Why Racist Dog Whistles Keep Getting Louder This Election Cycle

Racist dog whistles are used to garner support without triggering public scrutiny. Using this strategy allows politicians to speak negatively about a group by appealing to others who share those views while benefiting from plausible deniability. In America, this is illustrated best by the Southern Strategy. As Lee Atwater, a Republican political operative, revealed in a 1981 interview, “You start out in 1954 by saying ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced bussing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.” While Atwater revealed a political plan to substitute the racist rhetoric of early American culture with subtle language that would achieve the same goal, his quote also describes the way racist dog whistles function.