Since this month’s focus is dog whistles, the euphemisms politicians use instead of saying the horrific thing they actually mean…I thought I’d talk about Critical Race Theory, or CRT. And I can’t believe I’m talking about internet troll Chris Rufo two weeks in a row, but MAN is he busy changing the meanings of things to cause chaos and cause real harm to marginalized communities.
So a few years back, Rufo initiated a campaign that swept the GOP to redefine CRT in the following way:
Strung together, the phrase “critical race theory” connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.
If that means nothing to you, that’s on purpose.
So I got to study CRT in depth this semester, and there’s a reason he turned it into that gibberish dog whistle: It’s because CRT is a robust, scholarly theory that forces us to wrestle with our history related to race and how it actually causes harm to ALL of us, and what we need to do in order to create a country where we can all thrive. And most CRT scholars feel like that might never happen when people like Chris Rufo can profit off of keeping things the way they are, so the fact that a 50-year-old legal theory suddenly became code for “they want white people to feel bad” is probably not a shock to any of the founders of CRT.
I’ve written two newsletters about what CRT actually is for paid subscribers at my Substack, but you can also just google “CRT dog whistle” if you want to do a little learning on your own.
The “welfare queen” dog whistle
Today I want to talk about the term “welfare queen.” In the course I took this year on the history of social welfare in the US, we talked a lot about how America’s laws imply a lot about who we think is deserving and undeserving.
Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan created maybe the most notorious dog whistle of all time when he used the term “Welfare Queen” as a way of saying Black women were milking the system and the government needed to constrict welfare to stop this problem. He frequently used the story of a real woman in Chicago, Linda Taylor, whose story is more complex than the epithet would indicate, but he pretended that one woman who received more welfare benefits than she was supposed to represented a whole group of women.
I suspect Regan and his colleagues knew that the majority of government support goes to non-Black people. As far back as 1960, research had shown that the most significant fraud in the welfare system was how many people had legitimate government aid withheld from them, illegally, by government officials who had decided they were unworthy even though they fully met the criteria for aid. I have theories about why Reagan used this dog whistle loudly and regularly, but I don’t have enough research to back up the opinion…so you are strongly encouraged to drop your own opinions and knowledge in the comments. Our understanding of who we as a nation intend to be got shaped in some powerful ways by how the now forty-year-old lie of the welfare queen got adopted into so many subconsciouses, and by how we were already pre-disposed towards it because of hundreds of years of lies about who is worthy and who is not.
An ancestor who took on the “America First” dog whistle
Since this month we’re talking about dog whistles, I want to give a shout-out to movement ancestor Dorothy Thompson for naming the dog whistle of “America First” back in 1941.
In 1940, Charles Lindbergh and a BUNCH of known anti-semites and others created the America First Committee to demand the US not go to war in Germany. The AFC had 800,000 members at its height, but it was also embroiled in controversy, and had to let go known anti-semite Henry Ford and then Avery Brundage, the US Olympic Committee member who had stopped two Jewish American runners from competing in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics.
But then Charles Lindbergh made a speech about how if Jewish Americans were more forward-thinking, they’d agree we shouldn’t go to war because they’d be the first to deal with the backlash. And Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune who had covered the war from Europe, wrote
I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.
Others also stood against the AFC: Roosevelt, his political opponent Wendell Wilkie, Jewish organizations, labor unions and other Americans who believed in democracy instead of fascism. Here’s to Dorothy Thompson and the others who said that America First didn’t actually mean what Charles Lindbergh said it meant.
Image from Unexpected in common hours
One last thing…
Back in June, this newsletter focused on Christian nationalism. A couple of months ago, I found an article where right-wing extremist think tank the Heritage Foundation declared that the left is using “Christian nationalism” as a dog whistle. I’m not tagging it. I didn’t actually read it. But when I use the term Christian nationalist, I’m talking about people who are willing to sacrifice democracy and replace it with a right-wing version of Christian theocracy that undermines the rights of religious minorities, women, people of color, immigrants, and the environment. I’m putting that right up front, at a frequency where everyone can hear me. I hope you’ll join me in calling Christian nationalism what it is.