.............Once it became clear that old-fashioned racial prejudice truly was en route to extinction, a movement arose to insist that racism wasn’t really down and out but had merely gone underground and lived on in nefarious guises, in some ways worse than before. In the mid-1980s came Critical Race Theory, which maintained that racism was ingrained and pervasive and never would fade. This was followed by “unconscious racism,” “subliminal racism,” “implicit racism,” and “aversive racism,” as underemployed academics and scholars sought to find words for inchoate feelings they found rather hard to describe. The gist of them all was that...