I well remember that I first heard the term “political correctness” back in the 1970s used as a kind of self-deprecating joke about the many often clumsy strategies for getting gender and racial bias out of language in academia and leftie activist circles. We had to stop using “men” as a synonym for “the human species,” for example. The suffix -man was replaced with -person — spokesperson, chairperson. This was all exceeding strange at first, and sometimes got silly. Once when I was working in the textbook industry I came across a passage in which “Viking oarsmen” was changed to “Viking oarspersons” (I changed it back). We struggled with the nomenclature for racial and ethnic groups and the physically challenged (a prime PC term). I understand the term “political correctness” was borrowed from communist literature, but I’ve never read much communist literature so I wouldn’t know about that.
But for a long time PC has stopped meaning what it used to mean. It was taken over by the Right as a kind of all-purpose defense against hate speech, as in “you’re just being PC.” The Right actually sees what they think is PC as a kind of censorship, or a strategy by which the Left is trying to silence opposition. If it were, I think we can all agree it doesn’t work. It also seems to me that the Right screams more loudly and more often about language they don’t like than the Left, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Bill Maher’s loudly expressed hate speech against Islam got him dis-invited from speaking at UC Berkeley. I have mixed feelings about the young folks’ proclivities for canceling speech invitations, but it’s their campus, and at least they give a damn. And it’s not as if Bill Maher is not being heard elsewhere. The First Amendment protects your right to speak, but it doesn’t guarantee a venue. Nor does it include protection from disagreement.
At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart isn’t having it, and says political correctness is back. It had left? Well, never mind. Beinert recalls the horrors of the past —
In 1987, the University of Michigan reprimanded students working at the school radio station for broadcasting racially insensitive jokes. In 1990, after Stanford students painted a picture of Beethoven black, and added big lips, the university passed a speech code that prevented “personal vilification of students on the basis of their sex, race, color, handicap, religion, sexual orientation, or national and ethnic origin.†In 1991, George Mason punished fraternity students for dressing in blackface before being prevented from doing so by a federal judge. In 1993, African-American students at the University of Pennsylvania protested a student columnist’s denunciations of Martin Luther King by dumping 14,000 copies of The Daily Pennsylvanian in the trash. Later that year, Penn tried to punish a white student for yelling “Shut up, you water buffalo†at a group of largely African-American sorority sisters who were making noise outside his window.
Hey, Beinart, I can remember when a thousand paratroopers were deployed to Little Rock so that a handful of African American students could safely attend high school classes. I remember when a U.S. Air Force veteran named James Meredith had to sue the University of Mississippi to be allowed to attend, because he was black. Meredith had to be protected by U.S. Marshalls on campus. The white segregationist riots that accompanied this event resulted in two deaths. Trashing 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian isn’t exactly in the same ball park, is it?
The fact is, when you leave academia and get a job you can get fired for racial and gender insensitivity, so you might as well learn to can it while you’re still in college. Much of the Real World doesn’t put up with that crap, either. You’re free to say what you like, but you are not free from the consequences.
Beinart wrings his hands because everybody feels victimized.
Once again, campuses are witnessing a clash of the supposedly victimized. Maher paints himself as a man bravely violating politically correct orthodoxy to tell truths about Islam that many American liberals fear acknowledging. Muslim students on campus want their campuses to be a refuge from what many consider the demonization and persecution of Muslims in post-9/11 America. And once again, the clash is bringing out the worst in both sides.
And it appears students at UC Berkeley chose to stand with their Muslim fellow students and have told Maher to take his bigotry somewhere else, and that’s also an example of free speech in action. Maher has a very public venue for expressing his opinions, and I’m sure other venues are open to him, so his freedom of speech is not being squelched. It could be argued that Maher should have been allowed to speak and that the students who objected to his speech could just not go. But, as I said, it’s their campus, and at least they give a damn.
But my larger point is that “political correctness” wasn’t originally about blatant hate speech, and bigotry is not “politically incorrect.” It’s bigotry.
Actually, the Teapublican Party is the epitome of PC. It’s two main constituent elements are Predatory Corporatists and Pathological Christians!
Heard any good Polish jokes lately ?
Yeah, the PC thingie should be in the same bin as “groovy” and “it’s a moot point”.
One can choose to be polite or rude. I consider what the Righties call “PC” just being polite.
So if a person says to me “you’re just being politically correct” my response is ” no, I’m just not being an asshole.”
Very nicely put, erinyes!
Funny about those words, “polite” and “political.”
Political correctness isn’t weasel-speak.
It what erinyes said.
You can tame your tongue and brain to avoid offending and insulting other people – if you want to, and care enough.
And as for “The PC Police,” I consider them to be mature adults, who tell other’s when they err on the side of bigotry and offensiveness.
erinyes.. What’s wrong with groovy?
Swami, nothing, but I’d have to pull out my cheech and chong movie collection, que the strobe lights and fire up the bong…….
Feeling groovy !
Gotta love your sheriff.
“Political correctness” has become a way to de-privilege an argument that you can’t defeat on the facts.
At its worst political correctness can be awkward and confining, but at its best it recalls Martin Buber and the “I and Thou.” If you refer to people in a demeaning way, you form the habit of demeaning them, just as if you refer to the respectfully, it is easier to respect them. In reality of course, it all becomes stagecraft and circuitous, ungainly language. But, I often wonder what would happen if I were talking with some of my right wing friends and I said, “I know you don’t like ‘political correctness’ so I’ll tell you plainly, your pretense of religion is obviously …”
I don’t think it would end well. It might be something to clip out of the metro section of the newspaper and tape to your refrigerator as a cautionary tale. But, pretty obviously, our real world efforts have been a dismal failure and it is time to try a different tack. That’s the way of the world anyway, isn’t it?
