Dog whistles

Politicians' coded language so we won't get mad at them for what they believe

In the late 90s and early 2000s, I watched the TV show West Wing so much I had parts of it memorized. It’s a little painful on re-watches, but there are still some scenes I think about over and over. There’s one scene in particular I’ve been thinking about when I get disappointed with politicians I want to support who won’t own their positions or won’t commit to them. The scene (as I remember it) is this one:

The President is about to make a speech where his staffer wants him to make a statement in favor of affirmative action. Instead, the President wants to say something like “we’ve abolished racism from our laws, now is the time to abolish it from our hearts.” The staffer (Toby) asks why he watered down the language. The President says it’s so his supporters will know he’s on their side, but he won’t alienate people who are opposed to affirmative action.

“Well then why don’t we just say we’re opposed to affirmative action in the speech,” says Toby, “and then tell our supporters we were lying?”

President Bartlett was trying—not very expertly—to “dog whistle.” Vox defines political dog whistling as “political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views.”

This month, that’s what we’re looking at: contemporary and historic political dog whistles, and the ancestors who called them out. This month may get a little messy, but I think it’s important as we think about what kind of democracy we want, and how to re-build it.

A contemporary dog whistle: “protecting children.”

I bet you’ve heard a lot of people claiming they care about your kids. I wanted to make sure you knew that the source of almost all the legislation that withholds access to emotional, educational, and medical care for trans youth come from one source, the Alliance Defending Freedom. There’s two things I want you to know: (a) that organization has gone to Europe to support enforced sterilization for trans people there, and (b) they have won 15 supreme court cases including the overturning of Roe V Wade.

According to an article in Ms. Magazine, in 2000, when the ADF launched a legal fellowship, here are a few ways they trained their fellows to revise their speech:

• instead of “bigotry, anti-tolerance,” say “defending biblical, religious principles”

• instead of “homophobia,” say “convictions against homosexual behavior”

• instead of “hate crimes,” say “so-called ‘hate’ crimes”

• instead of “sex education,” say “sexual indoctrination”

• instead of “gay marriage” and its “advocates,” say “marriage imitation” and “opponents of marriage”

I wanted to make sure this was on your radar because the dog whistle of “protecting children” comes straight out of this cynical playbook, and it has limited the rights of children, of parents, of educators, and of everyone except the people who have said they want to eliminate transgenderism.

If I were doing a series on “moral panics,” I could use this example as well, since it is part of an effort to make LGBTQ+ people into a made-up threat in order to rally support for policies that would otherwise receive no support because they are so hateful and violent. But dog whistle is just as accurate a category, because when they say “protecting children,” that’s a dog whistle to a certain group that it’s 100% safe to go after LGBTQ+ people’s most basic rights with impunity.

To read about why the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group, read this link. Or check out Rolling Stone’s coverage of how they have publicly stated they want to eliminate transgenderism but also claim that’s not the same thing as eliminating trans people.

A dog whistle of the past: “superpredator”

Because I have worked with people whose lives were directly affected by this particular dog whistle in LA and in Oakland in the early 2000s and beyond, I want to take us back to the 1990s. Youth crime rates were actually declining, but political leaders popularized the term “superpredator” to convince a nation that “urban youth” (that’s another dog whistle right there) were on a violent rampage and nothing but incredibly brutal punishments could keep them at bay. The term spread like wildfire in the media, and Hillary Clinton used it while promoting Bill Clinton’s crime bill. Superpredator was a term that signaled to a certain group of people that demonizing and dehumanizing people because of their race and geography was 100% on the table.

Incarceration rates had no correlation to crime reduction since crime started going down before the term emerged, but many of the laws passed during this period remain on the books today, and some people remain incarcerated under mandatory life-without-parole sentences they received as teenagers during this era. DiIulio has vaguely stated some regret for this term and its horrific effects, but that did not stop people’s lives being harmed for decades after the fact. Politicians may use dog whistles just to score votes, but the repercussions reverberate in real people’s lives for many years to come.

Spotlight: Dog-whistle resisting Ancestor

Forebear Friday On this Forebear Friday, during this month focused on dog whistles, let’s listen to movement ancestor Ida B Wells. She was a risk-taking investigative journalist who nearly lost her life when she took on one of the biggest dog whistles in the US at the time. Lynching of Black men was rampant in the wake of the Civil War, and in 1895, Wells published an editorial that called out the dog whistle White men were using to justify their violence. (It was actually the second time she had written on the subject; the first time had resulted in the destruction of her newspaper office in Memphis, forcing her to move to New York.)

The lynchings were almost always done in the name of protecting white women from Black male sexual aggressors. Here in part is what she wrote to call them out:

To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power.

You can read the whole editorial here and it is absolutely worth your while. What a role model for our current moment.

And one little cranky note from me.

As important as I think it is to talk about dog whistles, it almost feels like we’ve mostly retired the dog whistle; people are just saying the quiet part out loud. When a particular politician pretends immigrants are a threat to America when all the data shows that’s a lie, he’s not dog whistling. He’s saying it up front and loud, even though it’s not true.

So what’s the opposite of a dog whistle, anyhow? (Someone already suggested “cat yell,” but I think I mean metaphorically.)