Chapter 9
Dog Whistle Politics
On Sunday,
Jan.13, 2013, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Former Secretary of
State, General Colin Powell condemned the GOP’s “dark vein of intolerance” and
the party’s repeated use of racial code words to oppose President Obama and
rally white conservative voters.
Without mentioning names, Powell singled out former Mitt
Romney surrogate and New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu for calling Obama “lazy”
and Sarah Palin, who, Powell charged, used slavery-era terms to describe Obama:
POWELL: There’s also a dark — a dark vein of intolerance
in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that that they
still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that?
When I see a former governor say that the President is
“shuckin’ and jivin’,” that’s a racial era slave term. When I see another
former governor after the president’s first debate where he didn’t do very
well, says that the president was lazy. He didn’t say he was slow. He was
tired. He didn’t do well. He said he was lazy. Now, it may not mean anything to
most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word
is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with that. The
birther, the whole birther movement. Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this
kind of discussion within the party?
Powell added that the Republican Party is “having an
identity problem,” noting that its significant shift to the right has produced
“two losing presidential campaigns.” “I think what the Republican Party needs
to do now is a very hard look at itself and understand that the country is
changed,” he said. “If the Republican Party does not change along with that
demographic, they a going to be in trouble.”
Powell also called on Republicans to focus on a more
equitable and progressive economic policies that help middle and lower income
Americans, as well as immigration reform. “Everybody wants to talk about who is
going to be the candidate,” Powell said. “You better think first about what’s
the party actually going to represent.”
Dog-whistle
politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean
one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more
specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The phrase is only ever used as a
pejorative, because of the inherently deceptive nature of the practice and
because the dog-whistle messages are frequently themselves distasteful, for
example by empathizing with racist attitudes. The Dog-whistle is targeted to
white people.
Commonly-cited examples of dog-whistle politics include
civil rights-era use of the phrase "forced busing," used to enable a
person to imply opposition to racial integration without them needing to say so
explicitly; the state of Georgia's adoption, in 1956, of a flag visually
similar to the Confederate battle flag, itself understood by many to be a
dog-whistle for racism; the phrase "Southern strategy," used by the
Republican Party in the 1960s to describe plans to gain influence in the South
by appealing to people's racism; Ronald Reagan, on the campaign trail in 1980,
saying in Mississippi "I believe in states' rights" (a sentence the
New Statesman later described as "perhaps the archetypal dog-whistle
statement"), described as implying Reagan believed that states should be
allowed, if they want, to retain racial segregation; Reagan's use of the term
"welfare queens," said to be designed to rouse racial resentment
among white working-class voters against minorities; a 2008 TV ad for
Republican presidential candidate John McCain called "The One," which
observers said dog-whistled to evangelical Christians who believed Obama might
be the Antichrist; a Tea Party spokeswoman saying President Obama "doesn't
love America like we do," thought to be an allusion to Obama's race and to
the birth certificate controversy, and Republicans frequently emphasizing
Obama's middle name for the same reason; an aide to 2012 Republican presidential nominee
Mitt Romney saying Romney would be a better President than Obama because Romney
understood the "shared Anglo-Saxon heritage" of the United States and
the United Kingdom; former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and
2012 Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, and others, calling Obama
"the food stamps president" said to be a way of exploiting
stereotypes among racially resentful white voters who see food stamps as
unearned giveaways to minorities.
One group of alleged code words in the United States is
claimed to appeal to racism of the intended audience. The phrase "states'
rights", although literally referring to powers of individual state
governments in the United States, was described by David Greenberg in Slate as
"code words" for institutionalized segregation and racism. In 1981,
former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater when giving an anonymous
interview discussing the GOP's Southern Strategy (see also Lee Atwater on the
Southern Strategy) said:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger,
nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you.
Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that
stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things
and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And
subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying
that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously
sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract
than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than
"Nigger, nigger.”
The Dog-Whistles were becoming louder. We were
going to be hearing a lot of lies, and a lot of quasi-racist
dog-whistling about how Obama doesn't feel the same way about America as
"we" do. But it would get much
worse. As the campaign for the 2012 election got underway the “dog whistle”
became a bull horn.
While visiting England during the Olympics, one of Mitt
Romney’s "gaffes" had a
decidedly darker undertone, when an unnamed aide was reported by the Telegraph
to have commented that Romney would be a better President than Obama because
only he understood the "shared Anglo-Saxon heritage" that Britain and
America have.
