Since before the day, in 1976, when Ronald Reagan announced his belief in “states rights” near the Mississippi road where three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered twelve years before, tacit appeals to racism have been a regular feature of our political life. 

<blockquote> You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.".

Lee Atwater, speaking to Alexander Lamis, 1981.</blockquote>

When they are most effective, this subterranean discourse isn’t intended as coded “dog whistles” appealing to hardened racists; rather, they prime the unconscious racial biases that we all hold.  George H. W. Bush hit Willie Horton hard for many months; in speeches as well as ads.  According to The Race Card by Tali Mendelberg, this was very effective in raising Michael Dukakis’ negatives among whites until late in the season, when Jesse Jackson and (eventually) Lloyd Bentsen called the Horton attacks out as racist.  Making the subtext explicit appears to have defused the potency of the issue, and the poll numbers of Bush’s opponent began to rise in correlation with news stories that made the racial dimension explicit.

Have you had enough of it?  A website launched today, StopDogWhistleRacism.com, aims to demonstrate the scope of symbolic racism of this sort by bringing together evidence of its use from news sources, left and right, from across the nation.  The aim is to look closely at both national and local elections, as well as policy debates that occur in this electoral season.  (I helped create the larger project the website is part of.)  Check it out, and if you can, help us out by providing tips about incidents in your community.  (Or if you prefer, join our Facebook group here.)