My hair is starting to think about peppering itself with white, so I wasn't born yesterday, but I've spent about 1/3 of my adult life in Asia (primarily Japan), about 1/3 in the North of the US split between Yankee-land and the Rocky Mountain region, and about 1/3 in "the South".
In the Rocky Mountain region that I was in (and that I was born in), there was no history of slavery or any sort of modern diversity (it was all coal-miners, oil-drillers, and ranchers all the time), so I think we can take that one off the table. As we can Japan - because their issues with racism are different from ours (in the US).
That leaves good old Yankee-land and "the South". I am by birth and by culture, not a Southerner, but I will declare that if anyone sees more racism in Shreveport LA (for example) than they do in Chicago or even Terre Haute IN, that is a person that I would assert has never been to the south. I believe generally (based on a whole lotta anecdotal observation - some of which are turning my aging locks white), that Y2K Yankee-land is far more racist than Y2K Dixie. I don't know what it was like in 1960 - the race riots of Detroit in '68 - white flight to the suburbs - any of that. But I do believe that you are giving your own region a pass and the south a diss if you believe that they are more racist than you.
EDIT: And it isn't necessarily germane to my parent comment, but I see a lot of use of the phrase "dog-whistle" with no specifics. Can we see more specifics, so that the lesser aware of us can know what you are even talking about, or even get educated on what constitutes a "dog-whistle"?
> But I do believe that you are giving your own region a pass and the south a diss if you believe that they are more racist than you.
This was definitely a lesson I learned. I grew up in the midwest, and because racism of the Jim Crow sort was more blatant in the south, I thought we were relatively innocent. But I no longer think that.
As an example, I got a reproduction of the Negro Motorist Green Book. [1] It was a good exercise trying to imagine planning one of the road trips I've been on, but only staying at the small number of places that would accept black people.
I also learned from that book that there was one town in Michigan where well-off black people went to vacation: Idlewild. [2] It was created because black people in Chicago and Detroit were excluded from other vacation spots. I grew up not far from this place and nobody ever mentioned the history to me. Not accidental, I'm sure, that white people forgot all about it.
"Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup."
> And it isn't necessarily germane to my parent comment, but I see a lot of use of the phrase "dog-whistle" with no specifics
Quick, let's do some free association and tell me the first skin color that comes to mind: thugs, real americans, inner-city youth, hard-working american, welfare queen, illegal immigrant.
You are telling me that "welfare queen" is supposed to make me think of white trailer trash in my neighborhood? Surely not. You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?
If so, then, alright, the only thing on your list that makes me think of somebody that might be darker beige than me (I assume this is where you are trying to go?) is illegal immigrant, where I do assume "Mexican born national". Is that racist, or just a recognition of how our borders go and the fact that few Canadians come to the US to pick our tomatoes?
> You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?
No, "dog-whistle" terms seem mundane and can be played off as having the dictionary definition, but to certain people they have a very specific meaning. Your neighbor might say he wants to keep "thugs" out of your neighborhood, which you can naively infer to mean "violent criminals," but to other racists it's a synonym for "niggers." Or maybe you do know what he means, so you call him on it... and he asserts that it just means "violent criminals." That's what makes a dog-whistle.
I see enough references to the phrase (like: "everyone knows this is a dog-whistle for xyz") that I started to wonder if that phrase wasn't in itself, in certain contexts, a form of virtue-signaling itself. Maybe I was wrong.
Q: How is it that all the anti-racists know all the code-words that make up a dog whistle for racists? Isn't it supposed to be, by definition, unhearable?
I doubt we all know all of them. But they tend to persist for long periods, and so are easily discoverable by reverse engineering speeches. It helps that some people are quite explicit about it. Either in historical retrospect, as with the Atwater quote here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_.2...
Or with "saying the quiet parts loud", where people who aren't as good at dog whistling drift into being more explicit. Or people who are explicit get pushed into saying things where the racial connection is more easily denied. The Trump administration's Muslim ban is good example of that. They started out advocating for a ban with strong religious and racial components. When the public and the courts said no, they iterated to something less blatant. They will keep rinsing and repeating until something gets through.
I would guess that the answer is that not all anti-racists know all the code-words. Thug, urban, inner-city and so on are all known because they're the most used.
To contrast, I used to have a couple of friends who would use the term "friend" as a stand in for n* when talking about people in public. I figured it out from being around them and hearing how they stressed it differently than normal, but any random stranger wouldn't have picked up on it.
The same way we decode any phrase that has a coded meaning. I assume you can understand irony, jokes, and satire, dog whistle phrases are no different.
> You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?
No, I am saying the phrase is meant to be interpreted in a racial context by the target audience while passing off as non-racial. Non of the phrases I listed are racial by the dictionary definition.
The difference between a dog-whistle and a regular whistle is that dog-whistles are inaudible to humans and go unnoticed, hence the "dog-whistle" tag for such coded language.
In the Rocky Mountain region that I was in (and that I was born in), there was no history of slavery or any sort of modern diversity (it was all coal-miners, oil-drillers, and ranchers all the time), so I think we can take that one off the table. As we can Japan - because their issues with racism are different from ours (in the US).
That leaves good old Yankee-land and "the South". I am by birth and by culture, not a Southerner, but I will declare that if anyone sees more racism in Shreveport LA (for example) than they do in Chicago or even Terre Haute IN, that is a person that I would assert has never been to the south. I believe generally (based on a whole lotta anecdotal observation - some of which are turning my aging locks white), that Y2K Yankee-land is far more racist than Y2K Dixie. I don't know what it was like in 1960 - the race riots of Detroit in '68 - white flight to the suburbs - any of that. But I do believe that you are giving your own region a pass and the south a diss if you believe that they are more racist than you.
EDIT: And it isn't necessarily germane to my parent comment, but I see a lot of use of the phrase "dog-whistle" with no specifics. Can we see more specifics, so that the lesser aware of us can know what you are even talking about, or even get educated on what constitutes a "dog-whistle"?