The Fig Leaf Strategy

1nsomnizac:

Let’s do a thought experiment. Say you are a white racist politician, and you want support from white racist voters, but you cannot afford the backlash that would occur if you started talking about immigrants from a non-white country as a pack of subhuman barbarians. How do you get the support of racists?

The traditional solution to this problem is called a dog whistle. You use rhetoric which is not racist on the surface level where everyone can hear it, but between the lines where only your “dogs” can pick up on it. This gives you some plausible deniability, so it is quite popular.

But if that is too subtle for you, you can just say the racist rhetoric, and then put a fig leaf over it, in much the same way painters from antiquity would paint naked men and women and then cover their genitals with conveniently placed foliage. To put a fig leaf over racist rhetoric is to use racist rhetoric, and then hedge it or qualify it to a subset of the population of the race that you think that you can get away with smearing. Instead of calling all people from a non-white country animals, call the members of a gang from that country animals. Instead of saying that all the immigrants from that country are murderers and rapists, say that immigrants from that country are murderers, rapists, and, you assume, some good people.

The fig leaf works because people in general only want unambiguous racial bigotry to be treated as racist, when that is not strictly necessary to turn people against members of that race. When you reserve the moniker of animal for non-white criminals, and when you mention murderers and rapists whenever you talk about non-white immigrants, you are creating an atmosphere where people openly associate non-white people with criminality and animalism, even if you qualify your statements every time.