Higher frequency

While many political journalists, scholars, and critics acknowledge and condemn racial dog whistling, Ian Haney López argues that they underestimate the full impact dog whistling has on American politics and society. In Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class, López illustrates how politicians use coded racial appeals to influence social discourse, win elections, suppress liberalism, weaken the middle class, push their own agendas, and serve the interests of wealthy Americans.

López’s book is one of several published within the last two years that weave historical insight with contemporary social and political analysis to reveal the often insidious ways that the legacy of racism and inequality continues to be recycled in American politics. But where McCutcheon and Mark (Dog Whistles Walk-backs and Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang and Bluster in American Political Speech, 2014) provide the lexicon and ‘decode’ race-tinged political language, López harshly critiques dog whistling within the specific context of the ‘colourblind’ or ‘post-racial’ America increasingly touted since Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and election. With Dog Whistle Politics, López carves a niche amid this recent scholarship by honing in specifically on how this rhetoric, as used by highly influential political leaders since the Civil Rights era, further inculcates racial bias and division. López structures his argument with nine alternating chapters – five narrative accounts of how major U.S. political figures advanced the use of racial dog whistling and four expository chapters that unpack the idea and practice of racism in America – and a conclusion wherein he proposes targeted solutions to political, racial dog whistling.

López begins his narrative thread in the 1960s with George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, noting that Wallace turned whole heartedly to dog whistle politics as a way to win votes. After realizing that racial resentment resonated with whites around the country, not just Southerners, and recognizing that explicitly racist language was not the way to present that resentment, Wallace coded his racial hatred in euphemisms that still carried the racial tenor he intended. Following Wallace’s example, Goldwater strategically used coded race rhetoric to sway white Southern Democrats to vote Republican for the first time ever, ultimately helping to turn the GOP into ‘the White Man’s Party’ (p18). López ends chapter one with Richard Nixon who, with the help of zealous and astute political strategists, developed the practices of Wallace and Goldwater into the fully formed ‘Southern Strategy.’

The next point in López’s timeline is Ronald Reagan, who progressed conservative politics that serve interests of the wealthy from the fringe in the 60s, to a mainstream aspect of 1980s politics and policy. Reagan exemplified how dog whistling weakened the middle class by convincing white middle-class voters that ‘big government’, defined by closely associating government initiatives with blacks and other people of color, was their biggest threat rather than concentrated wealth. In chapter five, López continues his chronological narrative with political actors George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, but primarily focuses on one of the most significant instances of dog whistling in the 1988 Bush campaign: The Willie Horton commercial. The Horton commercial, as López argues, was so effective in appealing to white fear of the archetypal black male criminal, particularly the trope of black men raping white women, that Bush gained 12 percent of Dukakis’ supporters, ultimately leading to Bush’s victory.

López presents a bipartisan critique as demonstrated in the fifth chapter where he explains how Democrats also learned to pick up the dog whistle. Particularly, he suggests that Clinton’s popularity among middle-class whites resulted from distancing himself, rhetorically, from the black community. As a candidate, Clinton promoted himself as a ‘New Democrat’, ‘resistant to black concerns, tough on crime, and hostile to welfare’ (p108). Beyond political pandering, however, Clinton followed through on his campaign platform with signal policies that disproportionately hurt...