(In conversations about “bullying,” those who want to do more about it understand it as a pattern of harassment and abuse that targets already weak individuals; those who claim it’s no big deal understand it to mean jokes, insults, and the occasional punch between more-or-less equals. The word itself has such a broad reach that it covers both of those very different experiences. And when it comes to “drugs,” look no further than our Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who uses the current opiate crisis as a reason why marijuana must be prohibited, classifying them both as “drugs” and therefore equating them.)
 |
| Pictured: our nation's leading expert on marijuana |
As an illustration of my point, in just the year 2017, the following things have all been referred to as examples of “political correctness”:
- The movement to remove monuments to Confederate generals in the South
- London mayor Sadiq Khan telling the citizens of London not to be alarmed in the wake of a terror attack
- An ESPN reporter named Robert Lee being told not to cover a UVA football game because of the similarity of his name to Confederate general Robert E. Lee
- The movement to ban the use of Native Americans as high school sports mascots in Massachusetts
- Not racially profiling people from Muslim-majority countries
- One company removing "boys" and "girls" labels from its children's clothing
Well, some people certainly think so. Our president does, for one, since being against “political correctness” is the closest thing he has to an actual coherent philosophy. And I’m sure Bill O’Reilly would agree. (Fuck Bill O’Reilly. But that’s a whole separate post, still in its incubation period.) And there definitely does exist an impulse to think that way. I remember being part of one conversation that went sort of like this:
Them: "And now you don't say waiter or waitress, you just say 'server' because it's the politically correct term."
Me: "I feel like it's just easier."
Them: "Easier to be politically correct or easier not to be?"
I meant that it's easier to just say server instead of having to even consider the gender of the person who's bringing me food. But the other person immediately wanted to make the conversation about "political correctness" in general, and wanted me to take a side.
But most of the time, we intuitively recognize - especially when you spell it out with specific examples - that it’s perfectly possible to believe that we should take down monuments to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and that it’s silly to stop a guy from doing his job just because his name happens to be Bob Lee. (Or, to take a slightly less ridiculous example: it’s possible to believe we should take down monuments to Confederate generals without believing that we need to rename everything named after Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. Hey, look, I’m doing it right now.)
The most common way to resolve this problem is to refer to the examples one does not agree with as “political correctness gone mad” or “political correctness run amok.” Both very common phrases in the lexicon. This paints “political correctness” as something that is all right in small doses, but problematic in excess. (Like ice cream. Or most poisons.) But I find that to be a pretty uninspiring viewpoint. First of all, it’s possible to say express that about literally anything without expending any real intellectual energy. Watch: “Hey, I have no problem with libertarianism, but some people take it too far.” I didn’t have to think at all to write that sentence. And you can replace “libertarianism” with pretty much any noun.
Also, that way of approaching things doesn’t actually tell us anything about whether “political correctness” (or any ideology) is any good or not. All it really communicates is a preference for the status quo. You might as well say: “The amount of X that we’re already doing is fine, but doing any more would be too much. And doing any less - well, that would just not be doing enough.” It’s lazy, milquetoast non-thinking. And besides, the line between acceptable levels of “political correctness” and an excessive dose is always going to be subjective and arbitrary.
So being all in for “political correctness” is clearly absurd. So is being wholly against it. And the ostensibly moderate voice is pretty fucking dumb as well, at least in the terms that it is usually expressed. Where does that leave us?
At the risk of sounding like a moderately douchey college professor (but is there any other kind? LOL ROASTED) on the first day of class: what is political correctness, anyway? Maybe if we can define it, pin down its fundamental traits, identify what is common to all of the examples, we can come to a more satisfying answer about how to approach it. And I do mean maybe. This whole thing could very well be a waste of time and words (not that we’re suffering from a word shortage or anything) - but it’s the night before the first day of school and if I wasn’t doing this then I’d have to be actually preparing for school tomorrow so LET’S GO.
Someone else has already written a fantastic history of the term “political correctness,” so I am mostly going to stick to my own experience with it. (Disclaimer: it is sometimes hard to determine whether the way I experienced things had more to do with my age at the time or the actual culture of the 90s and 2000s. I don’t want to come across like those people who seems to believe that, by pure coincidence, the kids’ movies that came out during the years that they were a child were just, objectively, the best ones ever. So I may not have all the particulars right, but it is indisputable that both objective and subjective factors shaped my experience.)
