I’m a citizen of both the US and the UK, and in 2016, I watched as both my countries were suddenly pulled in shocking political directions, with Brexit in the UK and Trump’s election in the US. In both cases, strong pre-existing norms against openly racist speech seemed to vanish overnight. As a philosopher of language who worked on both deception and racism, I wanted to know how this happened. This has led me to an enduring interest in the ways that manipulative language can change norms around racism, allowing what was once unthinkable to become normal.
I wrote...
Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood
This book describes linguistic tricks that have helped increasingly blatant racism and increasingly dangerous conspiracy theories to move from fringe to mainstream.
Some dogwhistles, such as "88", used by Nazis online to mean "Heil Hitler," or a carrot emoji used by anti-vaxxers to represent vaccination, serve to disguise messages that would otherwise be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Others, like the notorious “Willie Horton” ad from 1992, work on people’s racist attitudes outside their awareness. Figleaves, such as "just asking questions" or “it’s just a joke,” take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable and provide just enough cover to make people more willing to accept them.
I was stunned to learn that this book even existed. It was written by a Jewish linguist who survived the rise of the Nazis, observing and reflecting on the language changes that took place and their effects on people he knew.
I found his reflections deeply illuminating, and I remain haunted by some of his anecdotes and turns of phrase.
A labourer, journalist and a professor who lived through four successive periods of German political history - from the German Empire, through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi state through to the German Democratic Republic - Victor Klemperer is regarded as one of the most vivid witnesses to a tumultuous century of European history.
First published in 1957, The Language of the Third Reich arose from Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: 'It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the…
This book transformed the way that I understood racist messaging. It’s a richly detailed history of racist political campaigning, but its centerpiece is a riveting deep dive into the Willie Horton ad from 1992, which arguably changed the course of history by bringing us the first President Bush and, therefore, the first Gulf War (and all that followed from it).
Mendelberg shows how this ad—and others like it— can act on viewers’ racism without their awareness. Importantly, she shows how this can happen even if viewers actively want to avoid being racist.
Did George Bush's use of the Willie Horton story during the1988 presidential campaign communicate most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning? Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters' awareness? This controversial, rigorously researched book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so. In the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort…
I was fascinated to see an anthropological linguist turn her analytic lens on her own culture (and mine), that of White America. What she finds is a fascinating pattern of ways that White Americans talk about race.
The observations she makes will change the way you see conversations around you. I found myself first saying, “No, surely that doesn’t happen,” but then noticing that very thing happening again and again.
In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill provides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal the underlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate in American culture.
provides a detailed background on the theory of race and racism
reveals how racializing discourse-talk and text that produces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people to them-facilitates a victim-blaming logic
integrates a broad and interdisciplinary range of literature from sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legal studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that have studied racism, as well as material from anthropology and sociolinguistics
Part of the Blackwell…
I found this book from 2013 deeply illuminating about how we have come to be in the place we are today. It explains how words like "welfare" have become weapons serving multiple nefarious purposes: they help to stoke racism, hatred, and division. And by doing that, they keep groups that share common goals—like low-wage workers seeking a living wage—from uniting to achieve these goals.
Although it’s not out yet, I’m eager for the 2025 revision, which will be updated to reflect all that has happened since Donald Trump's rise.
Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that started with George Wallace and Richard Nixon, and is more relevant than ever in the age of the Tea Party and the first black president.
This book is a devastatingly insightful collection of essays about the killing of Trayvon Martin, the event that started the Black Lives Matter movement. They are written by a wide variety of authors, and each has a different focus. However, several of them are especially illuminating in terms of language.
Foremost among these, perhaps, is the editors’ careful dissection of the transcript of the 911 call between Martin’s killer and the police. Through doing this, they show the racist assumptions made and transmitted, even through the apparently neutral language of the 911 operator.
It’s an absolute model of what the philosophy of language can do at its best, and I teach it frequently in my classes.
On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old African American male Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight-year-old white Hispanic American male in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman killed Martin in a gated community. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, featuring a new preface by editors George Yancy and Janine Jones written after the June 2013 trial, examines the societal conditions that fueled the shooting and its ramifications for race relations and violence in America.
Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics attempts to capture what a critical cadre of scholars think…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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