Make America what again?

If you're anything like me, you might have a sneaking suspicion that the subtext behind a certain political campaign is "Make American White Again." Well, it turns out there's some evidence that points that way. There's more on that here. And then, apropos of nothing, there's this.

Not exactly a surprise

In case you were wondering, the number of white supremacist groups has grown from around 150 in 2008 to 930 or so now, according to this Washington Post article. Golly, what could possibly have changed since then?

Those numbers don't include the much larger group of those who engage in the somewhat more subtle art of dog whistle politics.

Race matters

I've been running around too much lately and this blog has been a casualty of all that. However, I had a pretty good excuse for at least part of the time. That would be the Race Matters in Appalachia that my organization, the American Friends Service Committee, was proud to sponsor, help plan, and participate in.

(Sorry about ending that last sentence with a preposition.)

Race in Appalachia is a timely topic, especially given the racial dog whistling that helped flip WV in the last election. Here is some of the coverage from the Charleston Gazette, the Charleston Daily Mail, and WV Public Broadcasting. For good measure, here's an op-ed by my friend the Rev. Ron English.

This event was meant to be a conversation starter and just the beginning of a whole lot of needed work.

Punch, parry, kick

I've mentioned more than once that I recommend Ian Haney Lopez's bew book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. I was drawn to the book after the dog whistling in WV politics became audible as the 2014 election approaches.

Dog whistling refers to  the art of making coded and often oblique and indirect but loaded references to race that stop short of expressions of personal hatred. The purpose of dog whistling isn't to express personal bigotry but to gain power, wealth and status. These messages convey a warning to white voters about presumed threats from non-whites aimed at building support for a reactionary agenda.

Example: Reagan building support among resentful white voters over the allegedly extravagant lifestyle or a mythical (nonwhite) "welfare queen." And using that support to undermine the middle class, attack the New Deal legacy and distribute wealth upward.

It's not personal...

Lopez has a great analysis for how the game is played. Here are the basic moves:

(1) punch racism into the conversation through references to culture, behavior, and class; (2) parry claims of race-baiting by insisting that absent a direct reference to biology or the use of a racial epithet, there can be no racism; (3) kick up the racial attack by calling any critics the real racists for mentioning race and thereby "playing the race card."

Sadly, it seems to have worked pretty well for some folks for more than 30 years.

Strategic racism

Yesterday I gave a shoutout to a new book titled Dog Whistle Politics by Ian Haney Lopez. The book's subtitle is How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.

Here's the opening paragraph:

Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility towards nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and sharia law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last 50 years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today--and the crisis of the middle class--simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.

Holy Obama's war on coal, Batman! In this case, the decline of an industry largely driven by market forces gets conveniently dumped onto a convenient scapegoat who just so happens to be...from Chicago, sort of.

The book also usefully talks about strategic racism, which "refers to purposeful efforts to use racial animus as leverage to gain material wealth, political power, or heightened social standing." Precisely because it is strategic, the author argues that "it is not fundamentally about race. The driving force behind strategic racism is not racial animus for its own sake or brutalizing nonwhites out of hate; it is the pursuit of power, money, and/or status." People of color are certainly damaged by it. Ironically, so are many white members of the working and squeezed middle class who fall for it.

This kind of dog whistling has long been a part of American politics, but it has been played masterfully by politicians from George Wallace, Nixon and Reagan up to the present day, sadly with considerable success.

Dog whistling in our time

I'd like to give a shoutout to Ian Haney Lopez's new book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. The title gives a pretty good hint of what the book is about. I'm working my way through the book now and I keep thinking about how WV's political climate today is a classic example of dog whistling.  Anyhow, you can learn more about the book here.

SPEAKING OF WRECKING THE MIDDLE CLASS, check out this post from Robert Reich.

MIGHT AS WELL check out this one from Krugman while we're at it.