Lee Atwater's Recorded Confession Explains Evolution of Racial Dog Whistle Politics

In a November 1981 anonymous interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis, Republican strategist Lee Atwater provided an extraordinarily candid explanation of how the GOP uses coded racial appeals. Atwater explained: ‘You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”’ The 42-minute recording was not published until 2012, after both Atwater and Lamis had died. Conservatives had long claimed Lamis fabricated the quote. The recording was released by James Carter IV after obtaining it from Lamis’s widow, who was ‘upset’ that people doubted her husband’s scholarship. Atwater prefaced his remarks by saying ‘Now, y’all aren’t quoting me on this?’ The confession provides definitive proof that Republican racial appeals are deliberate strategic choices designed to mobilize white racial resentment while maintaining plausible deniability. Atwater would go on to orchestrate the Willie Horton strategy in 1988.