So, How is this NOT a Dog Whistle?

Of course Legal Insurrection takes on the latest thin, lame, charge of bigotry against Sharon Angle in Nevada because she made an ad against illegal immigration.  I guess the illegal immigrants should have been depicted as a multicultural group, like the “TV gangs” that Family Guy correctly sent up.  Sigh.

But meanwhile we have something that happened in New Mexico.  There Democrat Diane Denish is running against Republican Susana Martinez in the race for governor.  And now suddenly they are all saying “No Tejana Susana.”  A Tejana is literally a “Texan woman” in Spanish.  See the truth is that in Spanish, the X is supposed to be pronounced more like an H.  As I joke (with affection) Texans don’t even pronounce the name of their state correctly.  And if you are calling her that in Spanish, then that is all it means: Texas woman.

But if you are otherwise speaking in English, such as, “You should not vote for that Tejana” then there is a secondary meaning.  A Tejano/Tejana also means a Hispanic Texan.  Now its lame enough that they are resorting to this silly regionalism.  But what possible relevance is it to highlight that she is Hispanic, too?

And a quick google search reveals that this is getting very common on the left.

I mean imagine if during the 2008 campaign, McCain said, “Do not vote for the black man, Obama.”  Everyone would rightly denounce that as racist, because it was unnecessarily dragging his race into the issue.

And mind you this is not a subtle code that a lot of people might miss and innocently invoke.  I have said we have a whole generation of children who don’t understand why it is racially offensive to depict Obama as a monkey, or eating fried chicken and watermelons; they are so beyond race, they don’t even understand these stereotypes.  But everyone in that region knows what Tejano/Tejana means.  Everyone.