UDL: The GOP's Race Problem and Your Discussion

It has been the stuff of legend for years now -- an interview that canonized GOP political consultant Lee Atwater gave while he was working in the Reagan White House in 1981. In that sit-down, Atwater explained how the Republican Party had so successfully executed the "Southern Strategy" of convincing large numbers of Southern Whites to vote Republican while navigating a new world in which overt prejudice was no longer politically viable. How? By replacing formerly overtly racist appeals, embodied in the n-word (which, Atwater noted, "you can't say" anymore) with coded language instead. These coded appeals -- "dog-whistles" -- whether about busing or, even more "abstract," as Atwater put it, things like tax cuts and other economic issues, would have the effect of "hurting blacks worse than whites," appealing to the constituencies the GOP was trying to attract, all while affording the party plausible deniability with respect to racism.