Dog-whistling is not merely about creating ill will towards communities of color. It’s about cementing the notion that we cannot have an ‘us,’ we cannot have a collective, we cannot have shared things. We cannot have a universal single-payer health care system; we cannot have paid time to care for our families; we cannot have labor protections that cover us all — we can’t have an us because there’s a them. And they don’t work, they don’t follow the rules, they overuse government services, and because there’s a them, we cannot have things for us. So dog-whistling at its core is about undermining the notion of the collective, i.e., the principle of government.
Anat Shenker-Osorio quoted in ‘A unifying “race-class narrative”: Blueprint for progressive victory?’, Salon.com
Prominent cognitive linguist Anat Shenker-Osorio partnered with U.S think tank Demos and Ian Haney Lopez (author of Dog Whistle Politics) in an ambitious multi-phase project to build an effective new narrative on race-class.
In her only public event in Australia in 2018, Anat Shenker-Osorio draws parallels to her research with Australia’s socio-political context as she discusses how to apply these findings to the increasing white nationalism, xenophobia and race-based attacks that punctuate politics around the globe.
Attribution CC BY