Emily Hodge recommends Dog Whistle Politics

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

By Ian Haney López (Oxford University Press, 2013)

I love it when books give you a vocabulary for something that you sensed but couldn’t find words for. For me, Dog Whistle Politics is such a book, recommended to me by my co-author and collaborator Francesca López. It makes concrete and explicit how politicians can activate and exploit people’s fear for their own political gain. Ian Haney López describes how over the last few decades politicians from both parties have used coded phrases that stereotype groups of people in ways that are not overtly racist. Nonetheless, they make the message’s target audience feel fear and anger that they direct toward another group of people.

The term in the title refers to the high-pitched whistle that dogs respond to, but humans cannot hear. Similarly, “dog whistle” messages in politics operate as “inaudible and easily denied in one range yet stimulating strong reactions in another” (p. 3). Politicians who use these messages know that it would be socially unacceptable to say something overtly racist. Instead, they may rely on words or images that invoke racial or ethnic stereotypes or terms with negative connotations, such as “illegal aliens.” Also, politicians often use a three-part dog-whistle strategy López calls “punch, parry, kick.” A politician first uses coded racial language (punch), then denies activating racial fears because the language was not overtly racist (parry) before attacking the person raising the critique for “falsely” injecting race into the conversation (kick). If we all know what to look for, we can hopefully avoid being manipulated by those rhetorical tactics.