Review: Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class by Ian F. Haney-Lopez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To understand how racism has permeated politics for the last fifty years, even though so many politicians openly disavow it, then Haney-Lopez's book is a fantastic primer on understanding America's coded racism. He used the term, "dog whistle politics" to explain that since the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of Geroge Wallace, Richard Nixon, and William F. Buckley have purposely looked to code race by relying upon or making associations between negative imagery (Willie Horton ad), soundbites ("welfare queen"), and cultural artifacts (drugs, social services, etc) and then relying on those associations to play upon white fears in order to win votes, push for elimination of public services, or disenfranchise opportunites and rights for people of color. Haney-Lopen focuses much of his work on the Republic Party since their white supremacist strategy (or in the Republican's politically correct term, "southern strategy") have been the hallmark of efforts for over a half-century. However, he also goes after Democrats and their equally appalling efforts to marginalize people of color through attempts to be "tough on crime" (always geared towards populations association with people of color) such as Three-Strikes laws. In total, Haney-Lopez's work serves as a history and decoder for how much structural racism is woven into the modern political discourse. It's fascinating to see this book was written a few years ago but to see how much of it resonates with the politics practiced by Trump throughout the 2016 election cycle, using tactics initially introduced by Wallace and Nixon. In fact, the book does much to explain Trump as the culmination of white supremacy harnessed by the Republicans in their efforts for decades.

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