What exactly is a “racist dogwhistle”?
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a “dog whistle” in politics is a phrase that only a certain group will understand the message of but to most others it won’t mean much. Such phrases are a way to make controversial statements without most people realizing.
The archetypal example was the Nixon campaign’s focus on “law and order.” Given that the disorder he was implicitly referring to was the unrest of the civil rights movement, it’s quite clear that the message was, “I’ll fight the civil rights activists.” Saying that directly would have, of course, been deeply unpopular.
It’s a phrase or word or meme that will probably not mean anything to most people, but to those ‘in the know’ it’s clearly referencing a racist viewpoint.
An example is posting about (((Bernie Sanders))). To most peple it just looks like weird punctuation. If you’re in the know, it’s bringing attention to Bernie Sanders being Jewish.
Language that seems innocuous but to a certain part of the audience will be understood as something more sinister.
For example, someone might refer to “the people who control the media”, and the general audience knows that there are people high up in media with influence, but this could also be a nod to far-right antisemitic conspiracies. Obviously that example would fall victim of being really hard to tell when someone is dogwhistling and when they’re simply taking a dig at someone like Rupert Murdoch, but that’s sort of the point.
In addition to what other people have said, it’s called a “dog whistle” because dogs can hear higher pitched sound than most humans, so a dog whistle, a whistle whose purpose it is to command a dog, is largely inaudible to humans while still able to be heard by dogs.
So it’s a “racist dog whistle” because it’s inaudible to most people while still being heard loud and clear by racists.
I hope that context makes it make a bit more sense why coded language that sound innocuous unless you’re in the know but is actually racist is called a “dog whistle”
A dog whistle is a whistle that, when blown, can “only be heard by dogs.” A racist dog whistle is a symbol, when seen, is “only recognized by other racists.”
Dog whistling is the use of words, phrases, images, etc where your target group understands an additional meaning than a casual observer who isn’t part of the group you’re talking to.
For example, going out and yelling that the Jews control the media and are a bunch of child murdering perverts is gonna get you shut down pretty quickly. But what if you’re part of an ethnic-political identity that has established a kinda slang where the words Globalists/Illuminati/Soros/Cabal and so on all mean “Jews” to you intended audience. From there you can go on shouting “Globalists control the media to help a secret Cabal of elites kidnap children for perverted causes” and anyone who wants to criticize you has to them explain to those outside your group that you’re using words like “Globalists” and “Cabal” as a stand in for “Jews” while you’re all 😇 Who? Me? 😇 if anyone calls you out as an antisemite. But your audience understands you just fine.
Similarly if you want to go around yelling that you want to murder homosexuals… tough sell to the mass market. So instead you go around creating hysteria that homosexuals are “grooming” children, and then you go around shouting that people who rape children need to be murdered. Your intended audience knows to tie these two statements together, people outside it who aren’t part of your group don’t.
Or, on the race angle, say you want to perform a song about how good lynching is. Again… tough sell to the ordinary folk. So instead you sing about how a bunch of armed good ole boys are going to round up those outsiders who need to find out and shoot your music video advocating for vigilante violence against the site of a notorious lynching. Now you’ve not mentioned race once, so can be all 😇 Who? Me? 😇 when people object to the type of violence you’re promoting.
The number 88 in white supremacist circles is a coded message. The 8th letter of the alphabet is ‘H’, making 88 ‘HH’, which is code for “Heil Hitler”.
If you don’t know this code, the number 88 has no special meaning to you. See it on a bumper sticker and it doesn’t stand out.
If you’re a white supremacist, and you see that bumper sticker, you know something about the owner of that truck. This message is only one that those ‘in the know’ know, allowing them to identify each-other without being identified by others. It’s called a dogwhistle cause you can only hear it if your ‘ears’ are tuned to the right frequency.
It’s a form of passive aggressive racism. It means people will speak in a way or present themselves in a way that other racists will know is racism and often the minority being discriminated or talked about will know. But to the lay person it can be defended as construed or taken out of context and therefore not racist.
A good example of this is the key and peele skit “country song” there’s a part where key is singing and he says something like “don’t let her near the homies on the wrong side of town” and when peele tells him it’s racist he says no its not homies can be any race, white, Mexican, black, whatever. But given the context it’s obvious he’s talking about black people.
If you want an excellent example of what this means in practice there’s a very famous/infamous interview with Lee Atwater, talking about the southern strategy while he worked for Reagan as a strategist.
You’d get banned for repeating a lot of what he said here, or linking to it, but it’s incredibly informative of how this worked, and a number of very legitimate serious publications have published the interview (audio only), transcripts and analysis, because well, he was a racist but he was also a white house republican strategist saying the quiet part out loud.
Essentially the logic goes like this: You can’t say overtly racist stuff by the mid 1950s because people don’t like racist terminology and don’t like being called out on their racism.
So you need a way to tell racists you’re going to do racist things, but without using overtly racist language. Enter dog whistles, you’re now going to speak in a language that racists know is racist, but that the mostly naive public aren’t going to immediately catch, and you have plausible deniability. It’s a dog whistle because you can create whistle which dogs can hear but people can’t (high frequency) – the idea is that you’re creating language which racists can hear but the broader public can’t.
So in the 1960’s you start saying things like state’s rights, forced busing, these are ultimately to serve racist goals, but are now abstract language and talking points.
By the 1970s and 1980s people have caught on to how some of the old language was racist or ultimately a tool for racism.
So you have one step further abstraction: tax cuts! Union busting laws, trade policy etc. These are now abstract policies that disproportionately hurt racial minorities.
Fast forward to everyone talking about Trump and Tucker and you’re essentially back in the 1950s and 60s. Poor white racists in the US are also getting hurt by 4 decades of policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and so you need to get them back on your side by making sure they can find the racists to vote for.
Edit:
A couple of things to add. Dog whistles work because the people you’re talking to have a media ecosystem that tells them what to listen for, and they’re engaged in it. You see this a bit with current discussion about say Ron DeSantis or Trump being ‘too online’ which isn’t inherently racist – but they’re speaking in a way (CRT, Wokeness etc.) which their base understand but which to everyone else sounds like nonsense. Good dog whistles sound like serious discussion to the untrained listener, bad ones sound like a Ron DeSantis speech.
The more abstract you get, the more you run into legitimate policy discussions where one side is trying to negotiate in good faith and doesn’t know the other side isn’t. States rights is a solid example. States exist, and what powers they should or should not have vs federal and local governments, and when one state should have different rules from another is a complex legitimate discussion to have. Giving states (or provinces, or territories or whatever) control over certain issues also hurts certain momentum on issues. Think about abortion rights, where if you’re a woman in a blue state the situation for you hasn’t fundamentally changed very much since the end of Roe v. Wade, so a republican can run on “Doing what we did in Iowa” (which is a dog whistle for an abortion ban), but if you don’t know that, you think you might not mobilise to vote against that in the next election. Tax policy is the same thing – taxes on any given type or amount of income can be too high, or too low, and well, someone needs to figure out what the tax rates should be.
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