The intended signal is no longer received

An interesting take in The Atlantic. Sadly, an increasingly rare occurrence. From The Utility of White-Bashing
It’s a rhetoric that serves a purpose—which is why it’s not likely to disappear. by Reihan Salam.

I abhor the common racism and class disdain of the Mandarin Class: appalled that it is so common and astonished that the "enlightened" purveyors of such class disdain and racism don't see what they are doing.

Salam focuses on the fact that, within narrow circles, such class disdain and active racism actually have rewarded utility.

Not sure his is the best explanation but it is certainly a viable hypothesis. He ends with:

Or, alternatively, this sort of rhetoric can be less a tool of assimilation than a method of alleviating what I’ll call the burden of representativeness. If you are an outsider who finds yourself in an elite space, you may well feel an obligation to represent the people for whom you are serving as a stand-in—working-class people, or the members of disadvantaged minority groups. This could be true even, or perhaps particularly, if you are decidedly unrepresentative of the others in the group. Because you are present in elite spaces, your authenticity will often be called into question. So white-bashing becomes a form of assuaging internal and external doubts, affirming that despite ascending into the elite, you are not entirely of it.

Whatever their purposes, such statements don’t exist in the abstract. They’re addressed to specific audiences and serve particular ends. It’s when they travel beyond the audiences for which they were crafted that they backfire—the carefully calculated transgression now goes too far, the intended signal is no longer received. But despite the outrage they generate, they’re unlikely to disappear; in a variety of ways, they’re too useful to those who employ them to abandon.