Interesting post. I am old enough to remember when polite folks used the term ‘negro’ and I understand (now) the rebranding behind a change to ‘black’ as the substitute term for ‘negro’. “Black is beautiful” was the associated catch phrase. There was a transition from a sub-culture that was tolerated by progressive white folks to a different culture that was fully part of America and didn’t aspire to be white. IMO, the rebranding didn’t cause the civil rights movement, but I seriously doubt if the movement could have succeeded if the descendants of slaves in the US had clung to the term ‘negro’.
The thoughtform associated with a word can be a powerful thing. This can be a good thing, a bad thing or a downright silly thing. On the subject of silly, I have resisted a switch to ‘African American’. Too many syllables, for one thing. Also, when I use the term ‘black’, I use it with respect because I understand the transition TO that phrase and the struggle associated with it. The term ‘black’ is inaccurate – the skin tone isn’t black but I’m not going to jump through a 7-syllable hoop unless there’s a compelling reason. PC isn’t compelling to me.
James is right – much of the time, PC is a debate strategy for changing the subject from the original theme to a new argument about trivia in the hope the original theme will be lost.
Interesting post. I am old enough to remember when polite folks used the term ‘negro’ and I understand (now) the rebranding behind a change to ‘black’ as the substitute term for ‘negro’. “Black is beautiful” was the associated catch phrase. There was a transition from a sub-culture that was tolerated by progressive white folks to a different culture that was fully part of America and didn’t aspire to be white. IMO, the rebranding didn’t cause the civil rights movement, but I seriously doubt if the movement could have succeeded if the descendants of slaves in the US had clung to the term ‘negro’.
The thoughtform associated with a word can be a powerful thing. This can be a good thing, a bad thing or a downright silly thing. On the subject of silly, I have resisted a switch to ‘African American’. Too many syllables, for one thing. Also, when I use the term ‘black’, I use it with respect because I understand the transition TO that phrase and the struggle associated with it. The term ‘black’ is inaccurate – the skin tone isn’t black but I’m not going to jump through a 7-syllable hoop unless there’s a compelling reason. PC isn’t compelling to me.
James is right – much of the time, PC is a debate strategy for changing the subject from the original theme to a new argument about trivia in the hope the original theme will be lost.
PC is a version of politesse, now slightly quaint. It’s half-right, half-wrong. The right part; compassionate habits of speech. The wrong part; paternalistic cant and euphemisms. (For instance, “differently abled”.)
Like all systems of good manners, PC is by nature artificial, bureaucratic and hypocritical; whereas true love and friendship can be very rude indeed.
I think Bill Maher is still on to speak at Berkeley.
Not everyone courts popularity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUCILq6J2yU
Paradoctor:
(For instance, “differently abledâ€.)
I absolutely hated this phrase. It was indeed silly. I know that many people thought it would help make certain people feel better about themselves but it really didn’t. For example, I stutter. I have always spoken with a stutter. I did not have another or different trait that could “make up” for the stutter. I was, and am, disabled because I don’t talk like most people.
PurpleGirl,
And, yet, you write so beautifully! 😉
Btw – I don’t stutter, and I also don’t like a whole lot of people.
“Way back when” I started working in the rehab field, it was at the beginning of a movement for people with disabilities. (By the way, “differently abled’ was silly and unwieldy, as purplegirl wrote.) The “in terms” seemed to shift often as the people in the movement were deciding where to go next. But, despite the circuitous speech and the silly rebranding, some important things were achieved.
In the late 70s, it wasn’t unusual to do a home visit and find someone who had spent the previous couple of decades sitting in a spare room, without access to anything outside their house. Young men and women were sent to nursing homes to die of boredom among much older people. If they needed a power wheelchair, most nursing homes found it more convenient and less risky to keep them immobilized in a manual chair, so generally power wheelchairs weren’t allowed.
There were not only physical barriers, but the societal barriers were just as confining, or more so.
Today we have accessible mass transit, wheelchair ramps, curbcuts and a whole host of things that seem inconsequential. But, before all of those things, life for someone with mobility problems was a lot harder and much more isolated. Nowadays when you travel to a city with decent mass transit you see people with disabilities out and about socializing, working and taking care of their own needs. That wasn’t always possible.
By the way, the Independent Living Movement began in California when a group of young people who lived in nursing homes, pooled their resources, moved en masse to a single apartment complex and hired personal care assistants as a group. It was a kind of communal experiment that allowed them to take charge of their lives. In doing so, they opened up a world to people with disabilities and their inventiveness and drive affected the way all of us will live in that awkward time before the shuffling of coils.
“Political correctness’ can be a lot of things, as written in the comments. It can also be the goofy, annoying, unwieldy byproduct of something with genuine social value, and we can get beyond the PC and keep the benefits.
Very nice, goatherd !
Me too to most of the comments above. There is an advantage that comes with age. One can look back at how life has changed because each one of us has had an impact on the way the public at large views it’s society.
For each step towards the social good there has been a label: Liberal, Feminist, PC, black, anti-war, civil rights advocate and many other words with big ideas attached to them.
When these ideas catch on and produce positive results, the Rightwing will always appropriate the words and terms and turn them upside down. We should reclaim them because clearly we have succeeded or our opposites wouldn’t be so afraid of us.
Now, being called a Liberal is considered something to run away from instead of being an ideal to run towards. This is all thanks to the media narrative and assault on a term which should be associated with something good.
I wear all of my labels proudly. Liberal, feminist, woman, Democrat, Union Thugette and many more. It may not be groovy these days, or “hep” going back even further, but I want the people I influence to know me by my symbolic self and realise it’s all good.