Mitch McConnell and the Art of Dog Whistles

Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell and the racist dog whistle ride again. In political rhetoric, a dog whistle is a statement that can say something different to different audiences. That is like the way that a dog might hear a whistle that a person cannot. Asked during a recent press conference about the concerns that people of color felt about voting rights in the United States of America, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this:

“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just [as a] high percentage as Americans. A recent survey 94% of Americans thought it was easy to vote. This is not a problem.”

Of course, “this is not a problem” is the conservative mantra. If you pretend that nothing is wrong, you can pretend that you don’t need to change. By falsely denying that voter suppression is real, McConnell could pretend to justify his anti-voting rights agenda.

Dog-Whistle Speech

Politicians speak in dog whistles so they can deny what they themselves say. In this case, McConnell could deny that there was a problem in the same breath that he helped to cause the problem. Similarly, one might recall that former President Ronald Reagan talked about “young bucks and “welfare queens.” Everyone knew that he was talking about African Americans. Still, since these were dog whistles and not explicit statements, Reagan could blithely deny any racist intent. His racist core voters got the idea. Yet, the proverbial suburban housewives could pretend they heard no racist content. Likewise, when King Henry II supposedly asked, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” it didn’t sound like a solicitation to murder. It was a deniable dog whistle.

McConnell’s dog whistle itemized a racial divide. His critics jumped on the obvious. McConnell distinguished between “Americans” and “African Americans.” Otherwise, he could have said that African Americans vote at the same rate as other Americans. That would have been untrue, as we will see in a moment, but it would acknowledge that Black people are Americans. Instead, McConnell’s words implied that African Americans aren’t Americans. A person might, in contrast, say that Polish-American voters vote at a higher (or lower) percentage than Ukrainian-American voters. That might make at least a little bit of sense. McConnell did something else. He distinguished between African-Americans and (real?) Americans.

McConnell, of course, quickly denied that he meant to do any such thing. “I’ve never been accused of this sort of thing before,” he said, “and it’s hurtful and offensive.” He then described his commitment to civil rights in the 1960s, saying that he had attended the 1963 March on Washington and that he witnessed President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He also explained that he had, over the years, hired African Americans to work in his office. This led Charles Booker to comment, “Mitch McConnell wants you to know it’s fine for him to block Voting Rights because he has Black friends.” Of course, anyone who grew up in the South in the pre-Civil Rights era – as I did – knows that “I have many Black friends” is the racist’s favorite refrain.

None of McConnell’s defensive comments about a distant past, however, explain why he opposes voting rights legislation today. So, we ask, what did McConnell really mean? To understand dog-whistle communication, we need to listen for clues as to the speaker’s real meaning. We also need to listen for what the speaker did not say. After all, what a speaker does not say can convey as much meaning as what the speaker does say.

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Politicians often use dog whistles to sneak in their true meanings. For example, predating McConnell’s outrageous statement, former President Donald Trump once said that “MAGA loves black people. ” That implied that Black people were not part of Trump’s MAGA crowd. Pretty much the same thing that McConnell implied.

Donald Trump Says That the MAGA Crowd Loves Black People, Except When They Don’t


Why Speak in Dog Whistles? 

Dog-whistle communication gave McConnell a clever way to speak out of both sides of his mouth. Did McConnell respond to the uproar by supporting any kind of voting rights legislation, however moderate? No. Did he specifically assert that “Yes, African-Americans are real Americans?” Not that I have heard. He defended himself, but that is not the same as denying his dog-whistle meaning. His core supporters can come away confident that McConnell sides with their opposition to civil rights. More moderate Republican voters can pretend that he was misunderstood. The dog whistle helped McConnell appeal to a bigger audience than what he could reach if he spoke clearly.

Was McConnell’s statement undeniably racist? Well, no. He did not use the N-word. He did not accuse Black people of being lazy or ignorant. His statement was obvious but deniable, which is the whole point of a dog whistle. We all know that Mitch McConnell pretends to support voting rights when he does not. Unfortunately, because of his tricky way of speaking, it’s hard to prove. Yet, how can we solve our nation’s problems if we can’t even acknowledge them?

Scholars sometimes call dog-whistle speech “multivocal communication.” What that means is that a single statement can mean different things to different audiences. In this case, “African American voters are voting in just as high a high percentage as Americans” carries at least two meanings. It can mean that African-American voters and American voters are two different groups. It also could mean that McConnell found a statistical equivalence between the voting rates of White Americans and Black Americans. The first implication is much more racist then the second – not that either is defensible. 

Fact Check: Was McConnell Right? No.

By the way, did McConnell have his facts right? Of course not. The United States Census Bureau found that 71% of qualified white voters voted in the 2020 election. This is substantially more than the 63% voter turnout rate of African-Americans.

What about my own experience? I have lived in the voter suppression states of South Carolina and Texas since 2005. The most recent scandal results from Texas’ new voter suppression law, which restricts mail-in ballots. When you fill in the mail-in ballot application, you need to write down your driver’s license number, your voter ID number, or the last four digits of your Social Security number. However, what if you originally registered to vote, maybe years ago, using your voter ID number, and yet put your driver’s license number on the application?  Or vice versa? The application will likely be rejected. Rejected applications need to be refiled. There is no guarantee of success, since the state’s voter records are a mess. Or, when I lived in South Carolina, voting locations changed willy-nilly, often with no notice to voters. These are just two of the 19 states that have proposed or adopted aggressive voter suppression laws. Yes, contrary to Mitch McConnell, some states pull nasty tricks to suppress voter turnout.

And, since voter suppression is patently unjust, politicians like McConnell speak in dog whistles to conceal or distract. It did not work this time. Often enough, however, it does.   
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Other examples of dog whistle speech:

Were Trump’s Tweets Racist? They Were (Sort of) Deniable Dog Whistles

“And This Is Their New Hoax:” Donald Trump’s Six Deadly Words Still Ravage Our Nation
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Research note: Interested readers will want to look at Bethany Albertson’s important article to learn more about multivocal communication.

Image: Congressional photo, via Wikimedia