Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class 1st Edition
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In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney L�pez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich, give corporations regulatory control over industry and financial markets, and aggressively curtail social services. White voters, convinced by powerful interests that minorities are their true enemies, fail to see the connection between the political agendas they support and the surging wealth inequality that takes an increasing toll on their lives. The tactic continues at full force, with the Republican Party using racial provocations to drum up enthusiasm for weakening unions and public pensions, defunding public schools, and opposing health care reform.
Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney L�pez links as never before the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters. Dog Whistle Politics will generate a lively and much-needed debate about how racial politics has destabilized the American middle class -- white and nonwhite members alike.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"As Haney Lopez demonstrates, the vocabulary of race has changed. Nonetheless, race is still skillfully used to distract our attention from ongoing and pernicious disparities in economic opportunities. Read this terrific book to understand how dog whistle politics enables the wealth gap to stay the same and even to get worse not just for blacks or other people of color but for the white working class as well." --Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor, Harvard Law School
"This is one of those books that should be required reading for anyone and everyone who is struggling to understand how and why political elites succeed, time and again, in persuading poor and working class whites to support regressive policies that are a boon for corporations but actually harm them and wreck the middle class. The answer to the riddle has far more to do with race than most want to acknowledge. But it isn't old-fashioned, malevolent racism that's to blame. No, as Haney Lopez brilliantly and painstakingly lays bare, what is unraveling our nation is not bad people, but a stubborn refusal to deal openly and honestly with the reality of how race operates today." --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"Read this book to understand how dog whistle politics enables the wealth gap to stay the same and even to get worse not just for blacks or other people of color but for the white working class as well. As Haney Lopez demonstrates, the vocabulary of race has changed. Nonetheless, race is still skillfully used to distract our attention from ongoing and pernicious disparities in economic opportunities." --Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor, Harvard Law School, and author of The Miner's Canary
"A brilliant guide to modern politics, for anyone who wants to understand how outright racist appeals morphed into the genteel rhetoric of 'states rights' and from there into today's 'defund Obamacare' -- and why Democrats too often collude in rather than repudiate dog whistle politics." --Joan Walsh, Salon.com and MSNBC, and author of What's the Matter With White People
"Grounded in history rather than theory, this is recommended to readers engaged in today's political discourse." --Library Journal
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"This is one of those books that should be required reading for anyone and everyone who is struggling to understand how and why political elites succeed, time and again, in persuading poor and working class whites to support regressive policies that are a boon for corporations but actually harm them and wreck the middle class. The answer to the riddle has far more to do with race than most want to acknowledge. But it isn't old-fashioned, malevolent racism that's to blame. No, as Haney Lopez brilliantly and painstakingly lays bare, what is unraveling our nation is not bad people, but a stubborn refusal to deal openly and honestly with the reality of how race operates today." --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"Read this book to understand how dog whistle politics enables the wealth gap to stay the same and even to get worse not just for blacks or other people of color but for the white working class as well. As Haney Lopez demonstrates, the vocabulary of race has changed. Nonetheless, race is still skillfully used to distract our attention from ongoing and pernicious disparities in economic opportunities." --Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor, Harvard Law School, and author of The Miner's Canary
"A brilliant guide to modern politics, for anyone who wants to understand how outright racist appeals morphed into the genteel rhetoric of 'states rights' and from there into today's 'defund Obamacare' -- and why Democrats too often collude in rather than repudiate dog whistle politics." --Joan Walsh, Salon.com and MSNBC, and author of What's the Matter With White People
"Grounded in history rather than theory, this is recommended to readers engaged in today's political discourse." --Library Journal
"
About the Author
Ian Haney L�pez is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. An incisive voice on white identity since the publication of his path-breaking book White by Law (1996), he remains at the forefront of conversations about race in modern America. A past visiting professor at Yale and Harvard law schools, in 2011 he was awarded the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, given to scholars whose work promotes the integration goals of Brown v. Board of Education.