Whether or not anyone ever used the term in earnest - (and the research suggests that no,
they really didn’t) - by the time I burst onto the scene in the early 90’s, it was exclusively a pejorative. I never heard anyone say, “I believe in being politically correct.” Instead, everyone seemed to describe society as being “politically correct,” without seeming to acknowledge that they were part of society - I guess kind of the same way that we say we are “stuck in traffic” rather than being “part of traffic.” But it was always a complaint. And this has mostly remained true. Jerry Seinfeld’s complaint that college campuses are too politically correct “these days” wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place 20 years ago (although the real difference between now and then is that Jerry Seinfeld was actually funny back then.)
As a kid, I mostly associated “political correctness” with such things as using the terms “African American” and “Native American” instead of “black” and “Indian,” respectively. This didn’t particularly bother me. I mean, I had just learned that they were called Indians, like, two years ago, anyway - so what difference did it really make to change it? It wasn’t exactly a deeply entrenched habit. It felt pretty much like when you get a little bit older and your teachers tell you that you should stop saying “guess” and start saying “hypothesis” or that what you’ve always just called numbers are really “natural numbers.” Simple, intuitive terms always give way to longer, Latinate, and presumably more precise ones as you get older and learn more about a subject. And, of course, those new words are always supplied by some authority figure. So I was willing - maybe even eager - to use the new terms I was learning because it seemed like a mark of maturity.
What I did always notice, though, is that even the people who were advocating for the use of, say, “African-American” instead of “black” seemed to be distance themselves from it a little bit. (These are white people that I’m talking about, because, growing up in New Hampshire, that’s pretty much all we had.) They might say something like, “Always got to be politically correct nowadays, right?” Maybe throw in a wink or a small laugh. The message was pretty much: I don’t make the rules; I’m just a cog in this machine, too. Kind of like when you go to McDonalds and you try to order your sandwich with a small fry and the cashier tells you actually we only have medium and large, and you share this meaningful look where you both understand that you really can’t call something medium when there are only two available sizes. “But what can I do?” her eyes say. “I only work here.”
So there was always a sense of authority inherent to “political correctness.” It didn’t particularly bother me - because, as a kid in the public school system, I was pretty used to being told that I should change my language or my behavior every couple of months, and doing so without complaint - but it was clear that it bothered those who were above me in the chain of command. There was, of course, a range of attitudes. Some adults managed to appear almost enthusiastic; others were reluctant and resentful - only following orders. But no one wanted to take ownership of the decision.
I know now where these adults probably felt like their instructions were coming from: university professors, left-leaning media outlets, and activist groups. Basically the same forces that are running current social justice movements. The main difference I see today is that more of the general population seems to have an interest in social justice issues; more people are willing to own and defend those principles, rather than pass the buck to a higher authority. But that is what I saw throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, which can be seen in the very fact that no one ever talked about “social justice” back then. The universal term of choice was still “political correctness.”
Somewhere along the line, it came to seem that the highest possible manifestation of being “politically correct” was to be colorblind. Not just when it came to race, but when it came to any marginalized groups. (For the most part, I’m going to use race for my examples, but they are meant to apply to all axes of oppression.) We were supposed to help ensure that everyone was treated equally by pretending that they already were, I guess. This order was never given explicitly, of course, but was passed along implicitly. In elementary and middle school, it was not uncommon to hear one kid call another “racist” for mentioning the race of another person. (I think that has mostly gone away at this point. But I’m not sure if that’s because we recognize that acknowledging race doesn’t make you racist or because we no longer have the same sense that “being racist” is the worst thing a white person can be accused of.) Asked to describe Samuel L. Jackson, you might say: “You know, that tall, muscular guy who’s in a lot of action movies . . . uh, he’s bald, has brown eyes . . .”
So in my sophomore year of high school, when I took a Sociology class where we were allowed and encouraged to discuss race, gender, and sexuality, it felt kind of like a breath of fresh air to me. I remember the teacher saying on the first day of class: “We’re not going to be politically correct in here.” And the defining example of that was when she asked a biracial student if she identified more with the black side of her family or the white side. Imagine that! Not only was she talking about race and the way that it affects people, but she was using the words “black” and “white!”
(That was the same class where, one day, the teacher went around the room and had each of us state whether we believed in God or not. It is very tempting to tell that story and then be like, “Imagine a teacher doing that nowadays.” But that was in 2007. Not that long ago. And very much the “nowadays” of a lot of people’s stories about what you used to be able to get away with in the 80s or 90s. It wouldn’t have been crazy to hear a news story about a teacher getting fired or sued for that in 2007; it wouldn’t be crazy for a teacher to “get away with it” in 2017. This is totally irrelevant to the main point, but just kind of bugs me.)
