Post by midcan5 on Oct 28, 2015 16:20:33 GMT -5
Interesting book I am currently reading.
Preface: LEARNING ABOUT RACISM AT HARVARD LAW
"Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and shari a law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today-and the crisis of the middle class-simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.
I initially sketched the ideas elaborated here in the Sixteenth Annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society, delivered at New York University in the fall of 2011. The professor honored by the lecture series, Derrick Bell, passed away less than a month before the lecture he had invited me to deliver. You may have heard of him . Leading up to the 2012 election, a rightwing media outfit promised a "bombshell" about President Barack Obama. It turned out to be a grainy video of Obama as a student at Harvard Law School introducing Bell at a rally, and then giving him a hug. The warm clasp, media provocateur Andrew Breirbart's group claimed, symbolized Obamas full embrace of an intellectual leader they described as "the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory [that argues] that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress 'people of color.'"
From: 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López
www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffic-stops-driving-black.html
"Beyond white and black. Another classic misunderstanding posits that the Southern strategy involves only white-black dynamics, or more generally, only race. On the contrary, Phillips was clear that whites would flee the Democratic Party in revulsion at "blacks and browns;' citing in particular the ascendant Mexican American community in the Southwest." To be sure, especially in the 1970S and 1980s, the portrayal of African Americans as criminals and welfare cheats provided the central themes in dog whistle assaults. Even during these decades, though, racial bogeymen varied by region, with Latinos in the Southwest, Asians in certain metropolitan areas, and Native Americans in the upper Midwest and in other pockets of the country also serving as racial scapegoats. The prominence of these other groups in racial demagoguery would increase over this period, and after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Muslims as potential terrorists and Latinos as illegal aliens would become core archetypes in dog whistle narratives. Dog whistling comes out of the South and its preoccupation with blacks, but it always involved equal opportunity racism, and never more so than today." p 29 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López, Oxford
Additional point from another source.
"Gingrich, of course, denied this, offering “a bromide on the value of hard work” which was met with applause by the audience. Stanley writes: “Williams followed up by pointing out to Gingrich that expressions such as ‘lacking work ethic’ were associated with negative racial stereotypes…and it was disingenuous for Gingrich to deny them. The audience loudly booed Williams’s response.” In other words, “lacking a work ethic” is code for “lazy blacks,” just like “food stamps” or “welfare queens.” In 2012, you don’t need to say, “Negroes are shiftless freeloaders” to tap into the racist ideology of a portion of the audience. You just need to use the right code words." newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/philosophy/not-your-grandfather-s-philosophy
"Racism is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look." Robin D.G. Kelley
Preface: LEARNING ABOUT RACISM AT HARVARD LAW
"Two themes dominate American politics today: at the forefront is declining economic opportunity; coursing underneath is race. This book connects the two. It explains popular enthusiasm for policies injuring the middle class in terms of "dog whistle politics": coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites. Examples of dog whistling include repeated blasts about criminals and welfare cheats, illegal aliens, and shari a law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening nonwhites. In the last so years, dog whistle politics has driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government, and in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. American politics today-and the crisis of the middle class-simply cannot be understood without recognizing racism's evolution and the power of pernicious demagoguery.
I initially sketched the ideas elaborated here in the Sixteenth Annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society, delivered at New York University in the fall of 2011. The professor honored by the lecture series, Derrick Bell, passed away less than a month before the lecture he had invited me to deliver. You may have heard of him . Leading up to the 2012 election, a rightwing media outfit promised a "bombshell" about President Barack Obama. It turned out to be a grainy video of Obama as a student at Harvard Law School introducing Bell at a rally, and then giving him a hug. The warm clasp, media provocateur Andrew Breirbart's group claimed, symbolized Obamas full embrace of an intellectual leader they described as "the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory [that argues] that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress 'people of color.'"
From: 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López
www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffic-stops-driving-black.html
"Beyond white and black. Another classic misunderstanding posits that the Southern strategy involves only white-black dynamics, or more generally, only race. On the contrary, Phillips was clear that whites would flee the Democratic Party in revulsion at "blacks and browns;' citing in particular the ascendant Mexican American community in the Southwest." To be sure, especially in the 1970S and 1980s, the portrayal of African Americans as criminals and welfare cheats provided the central themes in dog whistle assaults. Even during these decades, though, racial bogeymen varied by region, with Latinos in the Southwest, Asians in certain metropolitan areas, and Native Americans in the upper Midwest and in other pockets of the country also serving as racial scapegoats. The prominence of these other groups in racial demagoguery would increase over this period, and after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Muslims as potential terrorists and Latinos as illegal aliens would become core archetypes in dog whistle narratives. Dog whistling comes out of the South and its preoccupation with blacks, but it always involved equal opportunity racism, and never more so than today." p 29 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López, Oxford
Additional point from another source.
"Gingrich, of course, denied this, offering “a bromide on the value of hard work” which was met with applause by the audience. Stanley writes: “Williams followed up by pointing out to Gingrich that expressions such as ‘lacking work ethic’ were associated with negative racial stereotypes…and it was disingenuous for Gingrich to deny them. The audience loudly booed Williams’s response.” In other words, “lacking a work ethic” is code for “lazy blacks,” just like “food stamps” or “welfare queens.” In 2012, you don’t need to say, “Negroes are shiftless freeloaders” to tap into the racist ideology of a portion of the audience. You just need to use the right code words." newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/philosophy/not-your-grandfather-s-philosophy
"Racism is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look." Robin D.G. Kelley