Quoted: Stephen Kantrowitz, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there was a brief period not long ago in which political leaders had a general agreement about race in American history. They believed the country had a history of racial injustice, that this was a bad thing and that the country had a collective responsibility to do something about it.
Kantrowitz said those who disagreed with the consensus generally used coded language — or “dog whistles” — to articulate their resistance. Otherwise, he said, they knew they risked being dubbed racists and therefore outside the consensus.
“What we’ve seen in the last decade,” the professor said, “is the collapse of what remained of that consensus and the rise of an overt language of white racial resentment … as a respectable (or anyway matter-of-fact) political position.”