The fact that discussing race at all felt like freedom to me as a fifteen-year-old, and that both me and my teacher (a fifty-year-old leftist) understood it as the antithesis of “political correctness” means that we had a conception of “political correctness” as something that got in the way of productive discourse. And that used to be the universal view. It used to transcend politics. I mean, Bill Maher used to have a show called Politically Incorrect - and whatever you may think of him, he’s undeniably a liberal. (By the way, I know there are a lot of people out there who hate Bill Maher, but I’m really not sure why. Please feel free to explain it to me if you are one of them.)
But then we entered the Trump era. (Which started, I believe, before Trump even announced his candidacy for president. The era created Trump, not the other way around.) But either way, being opposed to all forms of “political correctness” has become irrevocably associated with Donald J. Trump and his politics. The upshot is that people on the left, people who identify to any degree with social justice movements, have started to reclaim the term.
In the summer of 2015, someone created a Google Chrome extension that replaced the phrase “political correctness” with the phrase “treating people with respect.” I thought that was awesome. I mean, everyone loves that kind of shit, right? It’s just like how Trump supporters started to willingly identify as “deplorable” and young liberals will now call themselves “snowflakes.” It’s fun for the whole family!
But that’s also kind of disingenuous. Because that’s not what “political correctness” really ever was - not exactly. Being “politically correct” always carried with it a sense of being dictated by a higher authority, for one thing. It also was only ever concerned with external features: the language one used (or didn’t use) or one’s actions. It never said anything about one’s inner thoughts, feelings, or prejudices. These two features go together. Authority can dictate and police the words you use, but not the thoughts you have inside your head. So the result was that a bunch of people who considered black people genetically inferior started referring to them as “African-Americans” because they felt like they had to.
I think that’s a bit shy of “treating people with respect.”
So, is it a good thing or a bad thing for society if people who hold bigoted views about race, gender, sexuality, or whatever else hold their tongues and use the “right” language? I have no goddamn clue. Obviously, we should try to aim for higher goals than just that. We should want to live in a society where people don’t have those bigoted ideas at all. The question is how to get there. Neither option seems particularly appealing. In one case, it feels like we’re letting racists be racist; in the other, it’s like we’re just hoping that “fake it ‘til you make it” works on racism.
Aziz Ansari discussed this once when he hosted SNL back in January (the day after Trump’s inauguration, incidentally). And he said (please read this in his voice): “I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore!' . . . Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You’ve got to go back to pretending. I’m so sorry we never thanked you for your service. We never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending.”
So he’s definitely on the side of “people pretending not to be racist is a good thing.” The side of “political correctness.” The side of most people that I voluntarily interact with.
But there’s also a part of me that thinks that that’s kind of how we got here in the first place. Maybe pretending not to be racist is kind of unsustainable in the long run. Maybe our focus on policing superficial aspects of behavior like language rather than trying to engage people in meaningful, substantive dialogue about power and privilege is what made Trump feel like a breath of fresh air to so many people.
Or maybe it’s just nice to actually know who the racists are instead of having every polite, respectful person you meet be a Schrodinger’s racist.
I don’t know. But we’ve got to figure it out. Because the same problems inherent in the “political correctness” movement of the 90s and early 2000s are still present in social justice communities today. There is still a pervasive air of authority; there is still a focus on using the right language. Some of the particulars have changed, but those principles are still there. One of the real litmus tests for whether you are #woke enough is if you use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns. You say “she,” you’re in; say “he,” you’re out. But simply using a pronoun doesn’t mean you have really challenged any of your preconceived ideas about gender, sex, or identity; it doesn’t even mean you truly perceive this person as a woman. All it means is that you said the right pronoun. And that's all it can ever say.
The most common way to resolve this problem is to refer to the examples one does not agree with as “political correctness gone mad” or “political correctness run amok.” Both very common phrases in the lexicon. This paints “political correctness” as something that is all right in small doses, but problematic in excess. (Like ice cream. Or most poisons.) But I find that to be a pretty uninspiring viewpoint. First of all, it’s possible to say express that about literally anything without expending any real intellectual energy. Watch: “Hey, I have no problem with libertarianism, but some people take it too far.” I didn’t have to think at all to write that sentence. And you can replace “libertarianism” with pretty much any noun.
 |
| A reasonable amount of ice cream |
Also, that way of approaching things doesn’t actually tell us anything about whether “political correctness” (or any ideology) is any good or not. All it really communicates is a preference for the status quo. You might as well say: “The amount of X that we’re already doing is fine, but doing any more would be too much. And doing any less - well, that would just not be doing enough.” It’s lazy, milquetoast non-thinking. And besides, the line between acceptable levels of “political correctness” and an excessive dose is always going to be subjective and arbitrary.
