Thread by @ONENATI42043514

Going to coin a (potentially) new term on Twitter. This might take a few tweets so bear with me. #BlackTwitter will get this pretty quickly so bear with me while I explain.

1981 Lee Atwater interview basically outline the definition of dogwhistle politics.
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Let me share the specifics of what I want to focus on:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.
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Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things & a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.…

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“We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

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google.com/amp/s/www.then…

Let's focus on the underlying goal of what he said "Black's get hurt worse than whites" by using language to install a candidate to operate the levers of government to manipulate these so-called abstract issues.

But the intent is the same.

Marginalized communities hurt worse
5

So whenever a candidate targets a social safety net program, or proposes a constitutional amendment to mandate a balanced budget or whatever...where marginalized communities will suffer *more* than more affluent communities we can assume the intent is the same.
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The term I propose to describe this is The Atwater Doctrine.

It's dogwhistle politics just as Ian Haney Lopez defined it but expanded to encompass more than just *language* that sounds nice as a precursor to some horrible policy.

The Atwater Doctrine.

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