Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the United States owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their schools to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created their dependency on government similar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history.

I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Sen. John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates today aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.

A dark art

Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters — is one of the darkest political arts. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, Newt Gingrich has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”

Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at least since 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting.)

The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky” around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)

But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white GOP primaries.

Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamp president” a staple of his stump speeches.

New realization

Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog- whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. Another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.