So being all in for “political correctness” is clearly absurd. So is being wholly against it. And the ostensibly moderate voice is pretty fucking dumb as well, at least in the terms that it is usually expressed. Where does that leave us?
At the risk of sounding like a moderately douchey college professor (but is there any other kind? LOL ROASTED) on the first day of class: what is political correctness, anyway? Maybe if we can define it, pin down its fundamental traits, identify what is common to all of the examples, we can come to a more satisfying answer about how to approach it. And I do mean maybe. This whole thing could very well be a waste of time and words (not that we’re suffering from a word shortage or anything) - but it’s the night before the first day of school and if I wasn’t doing this then I’d have to be actually preparing for school tomorrow so LET’S GO.
*
Whether or not anyone ever used the term in earnest - (and the research suggests that no,
 |
| Sadly, this is not actually a good movie. |
As a kid, I mostly associated “political correctness” with such things as using the terms “African American” and “Native American” instead of “black” and “Indian,” respectively. This didn’t particularly bother me. I mean, I had just learned that they were called Indians, like, two years ago, anyway - so what difference did it really make to change it? It wasn’t exactly a deeply entrenched habit. It felt pretty much like when you get a little bit older and your teachers tell you that you should stop saying “guess” and start saying “hypothesis” or that what you’ve always just called numbers are really “natural numbers.” Simple, intuitive terms always give way to longer, Latinate, and presumably more precise ones as you get older and learn more about a subject. And, of course, those new words are always supplied by some authority figure. So I was willing - maybe even eager - to use the new terms I was learning because it seemed like a mark of maturity.
What I did always notice, though, is that even the people who were advocating for the use of, say, “African-American” instead of “black” seemed to be distance themselves from it a little bit. (These are white people that I’m talking about, because, growing up in New Hampshire, that’s pretty much all we had.) They might say something like, “Always got to be politically correct nowadays, right?” Maybe throw in a wink or a small laugh. The message was pretty much: I don’t make the rules; I’m just a cog in this machine, too. Kind of like when you go to McDonalds and you try to order your sandwich with a small fry and the cashier tells you actually we only have medium and large, and you share this meaningful look where you both understand that you really can’t call something medium when there are only two available sizes. “But what can I do?” her eyes say. “I only work here.”
 |
| Yes, I know they have small fries, just not as part of a combo. No letters please. |
So there was always a sense of authority inherent to “political correctness.” It didn’t particularly bother me - because, as a kid in the public school system, I was pretty used to being told that I should change my language or my behavior every couple of months, and doing so without complaint - but it was clear that it bothered those who were above me in the chain of command. There was, of course, a range of attitudes. Some adults managed to appear almost enthusiastic; others were reluctant and resentful - only following orders. But no one wanted to take ownership of the decision.
I know now where these adults probably felt like their instructions were coming from: university professors, left-leaning media outlets, and activist groups. Basically the same forces that are running current social justice movements. The main difference I see today is that more of the general population seems to have an interest in social justice issues; more people are willing to own and defend those principles, rather than pass the buck to a higher authority. But that is what I saw throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, which can be seen in the very fact that no one ever talked about “social justice” back then. The universal term of choice was still “political correctness.”
*
Somewhere along the line, it came to seem that the highest possible manifestation of being “politically correct” was to be colorblind. Not just when it came to race, but when it came to any marginalized groups. (For the most part, I’m going to use race for my examples, but they are meant to apply to all axes of oppression.) We were supposed to help ensure that everyone was treated equally by pretending that they already were, I guess. This order was never given explicitly, of course, but was passed along implicitly. In elementary and middle school, it was not uncommon to hear one kid call another “racist” for mentioning the race of another person. (I think that has mostly gone away at this point. But I’m not sure if that’s because we recognize that acknowledging race doesn’t make you racist or because we no longer have the same sense that “being racist” is the worst thing a white person can be accused of.) Asked to describe Samuel L. Jackson, you might say: “You know, that tall, muscular guy who’s in a lot of action movies . . . uh, he’s bald, has brown eyes . . .”
 |
| Is Anne the only black one here? Or is she Hispanic? |
So in my sophomore year of high school, when I took a Sociology class where we were allowed and encouraged to discuss race, gender, and sexuality, it felt kind of like a breath of fresh air to me. I remember the teacher saying on the first day of class: “We’re not going to be politically correct in here.” And the defining example of that was when she asked a biracial student if she identified more with the black side of her family or the white side. Imagine that! Not only was she talking about race and the way that it affects people, but she was using the words “black” and “white!”
