The Language of Hate

From slurs to dog whistles

Ibizan Hound. Image from https://www.dogster.com/lifestyle/history-of-dogs-in-ancient-egypt

For the past ten days, my husband and I have been dog-sitting our son and daughter-in-law’s hybrid, a graceful young creature named after the Roman goddess Juno. With her slender, deer-like build and large pointed ears, she calls to mind Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god who guided souls through the underworld. Still a puppy, she moves between innocence and poise, between myth and mischief. More than once, we’ve caught ourselves calling her by the name of our kids’ late dog, Chi-Rho. It’s a small slip, yet one that has reminded us how, persisting quietly, love and memory intertwine.

During this tour of duty, my husband and I, a zero-car family ever since we both retired, have taken the bus to and from our downtown condo a few times. I spent many years riding buses during part of my childhood and young adulthood in San Francisco, so ditching our car felt like coming back to familiar territory. Except, I don’t remember Muni-operated bus drivers being thanked often or at all back in The City. Here in Seattle, however, “Thank you!” and “Thank you, bus driver!” are often heard from many riders, young and old.

But we’re talking buses here, so … life happens. I watched a slim young teenager board the bus beside a woman who was, in all likelihood, a glimpse of her future self: her mother. On another trip my husband took, he described a man who, forbidden to bring his large paper cup aboard, ended up retching into a paper bag, a blunt reminder of how quickly routine civility can collapse under the body’s simplest demands.

And now we’ve arrived at the nitty-gritty, as ever since the following happened a few days ago, I’ve not been able to exorcise it from my mind.

My husband and I were both on this particular bus ride, sitting a few seats from the front. A loud fight broke out at the back; voices were raised, and fists went flying. I looked back and saw a tall man, about 60 years old, loudly shouting and threatening to hit the shorter guy again. As far as we could make out, the argument seemed to have been about a ball game. The tall guy yelled something about “don’t touch me” and demanded an apology.

I couldn’t make out who the shorter guy was, whose back was to me. If he said anything, I did not hear it from where I sat. The tall guy was doing all the shouting, and he was still in that mode when he called the smaller guy a “white [n-word].” I asked my husband, “Is the other guy Black?”

Naïve as I can be sometimes, I thought maybe the other guy was a light-skinned African American. My husband told me no, explaining that when the phrase was aimed at a white person, it was the speaker’s way to display dominance or provoke maximum outrage to wound or shock.

That moment revealed something crucial: the person hurling the insult was fundamentally a coward. He needed the shield of another white person to feel safe using the most taboo, historically loaded slur imaginable. I supposed he would never risk saying it to a Black person because of its real-world dangers and historical weight. The phrase’s potency comes less from describing the target and more from signaling social inferiority or betrayal. His behavior was entirely his choice: he attacked someone because it was safe and socially permissible. This reveals how racism’s legacy persists in language even outside literal racial contexts, and how insecurity masks itself as aggression in a desperate attempt to claim power where none exists.

It makes me wonder how many people carry around unexamined prejudices that only emerge under certain conditions like stress or peer pressure.

I came home and did some research. The term “white n-word” has worn many ugly faces in American history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was lobbed at poor whites, marking them as racially suspect and socially degraded. By the civil rights era, it had mutated into a phrase I was familiar with: “n-word lover.” It singled out white people who dared support racial equality or enter interracial relationships, turning the language of hate into a weapon to enforce segregation and punish acts of solidarity.

The n-word by itself, the deeply offensive racial slur, was used openly during the 20th century in public discourse, literature, media, and everyday conversation in many English-speaking countries, particularly in Britain and the United States. The term appeared regularly in films, books, popular songs, and even product names without significant pushback from mainstream society.

This widespread acceptance reflected the overtly racist attitudes and institutional discrimination that characterized the era. Beginning in the mid-20th century, as civil rights movements gained momentum and societal awareness of racism’s harmful impacts grew, the use of such language gradually became socially unacceptable in public forums. However, rather than eliminating racist attitudes entirely, this shift often drove prejudice underground, where it manifested in more subtle, coded language and systemic inequalities. Of course, the transition did not end racism, but rather a change in how it was expressed: from explicit and socially sanctioned to implicit and ostensibly hidden.

I’m a cinephile, yet I gave The Wire a miss. It was what some hailed as “… the greatest TV series of the 21st century.” The writing was described as “realistic,” but that very realism made it impossible for me to watch past the first two or three times the n-word appeared.

The 1955 British war film The Dam Busters featured a dog belonging to Wing Commander Guy Gibson that was historically named with a racial slur. While this name was the dog’s actual historical name and reflected the language of the 1940s era, it has become deeply offensive in modern contexts. Consequently, later television broadcasts and re-edited versions have altered the name to “Blackie” or “Trigger” to avoid causing distress to contemporary audiences. The 2019 remake of the film also used “Digger” as an alternative.

