LIVE from New Orleans: Why avoiding talking about race is inauthentic and ineffective

Hel­lo again from New Orleans!

There was an excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion this morn­ing on the effec­tive­ness of using mes­sag­ing that explic­it­ly address­es race. Race-Class: How to Build a Tru­ly Mul­tira­cial Move­ment for Racial Jus­tice and Shared Pros­per­i­ty for All fea­tured Ian Hon­ey Lopez, author of Dog Whis­tle Pol­i­tics, Causten Rodriguez-Woller­man of Demos Action, and Celin­da Lake of Lake Research Partners.

Before they start­ed their dis­cus­sion, a video mes­sage from Heather McFee, a Dis­tin­guished Senior Fel­low of Demos Action was shown.

McGee (who could­n’t make it to Net­roots Nation) explained that we would­n’t have the pover­ty wage econ­o­my we have today if it weren’t for racism being used as a force to cre­ate a hier­ar­chy of human val­ue. We have dis­tor­tion in our democ­ra­cy for the same rea­son, along with the fear of polit­i­cal pow­er for peo­ple of color.

They cre­at­ed their project to tell the truth: that the cur­rent eco­nom­ic pop­ulist mes­sage is accu­rate, but incom­plete, because it is not being hon­est about how racism is part of the issue. So they devel­oped a set of sto­ries and test­ed the mes­sages head-to-head.

“If we don’t get this right,” she said, “inte­grate our sto­ry and our move­ment, not only will we not win, but we won’t ful­fill the promise of this coun­try.” It is up to pro­gres­sives to get it done, to cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ty and jus­tice for every­one, she said. “It is up to us to call out racism and invite peo­ple of all races into coali­tion that is nec­es­sary to make the Amer­i­ca we believe in possible.”

Lopez start­ed the live dis­cus­sion by point­ing out that race has been used as a weapon in pol­i­tics for decades, and Trump is no different.

He says that Trump’s mes­sage of dog whistling, espe­cial­ly around immi­gra­tion, is the Repub­li­can frame for 2018, because its very pow­er­ful with their base, and because they can­not attract bicon­cep­tu­al vot­ers with­out it.

So-called col­or­blind eco­nom­ic pop­ulism is not the way to respond. It ele­vates eco­nom­ics and ignores racial issues, under the the­o­ry that race divides us and that we should focus on what unites us, and the thing we all have in com­mon is eco­nom­ics. But race does divide us! To not acknowl­edge this does not make it go away and the mes­sag­ing is not as effec­tive as when we tell the truth about race.

They test­ed audio mes­sages of con­ser­v­a­tive mes­sages, col­or­blind eco­nom­ic pop­ulist mes­sages, and eco­nom­ic pop­ulist mes­sages that specif­i­cal­ly name race and call peo­ple to work togeth­er across racial lines to address the eco­nom­ic issue. All six race/class mes­sages per­formed bet­ter than col­or­blind eco­nom­ic populism.

They also found that call­ing out divi­sive tac­tics with explic­it ref­er­ences to race beats oppo­si­tion race bait­ing mes­sages on immi­gra­tion, and res­onates more strong­ly than an iden­ti­cal mes­sage that does­n’t name race. How­ev­er, call­ing out divi­sion does not stand up to dog whistling if it fails to include a call for unity.

The study results showed that after hear­ing race-class mes­sages, respon­dents move towards greater sup­port for pro­gres­sive policies.

“So what­ev­er issue you care about, you need to fig­ure out how to address racist dog whistling in gov­ern­ment,” said Lopez.

He next broke down the anato­my of a win­ning nar­ra­tive. Race should be dis­cussed overt­ly and as includ­ing every­one, whites too.

We must explain divi­sion as a “divide and dis­tract” strat­e­gy behind eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty and racial injus­tice. Then we’ve got to empha­size uni­ty and col­lec­tive action to solve prob­lems. Final­ly, we must invoke pre­vi­ous cross-racial sol­i­dar­i­ty vic­to­ries to com­bat cyn­i­cism, and con­nect work­ing togeth­er to gov­ern­ment for all.

Rodriguez-Woller­man spoke next and said that just sim­ply nam­ing race in these mes­sages does­n’t seem like it’s doing much to real­ly call out racism. The real­i­ty is that in our polit­i­cal dis­course on the left, the floor for talk­ing about race is very low, so even when we just men­tion it a lit­tle, to some it feels like we are yelling.

When we don’t direct­ly address race and dog whis­tle mes­sages, he said, peo­ple know that we aren’t being honest.

But when we call it out and address it, we build trust and authen­tic­i­ty. Invok­ing cross-racial sol­i­dar­i­ty helps to get past peo­ple’s cynicism.

Lake runs the com­pa­ny that did the research and polling.

She point­ed out that even if we try to avoid talk­ing about race, peo­ple’s feel­ings about race will still be there. She also said that bicon­cep­tu­al vot­ers are not con­fused, but rather have the abil­i­ty to rea­son using either a right wing frame or a pro­gres­sive frame, so we need to con­sis­tent­ly reframe to ensure the log­ic of pro­gres­sive val­ues is active­ly guid­ing the think­ing and behav­ior of more people.

More infor­ma­tion on race-class mes­sag­ing and the pro­jec­t’s find­ings are avail­able from the Demos Action web­site.