(That was the same class where, one day, the teacher went around the room and had each of us state whether we believed in God or not. It is very tempting to tell that story and then be like, “Imagine a teacher doing that nowadays.” But that was in 2007. Not that long ago. And very much the “nowadays” of a lot of people’s stories about what you used to be able to get away with in the 80s or 90s. It wouldn’t have been crazy to hear a news story about a teacher getting fired or sued for that in 2007; it wouldn’t be crazy for a teacher to “get away with it” in 2017. This is totally irrelevant to the main point, but just kind of bugs me.)
The fact that discussing race at all felt like freedom to me as a fifteen-year-old, and that both me and my teacher (a fifty-year-old leftist) understood it as the antithesis of “political correctness” means that we had a conception of “political correctness” as something that got in the way of productive discourse. And that used to be the universal view. It used to transcend politics. I mean, Bill Maher used to have a show called Politically Incorrect - and whatever you may think of him, he’s undeniably a liberal. (By the way, I know there are a lot of people out there who hate Bill Maher, but I’m really not sure why. Please feel free to explain it to me if you are one of them.)
But then we entered the Trump era. (Which started, I believe, before Trump even announced his candidacy for president. The era created Trump, not the other way around.) But either way, being opposed to all forms of “political correctness” has become irrevocably associated with Donald J. Trump and his politics. The upshot is that people on the left, people who identify to any degree with social justice movements, have started to reclaim the term.
 |
| Hypothesis: it's the slicked-back Draco Malfoy hair. |
In the summer of 2015, someone created a Google Chrome extension that replaced the phrase “political correctness” with the phrase “treating people with respect.” I thought that was awesome. I mean, everyone loves that kind of shit, right? It’s just like how Trump supporters started to willingly identify as “deplorable” and young liberals will now call themselves “snowflakes.” It’s fun for the whole family!
But that’s also kind of disingenuous. Because that’s not what “political correctness” really ever was - not exactly. Being “politically correct” always carried with it a sense of being dictated by a higher authority, for one thing. It also was only ever concerned with external features: the language one used (or didn’t use) or one’s actions. It never said anything about one’s inner thoughts, feelings, or prejudices. These two features go together. Authority can dictate and police the words you use, but not the thoughts you have inside your head. So the result was that a bunch of people who considered black people genetically inferior started referring to them as “African-Americans” because they felt like they had to.
I think that’s a bit shy of “treating people with respect.”
*
So, is it a good thing or a bad thing for society if people who hold bigoted views about race, gender, sexuality, or whatever else hold their tongues and use the “right” language? I have no goddamn clue. Obviously, we should try to aim for higher goals than just that. We should want to live in a society where people don’t have those bigoted ideas at all. The question is how to get there. Neither option seems particularly appealing. In one case, it feels like we’re letting racists be racist; in the other, it’s like we’re just hoping that “fake it ‘til you make it” works on racism.
Aziz Ansari discussed this once when he hosted SNL back in January (the day after Trump’s inauguration, incidentally). And he said (please read this in his voice): “I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore!' . . . Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You’ve got to go back to pretending. I’m so sorry we never thanked you for your service. We never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending.”
 |
| Between watching Master of None and reading Modern Romance, I honestly feel like I know him IRL |
So he’s definitely on the side of “people pretending not to be racist is a good thing.” The side of “political correctness.” The side of most people that I voluntarily interact with.
But there’s also a part of me that thinks that that’s kind of how we got here in the first place. Maybe pretending not to be racist is kind of unsustainable in the long run. Maybe our focus on policing superficial aspects of behavior like language rather than trying to engage people in meaningful, substantive dialogue about power and privilege is what made Trump feel like a breath of fresh air to so many people.
Or maybe it’s just nice to actually know who the racists are instead of having every polite, respectful person you meet be a Schrodinger’s racist.
I don’t know. But we’ve got to figure it out. Because the same problems inherent in the “political correctness” movement of the 90s and early 2000s are still present in social justice communities today. There is still a pervasive air of authority; there is still a focus on using the right language. Some of the particulars have changed, but those principles are still there. One of the real litmus tests for whether you are #woke enough is if you use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns. You say “she,” you’re in; say “he,” you’re out. But simply using a pronoun doesn’t mean you have really challenged any of your preconceived ideas about gender, sex, or identity; it doesn’t even mean you truly perceive this person as a woman. All it means is that you said the right pronoun. And that's all it can ever say.
No comments:
Post a Comment