Racial politics is back, flying under Mitt Romney’s banner, the author says. | REUTERS Who hears the dog whistle?

Recent Republican rhetoric, as demonstrated at the GOP convention, has taken a nasty but familiar turn: Rather than dig into policy proposals and lacking a dynamic candidate, the Romney campaign has often focused on talk of welfare freeloaders and their opponent as the “food stamp president.” This rhetoric has been accompanied by GOP-led initiatives in states across the nation that could depress Democratic and minority turnout through restrictive voter ID laws, which remind many critics of the bad old days of poll taxes and literacy tests.

This is racial politics, the “dog whistle” of division, heard by some but not all. It was used by some GOP contenders during the primaries and is now back under GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s banner.


Some commentators are casting aside typical decorum and flatly confronting the architects of these strategies. Chris Matthews, for example, laid into Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus last week in a tirade that exploded across the twitterverse and then the mainstream media.

But in a society with a short attention span and even shorter historical memory, not everyone hears the whistle. Some don’t hear it because they don’t want to, or they deny what it means. But many don’t hear it because they don’t know what it means.

Age has much to do with this: Some of my college students, including African-Americans, have expressed honest bewilderment at why, in recent polls, Romney is polling 0 percent, or close to it, among black voters. They do not know what the dog whistle means or how it affects those poll numbers.

When Stephen Colbert jokes that he “doesn’t see race,” he is poking fun at conservatives who make this claim — while continuing to blow that nasty dog whistle about food stamp presidents. As time distances younger generations from the civil rights movement, though, their lack of awareness of our country’s racial dynamic, and racial history, means they may not hear that dog whistle. They don’t “hear race.”

In this, their attitude is much like their views on gender issues. In the world of the millennials, for whom human interaction increasingly occurs in the virtual realities of Twitter and Facebook, the old categories often aren’t relevant. Though U.S. politics has clearly not become post-racial in the idealized sense envisaged by some in the wake of Obama’s 2008 victory, it is also true that many younger Americans increasingly ignore differences of race or nationality.

It’s different for the baby boomers and their parents. They were there for the turbulent years of the civil rights movement, when Republicans’ Southern strategy emerged as a pragmatic way for the GOP to flip Southern Dixiecrat segregationists to the Republican column.

An early dog whistle technique was the declaration of opposition to “forced busing” for racial integration. Republicans opposed busing. But of course it had nothing to do with race. Today, Romney is cluttering the airwaves with false claims about Obama removing the work requirement from welfare, recycling the infamous “welfare queen” line popularized by Ronald Reagan in his quest for the 1980 nomination. Of course, that wasn’t about race either.

Similarly, GOP vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan has adopted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s talking point about Obama as the “food stamp president,” sounding the whistle again, exploiting stereotypes among racially resentful white voters who continue to see food stamps and welfare as unfair, unearned giveaways to minorities.

It brings to mind the infamous Jesse Helms “ hands” TV ad that ran here in North Carolina, in which a pair of white hands were depicted angrily tearing up a letter announcing the white applicant had been turned down for a job in favor of a minority due to affirmative action.

Being able to hear the dog whistle requires historical knowledge and context, understanding the intensity of racial trauma that tore our country apart and realigned our politics. To older voters, these rhetorical references can still split the eardrums. It’s why Matthews gets so angry, and also why the Romney people (as with the Reagan people) know it’s smart if cynical strategy to reach a key demographic: aging white voters with conservative inclinations. They hear the whistle. Civil rights leaders hear the whistle, too.

When my father, who is 70, was born, slavery had existed in our country within less than 100 years. When I’m his age, we’ll be as far removed from the civil rights movement. Hopefully, these dog whistles will stop working.

While I worry when my students don’t seem to have a thorough understanding of U.S. history, I also think our politics will take a great step forward when the time comes that these dog whistles fall on deaf ears.

Jonathan Riehl, a communications consultant who has worked for congressional campaigns and nonprofit advocacy organizations, is writing a book about the history of the modern conservative movement. He teaches at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, N.C.

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