Alright, so first we're going to talk about race, a thing that all Minnesotans love to talk about, right?

So that's right, and that's the issue, that's what happens, right?

Jenae Bates is a strategist with the group Faith in Minnesota.

She's speaking to a group of Democratic politicians and organizers, leading them in a training session for a messaging campaign called Greater than Fear,

which we're going to spend a good deal of time talking about later in this episode.

The training is taking place in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a city with a high population of Somali refugees,

which is one of the reasons Jenae starts off her session talking about something called dog whistle politics,

the use of coded racial appeals to stoke resentment.

Now has anybody seen any or heard any of their own little version of dog whistle politics, either in your work or at school or just...

Does anyone want to give an example?

I think a lot of times when people complain about all those lazy people on welfare queens and stuff like that,

there's stereotype that is dog whistle through that, and it's to decrease support for collective action and government and programs that help people and look people up.

Absolutely right. Anybody else?

Yes.

That's the term.

Those people.

So we know when we hear it, we know when we hear it.

Unfortunately everybody doesn't.

Or at least they, they viscerally react to it, but they don't recognize that this is the point of it.

It is to get us to distrust one another.

It is to get us to think, oh, it's that person is against me, and there's only so much and we have to fight over it.

I need to be the winner, right?

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