Ian Haney López

“Alabama in 1927 alone, 27,701 men were arrested on misdemeanor charges and offered for sale by county sheriffs. In Blackmon’s estimation, “roughly…

— Ian Haney López

“Start with the first half of Phillips’ statement, the claim that economic issues favored the Democrats when government programs “taxed the few…

— Ian Haney López

“the confluence of racial prejudice and conservative politics is the new racism. It’s a product of almost a half-century of ethnic discourse…

— Ian Haney López

“When the children were asked how many white people were “mean,” they commonly answered “almost none.” But when asked how many blacks…

— Ian Haney López

“Kevin Phillips also saw clearly that success lay in stimulating racial antipathies among whites across the country. For Phillips, if there was…

— Ian Haney López

“The Tea Party that reenergized the GOP in 2010 and that implacably attacked Obama turned out to be a familiar nemesis of…

— Ian Haney López

“Reagan Democrats increasingly extended their antipathy from nonwhites to government as a whole. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for…

— Ian Haney López

“In the wake of 1984’s pummeling the Michigan Democratic Party commissioned Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist and later a preeminent Democratic…

— Ian Haney López

“After 2012, Republicans controlled all 11 state legislatures of the former Confederacy, and their campaign tactics centered more than ever on depicting…

— Ian Haney López

“We would like to believe that if the polity understood that race-baiting continues to be widely practiced, people would repudiate it. Yet…

— Ian Haney López

“The core insight of modern liberalism is powerfully simple: we all benefit from a society that provides for the economic security and…

— Ian Haney López

“Racial attacks on liberalism shifted the enemy of the middle class from big money to lazy minorities, and transmuted economic programs that…

— Ian Haney López

“Dog whistling comes out of the South and its preoccupation with blacks, but it always involved equal opportunity racism, and never more…

— Ian Haney López

“This is not to portray race as simply one among many issues, each with equal weight; instead, race has been the principal…

— Ian Haney López

“In 1963, Robert Novak had written that many Republican leaders were intent on converting the Party of Lincoln into the White Man’s…

— Ian Haney López

“Even so, unlike most in society, these politicians thought long and deep about how to turn race to their advantage. We’ve previously…

— Ian Haney López

“it bears mention that “illegal” is a misnomer: crossing into or remaining in the United States without proper authorization is not a…

— Ian Haney López

“Conservative dog whistling made minorities, not concentrated wealth, the pressing enemy of the white middle class. It didn’t seem to matter that…

— Ian Haney López

“practicing the rhetorical punch, parry, and kick of dog whistle racial jujitsu. Here are the basic moves: (1) punch racism into the…

— Ian Haney López

“Wallace, Goldwater, and Nixon recognized and sought to take advantage of existing bigotry in the voting public, bigotry they did not create…

— Ian Haney López

“The ostensible culprit is liberalism’s bitterly contested remedies which asked too much of whites. Yet this ignores the long history, in the…

— Ian Haney López

“This hostility against intellectual and cultural elites had antecedents in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks in the 1950s, and arguably more generally forms…

— Ian Haney López

“From 1960 to 1970, as the New Deal expanded into the Great Society, the number of Americans in poverty declined from 40…

— Ian Haney López