Spain is Sponsoring Racist Research

Why is Spain sponsoring racism, under the guise of science.

Torices, José Ramón (2021) Understanding dogwhistles politics.

This paper aims to deepen our understanding of so-called covert dogwhistles. I discuss whether a covert dogwhistle is a specific sort of mechanism of manipulation or whether, on the contrary, it draws on other already familiar linguistic mechanisms such as implicatures or presuppositions.

This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

A dog whistle is a high-pitched whistle that dogs can hear, but not human.

Here are the examples in the paper:

For so many in our country, the homeless, and the fatherless, the addicted—the need is great. Yet there is power—wonder-working power—in the goodness, and idealism, and faith of the American people.1

Over here you have a policy which, with Reagan and me as speaker, created millions of jobs— it’s called paychecks. Over [t]here you have the most successful food stamp president in American history, Barack Obama.

Willie Horton’s ad

If you can hear the whistle, then you are the dog.

It says these are dogwhistles because everybody knows that “African Americans are lazy”. He says they are lazy 14 times in a 19 page paper. He also says they are criminals, and particularly identifies them with “kidnapping,” “stabbing,” and “rape”.

None of this is backed up by any research on whether African Americans really are lazy and criminal.

Nor is there any pretense of political objectivity. All of the criticism is of one political party, while excusing the comments of the other party.

In case you think that the author is only recognizing those beliefs without endorsing them, then whole point of the article is to deny that anyone does that. People say dogwhistles in order to advertise racist beliefs without explicitly advocating them. Or so it says.-

I just posting this to show what garbage passes for academic work. I thought that only Americans produced this junk, but apparently it has spread to Spain, which doesn't even have any African Americans.