Dog Whistle Politics

(W)e have got a tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working. And just generations of men not even thinking about work or learning the value of work, and so there's a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

                                                                                       Rep. Paul Ryan (D-IL)

The 2012 Republican candidate for Vice President made this comment Wednesday (March 12) on Morning in America, a radio talk show hosted by Reagan administration Secretary of Education and compulsive gambler Bill Bennett. He followed it up the next day at the Conservative Political Action Committee convention with a denunciation of the school lunch program.

You don't need a secret decoder ring to interpret the message in Ryan's latest remarks. Later that day, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) released this statement:

Ryan's comments about “inner city” poverty are a thinly veiled racial attack and cannot be tolerated. When Mr. Ryan says “inner city,” when he says “culture,” these are simply code words for what he really means: “Black.”

Ryan defended himself by saying, “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me.”

Two weeks ago, I posted some candid remarks by the late Republican campaign manager Lee Atwater, a primary advocate of the “Southern strategy.” Atwater pointed out that, in the 1950s, it was considered acceptable for politicians to appeal openly to the racial fears of White voters. However, by 1981, it was necessary to use more “abstract” language, such as favoring “states' rights” or “cutting taxes.”

Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has a new book, Dog Whistle Politics, about the history and current relevance of race-baiting in political campaigns. (I haven't read it yet; I have it on order.) He uses the metaphor of the dog whistle since it is inaudible to the human ear, but reliably influences the dog's behavior. Dog whistle political appeals seem on the surface not to be about race, but they are understood as racial by White voters. The fact that these statements refer to something else gives the politician plausible deniability when he or she is accused of racism. Here is Dr. Haney Lopez discussing his book on Democracy Now.

In recent years, the Republican Party's domestic political message has become almost synonymous with symbolic racism. It is intended to persuade White Americans that social welfare programs primarily benefit urban Blacks and other minorities, and that the overrepresentation of Blacks among the poor is due to lack of motivation to work. Government is portrayed as stealing their hard-earned tax dollars and giving them to lazy poor people. But the people influenced by this message are actually voting contrary to their economic self-interest, since, when elected, Republicans pass policies that primarily benefit the wealthy. These government policies have been the primary cause of the large increase in inequality that has occurred over the past 30 years.

Ryan's remarks imply that poverty is largely an urban phenomenon, but that is not the case. These data from the U. S. census show that the poverty rate is higher in rural areas—not coincidentally, the Republican base.

It is also not the case that a disproportionate amount of tax money goes to minority recipients. The Congressional Budget Office reports that while African-Americans make up 12% of the population and 22% of the poor, they only receive 14% of government benefits. Non-Hispanic Whites, on the other hand, are 49% of the poor and receive 69% of government benefits.

Black unemployment can best be understood as a result of lack of opportunity, specifically, the disappearance of industrial jobs from urban centers, and well-documented hiring discrimination against African-Americans. The Republican "culture of poverty" message is an obvious attempt to blame the victim. (See my earlier post on this important social-psychological concept.)  

Ryan's response to criticism of his “Blacks are lazy” comments illustrates the role of plausible deniability in dog whistle politics. On the one hand, given Ryan's prominence in the Republican Party, it is totally implausible that his remarks were thoughtless or unintentional. The Southern strategy is Campaigning 101 for Republican candidates. Yet the corporate media accept his denials without skepticism. In fact, they almost never call out Republicans for race-baiting. Could it be because Ryan's budget proposals, which call for cutting social spending and reducing taxes on the rich, coincide with the policy preferences of the small number of wealthy owners and managers of the corporate media?

You may also be interested in reading:

A Racist Who Loved the Blues

And Then There Were Five, Part 1

Blaming the Victim

Blaming the Victim

My two previous posts about the killing of Trayvon Martin focused on social influences on the perpetrator—the tendency of whites to assume that black people are a threat and the tendency to perceive others as threatening when you are carrying a gun. This one focuses on the attitudes of third parties. You have no doubt heard news reports suggesting Mr. Martin was a less-than-perfect person. When faced with inexplicable tragedy, there is a tendency to blame the victim—to hold the victim responsible for his own victimization.

Blaming the victim is supported by many studies. For example, Janoff-Bulman and her colleagues had participants read a detailed narrative about a young woman spending an evening out on the town. At the end of the night, a man escorts her home. In one version, he rapes her. In the other, nothing happens. Her behavior and personality are the same. In fact, the two stories were completely identical with the exception of the final sentence. The woman was blamed more by participants who read the rape outcome than those who read the neutral outcome. Behaviors that took on no particular significance in the neutral condition, such as mild flirting or wearing a short skirt, were seized on in hindsight by participants in the rape condition as evidence that she brought the rape on herself. Studies using this and other similar paradigms have found evidence of both behavioral blame (she engaged in risky actions) and characterological blame (she is a bad person). Needless to say, the most common strategy used by defense attorneys at trial is to attempt to persuade the jury to blame the victim.

In the Martin case, victim blaming is merged with our stereotypes of young black men. Instead of a short skirt, we are encouraged to think it's significant that Trayvon was wearing a hoodie. To associate him with drugs, it is leaked that marijuana residue was found among his possessions. And since young black men are supposed to be hostile, some news organizations were deceived by a photograph of a young man flipping the bird at the camera—which turned out a photo of someone else.

Blaming the victim is one of several examples of our belief in a just world. Fritz Heider, the founder of modern attribution theory, wrote that in order for our attitudes toward other people to be in balance, happiness and goodness ought to go together. In a just world, good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished. Seeing one, we assume the other. It follows that if all we know about a person is that he has suffered some accident, illness or other misfortune, we assume that he is a bad person who deserved the negative outcome he received.

Why do we believe in a just world despite so much obvious evidence to the contrary? It is functional for the individual, since it facilitates the illusion that we can control our own fate. The alternative belief, that there is no relationship between our behavior and our outcomes, is known as learned helplessness, and people who believe that tend to be chronically depressed. At the societal level, the just world hypothesis serves as a mechanism of social control. If children can be taught to believe in a just world, they will presumably be encouraged to work hard, obey the law, treat others well, etc., in the expectation of leading a long and happy life.