Dogwhistles: the New Pitch of the Same Old Racist Tune
What you need to know to start dismantling this form of strategic racism
A dogwhistle is a word or phrase that sounds harmless on the surface, but contains a secondary meaning intended solely for an in-group. It’s called a dogwhistle because it’s a metaphor modelled after a literal dog whistle — a sound made at a pitch that only dogs can hear.
Dogwhistles are often used in politics to convey messages that would be too damaging or otherwise adversely received if they went unconcealed. Most commonly, these coded political appeals are racist in nature, lending to the phrase ‘dogwhistle racism’, or sometimes simply, ‘dogwhistle politics’.
It turns out, the connection between the dogwhistle and racism isn’t new — the origin of the literal dog whistle has racist roots, too.
A brief history of literal and metaphorical dogwhistles
Also called ‘Galton’s whistle’, the silent dog whistle was invented by Francis Galton, father of the shameful pseudoscience of eugenics, responsible for developing many inaccurate and harmful theories about variations among human populations.
Galton designed the dog whistle to test hypotheses about differences among races…
