The Willie Horton ad used by George H. W. Bush in his 1988 presidential campaign is considered to be one of the most effective political ads in U.S. history. It's also the prototype for the use of symbolic racism in political campaigns. Brad Ashford is a Democrat running for Congress in Nebraska's 2nd District. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending $170,000 to run the following TV spot in support of his opponent, incumbent Lee Terry.
The ad is technically correct. Nikko Jenkins was released from prison under a Nebraska law that allows early release for good behavior, and went on to murder four people. Ashford supported this law while a member of the state legislature--as, presumably, a majority of Nebraska politicians did.
To call this an example of "dog whistle politics" may be to credit it with more subtlety than it actually shows.
By the way, the U.S. held 2.23 million people in prisons and jails in 2012, seven times the number in 1972, and by far the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. It will be difficult to reduce these numbers if politicians who vote for prison term reductions are held responsible for any recidivism that results.
In spite of declines in violent crime during the past two decades, the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and at any time in its history. Our punitive criminal justice policies have had a grossly disproportionate impact on racial minorities. While African-Americans make up 12% of the population, they are 40% of our criminal inmates. These disparities exist even where evidence suggests there are no racial differences in commission of the offense.
Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have argued for reducing the length of prison terms for nonviolent offenses, giving racial disparities in incarceration as one of their reasons. The President commented on this issue when the administration announced new guidelines for public school discipline intended to reduce racial disparities in school suspensions and dropout rates.
I remember thinking at the time that this argument could backfire. In a racist society, stating racial discrimination as a reason to reduce mass incarceration carries the risk of increasing support for punitive crime policies. Ian Haney-Lopez has noted that get-tough crime policies are a "dog whistle" used by politicians to appeal to white prejudice without referring directly to race. These coded racial appeals are used because they are effective. A new article by two Stanford social psychologists, Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt, supports these speculations.
Hetey and Eberhardt note that racial disparities in imprisonment are usually treated as an unintended outcome of punitive policies. They propose instead that knowledge of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is one of the causes of widespread public support for these policies. They conducted two field experiments.
In the first, white registered voters were approached by a white female experimenter at a train station and asked to sign a petition for a ballot initiative to reduce the punitiveness of California's "three-strikes-and-you're-out" law. Before being presented with the petition, participants were shown a 40-sec video about the prison system. The video did not refer to race, but in one version, 25% of the inmates shown were black, while in the other version, 45% were black. As predicted, fewer people (27%) were willing to sign the petition in the More-Black condition than in the Less-Black condition (52%).
The second study was an online survey of white New York City residents conducted by Survey Sampling International. Near the beginning of the survey, participants were given demographic information stating that the prison population was either 40.3% or 60.3% African-American. (Both statements were true. The first referred to the U. S. prison population, while the second referred to New York City.) Later in the survey, participants were shown a petition calling for an end to the New York police's "stop-and-frisk" policy, and asked whether, if they had been approached, they would have signed it. The results confirm those of the first experiment.
A measure of fear of crime was included in the survey. The relationship between racial composition of the prison population and support for less punitive policies was mediated by fear of crime. That is, the More-Black condition produced greater fear of crime, which led to less willingness to sign the petition. However, this was not the whole story. The effect of racial composition on policy acceptance was statistically significant even when fear of crime was statistically eliminated.
The authors admit that their results pose "quite a challenge for those striving to create a more just and equal society." It appears that presenting people with evidence that a social policy leads to racial injustice has the effect of increasing, rather than reducing, support for the policy. Maybe the President should emphasize the fact that reducing the prison population would save money.
After signing his landmark 1964 Civil
Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson is said to have become
depressed. When asked what was troubling him, he said, “I think we
just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to
come.” He was wrong. It was not just the South. Although Johnson
won that fall, since 1964 a majority of whites have voted for the
Republican candidate in every presidential election. The last column of the table shows the Republican margin of victory among
white voters.