This change illustrates the ongoing tension between historical accuracy and modern sensibilities in media. The dog, a black Labrador, served as the squadron’s mascot and was tragically killed in a road accident on the very night of the famous Dambusters raid in May 1943. His name was even used as a codeword during the actual military operation to signal mission success. The alterations reflect evolving social standards regarding racial language, even when depicting historical events, and demonstrate how filmmakers and broadcasters must balance authentic period representation with the responsibility to avoid perpetuating harmful language that carries significant pain and historical trauma for many communities.

Stephen Fry, writing the film’s screenplay, said there was “no question in America that you could ever have a dog called the N-word.”

Have you noticed how Trump and many Republicans have begun saying “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party”?

Are they, in effect, calling Democrats the “n-word party”? It’s a rhetorical tactic, a long-standing partisan jab, meant to strip away the positive associations of the word democratic and cast the opposition as less legitimate. This usage dates back at least to the mid-20th century, when racists and segregationists used it to portray the national Democratic Party as undemocratic, corrupt, “socialist,” or radical.

When Trump and Republicans say “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party,” it’s not accidental. This deliberate word choice goes back decades, meant to sound clipped and disrespectful. By removing the positive associations of “democratic,” the speaker subtly casts the party and its supporters as illegitimate or un-American. Shades of old slurs like “white n-word” and “n-word lover” linger beneath the surface, echoing an era when such words were used to keep white people “in line” and to police loyalty to whiteness.

The phrasing first gained traction among conservatives and segregationists in the 1940s and 1950s, during the Cold War and the early battles over civil rights. While the term itself isn’t overtly racist, it grew out of a political climate saturated with racial backlash, making its continued use a kind of vestige of that history.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was among the first to use it prominently. In a 1952 speech in Saginaw, Michigan, McCarthy declared: “You’ll hear the party in power, and I don’t call them the Democrat Party, my friends — I think it’s an insult to any loyal American who has long voted the Democrat ticket to call that motley crowd in Washington the Democrat Party. … It should be properly labeled as the Commiecrat Party.”

This speech, preserved in the Marquette University archives, shows how the phrasing was tied to his anti-communist attacks, casting Democrats as enemies within. In another speech, McCarthy again made the distinction between ordinary Democrats and those he vilified as part of the “administration Democrat party.” He told his audience: “There are the millions of loyal Americans who have voted the Democrat ticket … that small closely knit group of administration Democrats … they shouldn’t be called Democrats … they should be referred to properly as the Commiecrat party.”

Over time, the “Democrat Party” phrasing became a recognized rhetorical device. As described in Wikipedia’s “Democrat Party (epithet)” article, the term “Democrat Party” functioned as a way to divide the nation’s Democrats into “real Americans” versus traitorous elites, a rhetorical pattern that persists in Trump’s language today.

The term was also promoted institutionally by B. Carroll Reece, chairman of the Republican National Committee in the late 1940s. Reece is widely credited with introducing “Democrat Party” into the GOP’s official platforms, starting in 1946, as part of a broader linguistic strategy to weaken the moral resonance of “Democratic.”

By 1959, the slur had become controversial even within Republican circles. Senator Thruston Morton, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, promised to return to the correct name “Democratic Party,” distancing himself from the McCarthy-era hostility. Yet the phrasing never fully disappeared.

Decades later, the debate surfaced again at the 1984 Republican National Convention, when a delegate proposed that the GOP platform should officially use “Democrat Party.” Congressman Jack Kemp objected, calling it “an insult to our Democratic friends.” The motion was dropped, but the phrase persisted in right-wing media and political speech, eventually becoming part of Trump’s regular vocabulary.

These examples show that the shift from “Democratic” to “Democrat” has been a deliberate rhetorical tactic, evolving through decades of partisan and ideological battles.

Watching Juno these past ten days, a young creature still learning the boundaries between play and harm, I’m reminded that racists know exactly what they’re doing when they deploy words as weapons. Whether it’s a slur hurled because the true target isn’t present, or the deliberate truncation of “Democratic” to “Democrat,” these choices expose not innocence or ignorance but intent: the belief that some people can be demeaned without consequence.

Dogs seek connection and approval; humans seem drawn instead to establishing dominance, to finding someone beneath us. It’s a painful irony that we cherish in animals the very generosity of spirit we withhold from each other.

The mythological Juno was queen of the gods and protector of women. Perhaps her namesake, still learning the rules, reminds us that we’re all capable of becoming kinder, more culturally evolved humans.