Jennifer Saul's "Dogwhistles and Figleaves"

Jennifer Saul works in social and political philosophy of language, with particular interests in deceptive, sexist, and racist language. She has also worked in feminist philosophy and philosophy of psychology. In addition, she served as Director of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK 2009-2019, and President of the Mind Association in 2019. In 2011 she was named Distinguished Woman Philosopher by the US Society for Women in Philosophy. She taught at the University of Sheffield 1995-2019, and has been at the University of Waterloo since 2019.

Saul applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses how dogwhistles and figleaves can work together. Since these are the two major topics of my book, this does a lot to represent the breadth of the work. However, it comes after a lot of explanation of what these are, so it may not be very accessible to the reader on its own! Dogwhistles and figleaves are linguistic devices that help speakers get away with norm-violating utterances, and in the first half of the book I talk about how they help speakers get away with racist speech. Dogwhistles hide the racist speech from much of the audience, through code words like ‘inner city’, or—for Neo-Nazis—‘88’. (‘88’ is number code for ‘Heil Hitler’ because ‘H’ is the 8th letter of the alphabet.) Figleaves are different. They take racist speech that is openly on display, and add just a bit of cover—a phrase that raises some doubt about whether there really is racism present. Think here of people who say something very racist then tell you about their black friend. Or of Trump calling Mexicans rapists then saying that he’s sure some of them are good people. These won’t work on everyone but they can shift the views of people who want to not be racist but who can be caused to shift their standards of what counts as racist. And this ability to shift our standards, I argue, is what makes them so dangerous. On page 99 I turn to the ways these can work together—for example, how once a dogwhistle is discovered a speaker may produce a figleaf.

Learn more about Dogwhistles and Figleaves at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Lying, Misleading, and What is Said.

--Marshal Zeringue