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Cover of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism And Wrecked The Middle Class

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism And Wrecked The Middle Class

by Ian Haney López

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The decades-long increase in income inequality has become perhaps "the" issue in American politics, and scholars have offered many reasons for why the gap between the rich and the rest has widened so much since the mid-1970s. Most of the explanations have been social and political in the broadest sense, and many have keyed on the propensity of middle- and working class Americans to vote against their own interest. Yet given that the greatest income divide is racial in nature, why have so few looked toward racially motivated behavior as a cause?Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Wrecked the Middle Class is a sweeping account of how "dog-whistle" racial politics contributed to increasing inequality in America since the 1960s.…

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"It’s a bracing premise: Indirect messages centered on stereotypes about minorities have persuaded middle-class and poor white people to support a government controlled by wealthy elites. While obvious racism is repudiated today, public life is filled with covert messages about who uses welfare more or who commits more crime, calibrated to reach white voters. Ian Haney López traces stereotypes of black criminality to the end of slavery, when Southern states used criminal convictions to lease black convicts out as forced labor. But his most depressing thesis is simple: Many who believe these messages are not hate-filled bigots but decent people, simply misled by the dog whistle."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org