Year
Republican Candidate
Democratic Candidate
Margin
1964
Goldwater
Johnson
-29%
1968
Nixon
Humphrey
16%
1972
Nixon
McGovern
40%
1976
Ford
Carter
4%
1980
Reagan
Carter
20%
1984
Reagan
Mondale
32%
1988
Bush I
Dukakis
20%
1992
Bush I
Clinton
2%
1996
Dole
Clinton
2%
2000
Bush II
Gore
13%
2004
Bush II
Kerry
17%
2008
McCain
Obama
12%
2012
Romney
Obama
20%
In Dog Whistle Politics,
Ian Haney Lopez makes a strong case for the argument that race has
been the driving force in American politics since the '60s.
Beginning with Nixon in 1968, the Republican Party developed a
winning strategy of appealing to white voters with messages based on
symbolic racism. One of the results
is that the Republicans have increasingly become the “white man's
party.” A new set of studies by Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University suggests that what is now a bad
situation is likely to become worse.
The
Census Bureau projects that by 2042, the US will become a
majority-minority
nation. That is, more than 50% of Americans will be non-whites. The authors hypothesized that this information is threatening to white voters, and making it salient will cause them to shift toward a more
conservative ideology and become more likely to vote Republican. The
information is, in effect, a dog whistle, that Republicans will be
able to use to their advantage in future elections.
The
Craig and Richeson article presents three increasingly impressive
experiments. The first is an internet study of a random sample of
white Independent voters—that is, voters not affiliated with either
the Republican or Democratic Party—living in the Western US.
California is already a majority-minority state, and in one
condition, respondents were informed of this fact. In the control
condition, they were told that Hispanics had become roughly equal
in number to blacks in the US. Participants were then asked to
indicate the extent to which they leaned toward one of the two major
parties, and to rate their political attitudes on a 5-point scale
from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The results of
the political leaning question are shown below.
People
informed of the majority-minority status of California also rated
their political attitudes as significantly more conservative than the
control group.
A second experiment used a random sample of white American adults from
all regions and political parties. Some of the participants—the
racial shift
condition—were told that America would become a majority-minority
nation in 2042, while those in the control group were given
information about geographic mobility. Attitudes were measures
toward five social policies, such as immigration and health care
reform. The authors proposed that the conservative shift was
mediated by group status threat.
This was measured by two questions about whether the American way of
life is threatened, and whether conditions in the US are getting
better or worse. Three other potential mediators of the conservative
shift were measured, but, as expected, none of them panned out.
As in
study 1, the participants in the racial shift condition shifted in
the conservative direction on the five attitudes and those in the
control group did not. Those in the racial shift condition also
showed greater evidence of group status threat, and, as predicted,
group status threat mediated the relationship between the racial
shift information and political conservatism. (See my earlier post explaining how mediation is inferred.)
Finally,
if the conservative shift is mediated by group status threat, then
providing participants with information that mitigates that threat
should reduce the size of the shift. Their third experiment had three conditions. Some participants were given the racial shift
information. The control group was again told about geographic
mobility. And finally, there was an assuaged-threat
condition. Two sentences were added to the racial shift information
reassuring the respondents that, despite the majority-minority shift,
white privilege would be maintained. Specifically, “white
Americans are expected to continue to have higher average incomes and
wealth compared to other racial groups.” Some new social policy
questions were also added.
As
expected, only the racial shift group showed a conservative shift on
the social policy questions. The participants in the assuaged-threat
condition did not differ from the control group.
It
should be noted the authors divided their social policy questions
into those they thought were race-related, i.e.,
immigration, and those they thought were not, i.e.,
health care reform. The size of the conservative shift was the same
on both sets of questions. This result would not surprise Lopez,
since he maintains that virtually all domestic political issues have
been racialized. For example, the term “Obamacare” is a dog
whistle meant to persuade white voters—incorrectly, of course—that
their heard-earned money is being taken by the government and given
to “Obama's people”—undeserving minority citizens.
The
Craig and Richeson article may help Republicans to identify
another reliable dog whistle, although Pat Buchanan called it to their attention years ago. The majority-minority shift is sometimes
said to foretell the demise of the Republican Party. However, in the
short run, it is likely to increase the racial polarization of the
two parties, and it may help Republicans temporarily by increasing
their appeal to white voters. Lopez suggests that whether the Republican Party can remain viable in the long run may depend on
their ability to persuade some non-whites, i.e., Asian-Americans and
light-skinned Hispanics, to redefine themselves as “white.”
(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.
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.”
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.
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?
