How someone detects dog whistling?

@darthmongoose Kate Holden
Tue, 03 Nov 2020 14:10:23 +0000

@darthmongoose wrote:

uselessgoddess:

I have never known the examples used count, like I thought "Inner city" is like center part of city or something.

It's worth being clear that words and phrases used as dogwhistles are not exclusively used as dogwhistles. Otherwise they wouldn't be very effective. It's really all to do with context. That's why they're such an effective tactic.

If you say "Oh I went to a shop today, it's located in the inner city", or "The inner city districts of London are pretty expensive to live in." absolutely nobody with half a brain, even if they're a pretty hardcore leftie like me will think you're being racist.
Where things do get muddy are say a white politician with a mostly white voter base is talking to a crowd of people and puts a big emphasis on how they need to "crack down on inner city crime". In this case, there is a chance that the politician is basically saying they want the police to arrest more black people. Again, this isn't necessarily 100%, and you'd really need to consider things like context, corroborate the evidence with whether that politician often says things like that etc.

It's usually one of those things where consistent use of similar dog whistles, combined with action that harms the dogwhistled groups such as abuse or legislation harmful to them, or the action it spurs that person's following to based on their words, forms part of a body of evidence.