The art of racial 'dog whistling'

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Today, when I hear people like former governor of Massachusetts Romney or former speaker of the House Gingrich or former Pennsylvania senator Santorum use words and phrases like “entitled” or “blah” or “food stamps president,” I don’t have to wonder what would have happened if I’d walked into my kitchen and used those same phrases in front of Bertha. She would’ve looked at me and raised her eyebrows, sighed in exasperation, and gone about her business. The hurt I’m sure I caused her as a child is something I’ll never be able to take back, to just erase away with the passage of time. Never mind that she’s passed away and I’m unable to tell her I’m sorry. Perhaps the only thing I can do now to remedy it, to purge myself of that guilt, is to call out the dog whistling when I hear it in the course of our current political debates.

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This is my burden to bear, my cleansing. Some will declare what I’m writing will never be enough, while some will empathize. There’s not much I can do about the former I suppose.

I’m reminded of what Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, writes in her Epilogue  “Too Little, Too Late”:

“What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s. I don’t think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity.”

Howell Raines, former editor of the New York Times, once wrote, “There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.”

For me, the answer isn’t one of the above; it’s all of the above. Once I was able to compare my “gayness” with a world of “blackness,” only then was I able to look at African-Americans on the same level as mine. Humanity is odd that way.

So today when you hear “food stamps” and “welfare queens” and “boy,” speak up and say something. Because what you’re hearing is code, what you’re hearing is hate. What you’re hearing is a dog whistle.

Jimmy Williams is an MSNBC Political Contributor and writes daily for jimmyspolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JimmysPolitics.