Posted on Wednesday, 18th February 2009 by Maritzia
No, I’m not talking about one of those silent whistles that only dogs can hear. According to the WikiPedia, a dog-whistle is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.
A dog-whistle is a way for someone to say something offensive while maintaining deniability of it’s offensiveness.
- ”Oh, I didn’t mean it the way you’re taking it.”
- “Don’t you have a sense of humor?”
- “I meant xyz. What you’re saying never occurred to me.”
We saw a lot of racist dog-whistles employed in the 2008 Presidential campaign, and I’m sorry to say, we’re still not free of them. Take, for example, this cartoon in today’s Washington Post (thanks to Feministe for her post on the subject):
The Washington Post will tell you that this was just a cartoon based on the pet chimp shot by police yesterday. They’ll say it’s a reference to the stimulus bill being written by monkeys. That’s what they’ll say. But let’s look at the imagery of this cartoon.
- Blacks have a long history in the US of being referred to as monkeys, apes, and gorillas.
- Blacks have a long history in the US of being shot and killed by white police (after all, it’s been less than 2 months since Oscar Grant was shot and killed).
- The same cartoonist drew a cartoon last month protraying Obama as the author of the stimulus bill.
So while the NY Post may portray this cartoon as an innocent mistake, I think that the cartoonist and the editors new exactly what it was saying and put it out there anyway, no matter how offensive it is to any thinking person. And just in case I didn’t make it clear, this cartoon is portraying police killing the first black President of the United States and being flippant about it to boot.
This cartoon is a disgrace. If you feel the same way, please contact the NY Post and demand an apology and a censuring of the cartoonist. They should not be giving space to something this horrific.
Posted in Activism, Political, Social Justice | Comments (1)
February 21st, 2009 at 5:02 pm
It might not be long we’ll find dog-whistles here in the Philippines, or i guess we already have… i just haven’t seen it.. sometimes i am blind.
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