How someone detects dog whistling?

@But_a_Jape James
Mon, 02 Nov 2020 15:10:55 +0000

@But_a_Jape wrote:

Lee Atwater was a famous political consultant who worked under US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1981 he gave an anonymous interview where he provided an inside look on how dog-whistling language is intentionally used:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “[n-word], [n-word], [n-word].” By 1968 you can’t say “[n-word]”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, 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 busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “[n-word], [n-word].”

EDIT: But to answer the question of "How do you detect dogwhistling?" - really, you just need to have a lot of experience interacting with these sorts of political discussions. It can be really exhausting and frustrating getting this sort of experience because the people who dogwhistle are often not discussing things in good faith and if you invest a lot of time in these discussions you'll eventually get exasperated when you realize they never intended on having an honest discussion.

And this is one of the insidious things about dogwhistles - even when you learn about them it's really difficult to educate others on it because they operate on plausible deniability. To any third party listeners who are observing the discussion, accusations of dogwhistling sound vaguely conspiratorial - "Watch out everyone! The racists are hiding in plain sight with secret codes!" And the dogwhistlers know this and play off of that and say things like "People will call anything racist these days - did you hear that apparently the numbers 14 and 88 are nAzI cOdEs now? Guess I'm a racist cause I was born on January 4, 1988!" For context: "The 14 words" is a Nazi slogan and "88" is code for "HH" which is "Heil Hitler." Yes, it's ridiculous, but that's part of the point.