Dogwhistles: the New Pitch of the Same Old Racist Tune
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, with the aim to assert that differences were biologically and inheritance-based, not social.
Around 1940, Galton’s whistle replaced the traditional dog whistle used for hunting. This had an impact on the types of dogs used for hunting, as well as the contexts in which dog whistles were employed.
With this new silent whistle technology, suburban dogs were used more frequently, especially by police forces. This coincided with the start of the civil rights movement and by the 1960s, the American public had fully embraced using dogs in law enforcement.
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