Center for Social Inclusion CSI Announces New Project StopDogWhistleRacism.
Here at the Center for Social Inclusion, we just went live with StopDogWhistleRacism.com, a project to monitor symbolic racism, and to help organizations and ordinary folks do something about it. StopDogWhistleRacism.com is a nonpartisan research project – sadly, nobody has a monopoly on symbolic racism – that monitors political discussions, from mayoral elections to the presidential race, creating an ongoing record of how race is used in electoral and policy debates, and how race and symbolic racism is discussed. Please click the link to check out our site, and come back often for the latest on symbolic racism in this historic electoral season.
Stop Dog Whistle Racism is an important resource in laying bare the strategy that, too often, is lost in discussion of individual ads, speeches or attacks. We hope that it will be used by journalists and others who are interested in writing about symbolic racism, and in understanding the context for specific incidents they cover. We also hope that you will find it useful, and that you will pitch in by sending us information about examples of symbolic racism that you come across, especially incidents in your communities that we might otherwise miss.
By the way, if you are on Facebook, search for our group there.
Stop Dog Whistle Racism will soon include tools to help you spot symbolic racism and challenge it. These will be added in the next week or so, so stay tuned for our next update.
Dog-Whistle Racism is political campaigning or policy-making that uses coded words and themes to appeal to conscious or subconscious racist concepts and frames. For example, the concepts ‘welfare queen,’ ’states’ rights,’ ‘Islamic terrorist,’ ‘uppity,’ 'thug,' 'tough on crime,' and ‘illegal alien’ all activate racist concepts that that have already been planted in the public consciousness and now are being activated by purposeful or accidental campaign activities, media coverage, public policy and cultural traditions. So, what’s dog whistle racism? It’s pure political theater to push buttons to win elections and policies. We’re here to identify, expose and respond to it.
3 comments:
"Dog Whistle" racism. What an interesting, and cleverly worded, concept. Really captures the nature of this "hidden" racism (sexism, anti-LGBT, etc...) stuff, doesn't it ?
I like it.
Thanks for this link. I will add it to my blog. It is so sad that in the 21st century we haven't moved beyond this. I really think economic fears and perceptions of scarcity are going to exacerbate this problem.
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