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

"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."