Politically neutral-sounding terms can function as coded racial references.

Evidence

Other ideologies lack explicit racialized reference, relying instead on coded racialized reference. Here, words are heavily saturated with meanings and interests as the result of a specific history in which a particular social group is attributed with a particular fixed nature and/or whose presence is associated with a set of (usually undesirable) social consequences (Omi and Winant, 1994). When politicians refer to “muggers” and crime in the ”inner city,” the burden on the Welfare State, to children outside wedlock, or to “reverse racism,” and when they claim that multiculturalism devalues Western civilization, these all have a “racialized” reference. They are understood to be promoting policies believed to benefit “whites” while penalizing blacks and other people of color. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1835

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘coded racialized reference’ and illustrates it with concrete dog-whistle examples.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay’s interest in how surface-neutral discourse carries identity/political signaling; also connects to contemporary dog-whistle politics analysis.