This sort of statement is known in politics as a "dog
whistle". To most people, it looks innocuous, if a bit weird, but to its
target audience – in this case, racists – it reads as a perfectly clear statement
that Romney is better than Obama because he is white.
Not that this is anything new in the Republican party.
Consider Romney's "gaffe" just number 5 in the Top Five Racist
Republican Dog-Whistles of all time:
4. Barack Hussein Obama
Quick pop quiz: What's Barack Obama's middle name? Even if
you haven't read it from the line above, it seems pretty likely that you know
it's Hussein. Now, do you know John McCain's? (It's Sidney) What about Mitt
Romney's? (Trick question. Mitt is his middle name, and his real first name is
Willard. But even he forgets that sometimes)
There is a reason you know the former's but not the last
two. It's because reminding everyone that Barack Obama has, not just a scary
foreign-sounding name, but a scary, foreign and Islamic sounding name which is
the same as that nasty dictator plays really well with a Republican audience.
To his credit, John McCain never got on board with that
angle of attack, even going so far as to apologize for a radio commentator who
did. But that doesn't mean the Republican base has forgotten their President's
middle name.
3. Georgia's 1956 state flag
Less a dog-whistle, more a klaxon, this one. In 1956, the
state legislature of Georgia voted to adopt this as their flag: which is
awkwardly similar to the Confederate battle flag. You know, the one people
marched under as they went to war to defend their right to keep people in
slavery? That one. Now, Mississippi also has a flag which contains the
confederate one, but at least theirs was adopted in the 19th century. Georgia,
on the other hand, voted for theirs in 1956, and then proceeded to keep it
until 2001. And even when they replaced it, the new one still had the
confederate flag on it, albeit much smaller. It was only in 2003 that they
successfully de-racisted.
Even then, it still didn't stop being flown in the skies
of Georgia – it just flew in less of them. The city of Trenton, Georgia
(population 1,942) promptly adopted it as their official flag, and still use it
today. Not cool, Georgia.
2. Ronald Reagan and "States' Rights"
On the campaign trail in 1980, Ronald Reagan gave an
infamous speech in Mississippi, where he told assembled supporters that:
“I believe in
states' rights.... I believe we have distorted the balance of our government
today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution
to that federal establishment.”
It is perhaps the archetypal dog-whistle statement. To
most people, it sounds like a statement on
constitutional law. Yet to the residents of Nashoba
County, where the speech was held, it is a clear call-back to what many still
viewed as an illegitimate federal imposition: the civil rights agenda.
Desegregation was fought bitterly throughout the South,
and even drove the government to institute martial law in some areas.
Even worse, the Nashoba County Fair was very close to the
town of Philidelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists were shot
and killed in 1964.
In that context, saying "I believe in states'
rights" sounds an awful lot like saying that Reagan believed that the
decision as to whether or not to desegregate should be handed back to the
states – and if they decided against it, they should be allowed to. As New York
Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2007:
“Everybody watching
the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and
blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The
race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.”
He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when
politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places
like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the
blacks, we’re with you.
1. Where's the birth certificate?
The number one racist dog-whistle has to be the relentless
accusations that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US. Unlike the others, it's
one that has a point beyond propaganda – the "birthers" hope beyond
reason that they'll be able to prove he is of foreign birth, and thus render
him ineligible for the Presidency – but it serves that aim admirably as well.
The Guardian's Michael Tomasky sums up the thinking of the
people who spread the myth:
“They likely know no
one who voted for Barack Obama, so all the information they received in 2008
that they trusted – not from the media, but from friends and co-workers – led
them to search for explanations fair and foul. Acorn and the journalists helped
them feel a little better, but they didn't solve the basic problem: that the
man occupied the office.”
And so, the birther story. Perfect. Explained everything.
A conspiracy of immense proportions,
concocted all the way back in 1961, had to be the only
explanation for how this black man got to the White House. And if you think
race isn't what this is about at its core, ask yourself if there would even be
a birther conspiracy if Barack Obama were white and named Bart Oberstar. If you
think there would be, you are delusional.
Even releasing his actual birth certificate didn't stop
the crazies, but it did at least get everyone else to recognize them as such,
until, at the White House Press Correspondent's Dinner last year, he could
safely mock them.
No comments:
Post a Comment