Product details
- Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (January 13, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0199964270
- ISBN-13 : 978-0199964277
- Item Weight : 1.17 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.3 x 1.1 x 6.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,066,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #749 in Political History (Books)
- #4,736 in Discrimination & Racism (Books)
- #5,799 in History & Theory of Politics
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Ian Haney López was born and raised in Hawaii to a father from Washington (the Haney part) and a mother from El Salvador (the López side). He teaches constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley, and has a special interest in how racism has evolved over the last five decades. In “Dog Whistle Politics” (2014), Ian explained the tactics used by the Republican Party since Richard Nixon to win votes by stoking racial anxiety, thereby tilling the ground for Donald Trump. In his most recent book, “Merge Left,” he shows how to neutralize coded racism in politics and build a multiracial progressive future. Ian holds an endowed chair as the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley.
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In my inglorious career I must have heard my co-workers (especially New Yorkers for some reason) retell the Reagan meme of the "Welfare Queen." Perhaps the most quintessential example of "Dog Whistling" racism that like a brain eating zombie seems unstoppable. Important to note here that the whole thing was of course a fabrication.
Ian Haney Lopez (you'll see why he is the endowed chair as the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley) takes you through genuine understanding of the evil genius in the creation and pervasive use of "Dog Whistling" as an effective, cynical, and persistent tool of the far right (I prefer fascist loving) Republicans to not only use this as a means to churn racism and a sense of aggrievement, but to literally cripple the working class to act against their own best interests.
So, please buy this book and use the methods he provides to put this ugly tactic into the dustbin of history.
He writes like a good lawyer. If you want to find a well reasoned a priori argument which may or may not be congruent with reality, consult a good lawyer. Examples might be if you want to misdirect the jury after you've just murdered your wife and her lover or if you want to misdirect Congress after you’ve been caught with a 22 year old intern. Or, more mundanely, if you are a student of human nature and you want insight into how bright people concoct historical fiction stories. This book doesn't analyze modern society; it syntheses a story about it. It becomes grating once one realizes just how much is synthesis.
I do like his catchy phrase 'dog whistle politics'. It immediately puts one to mind of the now-dated movie where the villain whistles up a pack of Dobermans which then threaten to eat the hero. He sort of ruins the illusion however when he cherry picks (I hate that phrase, cherry picking, since it is way overused in Amazon reviews, particularly those one-sentence ax jobs) his stories, filters them through his own prejudices and ignores other equally catchy phrases such as 'victimhood politics', 'revolutionary dialectic', et cetera. But I fear he leaves as much history on the cutting room floor as did Michael Moore at his apex. Gone too is any semblance of explanation of how, in the absence of any objective biological basis for our sociological construct 'race', can the abstraction of that construction which we call 'racism' be anything except subjective?
My review is negative in large part because there are misdirections which thread their way throughout the book, just as a lawyer would misdirect a jury from the facts of his case. For the sake of brevity I'll mention only the most egregious ones: He conflates the effect of "wealthy" conservative contributors and ignores the short list of the world's richest people, 'progressives' all, who collectively own more wealth than half the people in the world. He presents too many false dichotomies, false equivalencies, straw man arguments and other rhetorical tricks. The analyses he presents appear at times to me to be superficial, not substantially based on human nature nor psychology except for the psychology of persuasion. Just as often they appear tangential to his central point but designed to impugn his political enemies.
For the reader who is struggling with understanding the incongruence between the language of the book's historical vignettes and traditional language I'd recommend a small but powerful book, Crane Brinton's 1938 text "The Anatomy of Revolution". Here they will find a logical structure with which they can deconstruct the meaning of revolutionary rhetoric. For the psychologically minded reader interested in understanding the book's curb appeal I'd suggest Jackson and Richardson's "Understanding African American Rhetoric". For the reader who senses the intrinsic emotional exploitation of their fears and nightmares but doesn't have words for it I'd recommend Jack Schafer's "The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over". For the reader interested in a critique of leftist academia from within its fold there is Tony Scott's "Dangerous Writing". And the reader who is interested in exploring the concept that the belief in racial identity is a damaging factor in the lives of real people should review the works of John Ogbu.










