work as a film critic and entertainment journalist for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and also wrote for Film Comment and Film Quarterly during this period.

So... the racist "dog whistle" originator of the phrase as it pertains to Obama comes from a flaming-hot-big-fat-gay-liberal. HOWEVER... to illustrate my devout respect for people of all persuasions and political affiliation... let me add this in his defense...

The term originates, fairly enough, with the film industry of which Mr. Ehrenstein is intimately familiar. It's not intended to be a racist term, it's just a term used in film...

Magical Negro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Magical Negro is a supporting stock character in American cinema who is portrayed as coming to the aid of a film's white protagonists.[1] Magical Negro characters, who often possess special insight or mystical powers, have long been a tradition in American fiction.[2]

Spike Lee, while discussing films with students at Washington State University and at Yale University, said he was dismayed at Hollywood's decision to continue using the premise; he noted that the films The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance used the "super-duper magical Negro".[3][4][5]

Critics use the word "negro" because it is considered archaic, and usually offensive, in modern English. This underlines their message that a "magical black character" who goes around selflessly helping white people is a throwback to stereotypes such as the "Sambo" or "Noble savage".[2]
 
Racism has gone so deep into the psyche of Americans, especially conservative Americans, they do not even see it and instead use the 'race card' as a deflection. Amazing how people can be so easily programmed. Below is a bit of an answer for those who can still see.

"LOPEZ: You know, for me, I heard this the speech and the end, and I thought about the way that it seemed connected to a strain of American conservatism that holds that the "real racist" is he or she who brings up race first, brings it up directly and says that it must be considered. It stems from the idea of colorblindness -- a once-liberal idea that essentially held that our race or ethnicity was not all that defined us but we still need to be mindful of how race continues to shape our lives, our options."

University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe’s very telling resignation speech

"The protesters at this school are saying we are concerned about and we must confront the great moral outrage of racism. And [in this section], the president is saying that we must worry about declining standards of etiquette.

Rather than address the substance of the students' concerns or the structure that put the students in the position that they felt they had to engage in protests, the president is criticizing them for protesting loudly and, I guess, shutting down their football games. And right there, you see the kernel of the problem on this campus. The university president fails to understand the circumstances the students are contending with and essentially dismisses them or, until his resignation, his obligation to listen to them and address them because the students did not ask nicely, they were not dressed in their Sunday best.

In some ways, this kind of fundamental misunderstanding is understandable.

There is a stereotype of African Americans being threatening, and that is embodied in the president’s language, his use of words such as “intimidation.” There is also revisionist myth making about civil rights protests that asks or at this point virtually allows some of us to only look back on them in this odd way. You hear people say things like 'look how neatly dressed they were, they were so polite.'"
Idiot. If your race is holding you back, the problem is between your ears. There are plenty of successful minorities. It isn't the right wing that turns people into helpless victims, it's what the left does for power and control.
 
Want to understand America today, read it.

Preface: LEARNING ABOUT RACISM AT HARVARD LAW

"Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and shari a law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today-and the crisis of the middle class-simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.

I initially sketched the ideas elaborated here in the Sixteenth Annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society, delivered at New York University in the fall of 2011. The professor honored by the lecture series, Derrick Bell, passed away less than a month before the lecture he had invited me to deliver. You may have heard of him . Leading up to the 2012 election, a rightwing media outfit promised a "bombshell" about President Barack Obama. It turned out to be a grainy video of Obama as a student at Harvard Law School introducing Bell at a rally, and then giving him a hug. The warm clasp, media provocateur Andrew Breirbart's group claimed, symbolized Obamas full embrace of an intellectual leader they described as "the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory [that argues] that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress 'people of color.'"

From: 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/opinion/alabama-puts-up-more-hurdles-for-voters.html
 
Want to understand America today, read it.

Preface: LEARNING ABOUT RACISM AT HARVARD LAW

"Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and shari a law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today-and the crisis of the middle class-simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.

I initially sketched the ideas elaborated here in the Sixteenth Annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society, delivered at New York University in the fall of 2011. The professor honored by the lecture series, Derrick Bell, passed away less than a month before the lecture he had invited me to deliver. You may have heard of him . Leading up to the 2012 election, a rightwing media outfit promised a "bombshell" about President Barack Obama. It turned out to be a grainy video of Obama as a student at Harvard Law School introducing Bell at a rally, and then giving him a hug. The warm clasp, media provocateur Andrew Breirbart's group claimed, symbolized Obamas full embrace of an intellectual leader they described as "the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory [that argues] that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress 'people of color.'"

From: 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/opinion/alabama-puts-up-more-hurdles-for-voters.html
Poverty causes black people to resort to unhealthy methods for sustenance worldwide. Poverty is the immediate cause of the black man's predicament. I am talking generally. And that's what the whistling is about: crime etc.
 
Poverty causes black people to resort to unhealthy methods for sustenance worldwide. Poverty is the immediate cause of the black man's predicament. I am talking generally. And that's what the whistling is about: crime etc.
And Democrat controlled environments ensue more of the same. A rising tide lifts all boats.
 
Races are inherently different. Black folks are generally less hard-working and less intelligent not because of evil lefties or racist righties, but because of evolution. It does no good to scream that it's anyone's fault, including black people. To say blacks will be equal to whites "if only they'd try harder" is not accurate. Nor is it accurate to say that blacks will be equal to whites "if only whites would stop being racist jerks." Both are false.
 

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