Watch highlight clips from Bill's interview with author and legal scholar Ian Haney López on the origins of dog whistle politics and how it may be used in future elections.
Twenty-six years after the infamous Willie Horton ad, race-based politics blocked Debo Adegbile's passage to head the Justice Department's civil rights division.
The fears that animate the tea party at the grassroots, Haney López says, are racial narratives that blame minorities for what's going wrong in America.
Sen. Bernie Sanders says that FDR's 1944 State of the Union speech is a model for what he would like to do for America's middle class. In this post, historian Harvey J. Kaye remembers what FDR had to say.