Dog Whistles No More: (R)(E)Racing Borders and the Preservation of the Wages of Whiteness

• In Event: ERacing Borders: Global Trends in Border Criminologies

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, significant changes in acceptable social behavior spurred by the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights act of 1964, and “race mixing” stimulated by changes in popular culture, rendered the public use of overt racial slurs and racist language increasingly unacceptable. One of the consequences is that openly racist and pro-segregationist sentiments that were once part of political rhetoric, particularly in the U.S. south, were replaced by “dog whistle” politics, crystallized by the Nixon’s reliance on “law and order” to call out the image of black criminals threatening society. This was a key part of his “Southern strategy” to attract working class whites away from the Democratic party, just as was true of Reagan’s invocations about “welfare queens” stealing from hard working Americans. Over time, however, economic, social and political gains by African Americans, not the least of which was the election of a mixed-race man to the presidency, increasingly eroded the value of what DuBois termed the “psychological wages of whiteness.” This paper contends that the rise of anti-immigrant language and politics was animated, in part, by an inchoate attempt to restore the wages of whiteness by rendering the “illegal immigrant” the social and legal equivalent of the Jim Crow era African-American. It further contends, that because the majority of these immigrants are not black, many on the far right of the U.S. political spectrum, where open racism has always remained alive and well, felt increasingly authorized to speak in openly racist language about undocumented immigrants. This paper examines this trend as represented in the language of support for Arizona’s SB 1070, the efforts by multiple U.S. states to prohibit the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their borders, and the popularity of Donald Trump’s naked denigration of Mexicans and Muslims. It concludes with an argument that these trends have the effect of re-reconstructing the U.S. border openly as an arena of hoped-for racial separation.

Authors

• Kasey C. Ragan, University of California, Irvine

• Raymond Michalowski, Northern Arizona University