Update, August 17, 2018: Discussion of this post occurred in two threads on Google+, here and here. One point arose when Robert Hansen pushed back on my exclusion of the wealthy as a group who can be “dogwhistled.” He cited the Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia in doing so.
My inclination is to reject such a broadening of this term’s meaning. Such a broadening robs the term of its force. The rich and powerful have nothing to fear from “dogwhistling.” Subaltern groups most certainly do. This term is not (yet) authoritatively defined.[1]
Update, August 22, 2018: I have been contemplating further the use of the term “dogwhistling” as some (see above) would apply it as a defense against however mildly obscured attacks on the rich and powerful. And I am remembering that slaveholders would set hounds after fugitive slaves. Let that sink in for a moment. Hounds. To use an accusation of “dogwhistling” to defend against such attacks is a gross perversion of that term. Sorry, this cannot wash and I emphatically reject this usage.
When speech communication scholars speak of persuasion, they often refer to three words: logos, pathos, and ethos. Two of these are pretty straightforward: Logos is about whether your argument, given reasonable assumptions that often aren’t all stated, makes sense inductively or deductively. Pathos is about the emotional appeal. “Dogwhistling” relies on a certain sometimes latent animus toward subaltern groups, for example.
Ethos is harder. It has no precise English translation that I’m aware of. It is about who the speaker is to the audience. It is about the way they have about them. It’s about a myriad of things that a specialist in nonverbal communication might be able to help quantify.
For example, as an undergraduate, I took a public speaking class from a older female African-American professor. She had a sense about her that simultaneously commanded respect and conveyed a certain skepticism that co-existed with her concern for the people around her and her faith.
She has (or had) a magnificent ethos. I loved it, admired it, respected it, and knew I could never emulate it. It is an ethos I have seen with other African-American women and that they have earned—I cannot emphasize this word earned enough—through their social location, which entails a legacy that includes slavery and Jim Crow.
In a way, this is racism, but I hope of a positive kind. My claim is that some folks have earned modes of presentation that would be inauthentic if deployed by others. That inauthenticity can legitimately be considered appropriation.
So when I hear white folks deploying the N-word and justifying their use by saying they hear Black folks using it all the time, my answer is no, it doesn’t work that way. I will not attempt to define the meaning of that word when Blacks use it but I can most definitely assure you that it has a different, much more brutal meaning when a white person utters it.
That’s because of the history. Whites used the N-word viciously over a protracted period of time during which they were simultaneously brutal to Blacks. In doing so, they surrendered forevermore whites’ ability to use that word with anything other than a vicious, racist connotation.
It may seem racist to proscribe white use of the N-word, but the whites who came before us incurred a debt to Blacks that can never be repaid. The very least we whites can do is to avoid compounding that debt with the use of that word.
Again, this is ethos: Who we are to our audience affects the content of our speech. As a white male scholar, I do best when I rely on the ethos I have earned. This ethos is nowhere near as delicious as that of my public speaking professor. But it is the ethos that is available to me despite the indignities I have suffered in the job market, that no one can take from me.
That’s not to say there aren’t some very frustrating limitations.
This is Ben Carson at work. Like Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice. https://t.co/gBqkHpw4dg
— David Benfell, Ph.D. (@n4rky) August 14, 2018
I was retweeting a tweet by Lydia DePillis in which she posted a Slate article reporting policy changes at the Department of Housing and Urban Development:
Scandalized by Trump’s use of a racist term for a black former White House staffer? Wait till you hear what his administration is doing to fair housing rules, which were put in place to keep wealthy neighborhoods from excluding poor minorities: https://t.co/ujMnqyWyAW
— Lydia DePillis (@lydiadepillis) August 14, 2018
Suffice it to say, DePillis is entirely correct to be outraged. Ben Carson’s action is unsupported by empirical evidence, is unlikely to address the problems of segregation, and instead falls into three patterns typical of the Trump administration: 1) undoing Barack Obama’s legacy, 2) being unbelievably repulsive in one or more respects, and 3) serving the interests of the powerful.[2] It is the latter of these that matches a pattern with two other prominent Blacks in or formerly in government service: Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas, hence my tweet.
It is particularly painful to watch powerful Blacks serve powerful whites with the sort of glee that we see with Carson, Rice, and Thomas. I perceive a betrayal, hence my subsequent tweet:
There is a term I want to use here. But it would be better if Blacks made the decision whether to deploy it.
— David Benfell, Ph.D. (@n4rky) August 14, 2018
And Robert Hansen assures me that the term I had in mind is unmistakable:
You think they’re Uncle Toms. I get that. I disagree with you — emphatically — but I get what you think. And frankly, you need to own that, not hide behind dogwhistling and saying how much you hope someone will rid you of a troublesome priest.
— Robert J. Hansen (@robertjhansen) August 15, 2018
Hansen is a conservative, at least somewhat traditionalist, but an unusually knowledgeable one over an unusually broad range of fields. And, as should be obvious here, he does care about racism. He continues:
Yes, that language is offensive. I don’t think it has a place in reasonable discourse. But I also believe that pretending we can make it okay if we just disguise it a little bit, so we’re not _really_ saying it except we’re totally saying it, is even worse.
— Robert J. Hansen (@robertjhansen) August 15, 2018
He makes a couple of errors here. First, the term “dogwhistling” can only apply to the extent that we treat Carson, Rice, and Thomas as Blacks and thus as members of a subaltern group. But they do not act as members of that subaltern group or even as ordinary people who happen to be members of that group, certainly not in the conduct I criticize. Instead, they act in service to the powerful, repeatedly at the expense of just about everyone else. I think this is a betrayal and because Carson, Rice, and Thomas are indeed Black, I think the term Hansen recognized applies.
But that term is specific to Blacks. It entails the betrayal of Blacks in favor of powerful white interests. It is for Blacks to identify this betrayal and if I do so for them, I speak for them without having consulted with them.[3] In so doing, I exceed my ethos; I am no longer the human scientist listening but rather its antithesis: a know-it-all asshole deciding what others should think.
I can certainly ‘own’ my belief that Carson, Rice, and Thomas are guilty as I would charge them. Indeed, the irony is all too obvious:
I think the aforementioned folks need more race consciousness, but especially less glee in advancing the interests of the very folks whose property–human and otherwise–the U.S. Constitution was originally designed to protect. 1/2
— David Benfell, Ph.D. (@n4rky) August 15, 2018
But do not confuse an accusing tweet with a verdict. And that verdict is not mine to reach.
- [1]Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed.↩
- [2]Henry Grabar, “Ben Carson Ends Obama-Era Efforts to Reduce Housing Segregation,” Slate, August 13, 2018, https://slate.com/business/2018/08/ben-carson-ends-obama-era-efforts-to-reduce-housing-segregation.html↩
- [3]see Linda Martín Alcott, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, eds. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1995), 97-119.↩