Understanding and Misunderstanding ‘Dog-Whistling’, by Blake Smith.

It is, however, chiefly the Left that accuses that Right of dog-whistling, and mostly to disclose and denounce the supposed racism lurking in conservative language. …

Thinkers on the Right, meanwhile, who have an obvious interest in challenging the concept of dog-whistling, have only glowered and sulked at it. A typical example of this habit can be found in a recent article by Daniel Bonevac, who analyzes left-wing rhetoric about Donald Trump’s allegedly dog-whistling references to Mexican immigrant criminals. Such references appear to Trump’s critics as racist. While Trump (whom Bonevac supports) insists that “some” Mexican immigrants are “good people,” these critics argue that he implicitly targets all Mexican immigrants by associating the categories ‘Mexican’ and ‘immigrant’ with the category of criminality.

Bonevac, logically enough, insists that such a line of argumentation would make it impermissible to issue any negative statement about members of racial groups, for fear that these statements might imply something racist about the group as a whole. Indeed, Bonevac does not go far enough. Any statement about a member of group, whether positive or negative (let alone accurate or inaccurate), made by someone suspected of being racist (i.e., anyone on the Right), may be demonstrated, after sufficiently imaginative interpretation, to have associated categories with each other in an implicitly racist, dog-whistling way. Praising a particular black man as hard-working, for example, could be uncharitably interpreted as a subtle invocation of stereotypes that black people are lazy. With enough bad faith, anything is possible. …

It is common to hear from the alt-right that words like ‘diversity’ are dog-whistles for anti-white racism.