Political Correctness

Now, I realize that many of the preceding presentations have addressed the issue of political correctness in one way or another. Nevertheless, I think that PC needs to be discussed overtly.

In simplest terms, political correctness, or adherence or avocation thereof, is a sure sign of stupidity. Now, I must be careful in stating that political correctness is not the same as common courtesy. Racial, ethnic, gender epithets, or any form of name-calling designed to attack a group of people is not acceptable. The type of political correctness I am referring to involves people’s refusal to address issues, or their soft peddling of responses. I suppose I am in a sense differentiating between maliciously motivated actions and intentions, and mere words.

Perhaps we should start with a less controversial example, and then build up to the strongest of opinions, and therefore the things that really piss people off. Somewhere about a generation ago, firemen became firefighters, with the theory being that the language itself created prejudices that influenced the perception that women could be firemen. I will concede that words create perceptions, and therefore that words can be instrumental in changing the way that people behave and think and such. However, did we really need to have that period where all the compound words that ended in ‘men’ were replaced by ‘person?’ I mean, seriously. Couldn’t a busboy still be a busboy even if she were a female? What was the benefit in the increase in the number of chairpersons, and committee persons, and longshorepersons?

Okay, the longshoreperson label never really caught on, but why not? I contend that the sheer idiocy of the ‘man’ to ‘person’ exchange became obvious when we came to words like longshoreperson.

Perhaps a bit more volatile of a term will help to illustrate my point. I understand completely why the word ‘nigger’ is inappropriate in conversation. The original coining of the term and its earliest usage was intended to denigrate a race of people. Consequently, using the term, even when no offense is intended, is careless, tactless, and wrong. Quite simply, the baggage that the word carries precludes its effective use. What I don’t understand is the adoption of that same word by contemporary Black Americans, or African Americans or persons of color. You see, I intended no offense there at all; I honestly don’t know what is currently the acceptable term of address. The component of political correctness to which I object is this very example. If I were a person of color who was using the term in the context of addressing a friend of mine who is also a person of the same color, then the term becomes some sort of an inside term of endearment.

Bear with me for a second. What if the law enforcement officers of the world decided, capriciously, that their exclusive term of address for other law enforcement officers was ‘pig’? In the squad car or the squad room, they could inoffensively call each other ‘pig’ without fear of offense taking. After all, it would just be a buddy calling a buddy a name. Such things happen everyday. Now suppose that a whole bunch of singing policemen sold millions of songs in which policemen call other policemen pigs? When the general population hears the disparaging term on the radio or on their pirated downloads to their ipods, will they also be able to use the term to address the policeman who pulls them over for speeding? Will the policemen be offended, not reasoning that the offensive term has been revived by the very people the term is meant to denigrate?

Hopefully, you are starting to follow my reasoning. Political correctness is a cowardly business that can often prevent people from saying what they really mean. For fear of choosing the potentially offensive term or phrase, they adopt some circumlocution that muddies the informational waters.

Having saved the most recent example for last, let me go on record as saying the backlash and subsequent firing of Don Imus for saying ‘nappy headed ho’s’ among other stupid things, is illustrative of my position. Don Imus is a shock jock. That is, he was hired and has been gainfully employed for a long time expressly because he says politically incorrect things. He doesn’t lack the sense to avoid the offensive; he is being paid to find it. The game, on his end, is to walk the tightrope between rattling the cage and grabbing the bird by the neck and thrashing its brains out on the rec room floor.

So to be blunt, I don’t think Don Imus should have been fired, and I don’t think that the public outcry should have been able to twist the short hairs of the radio execs. I think those execs should have been able respond to the public umbrage by saying, “Don Imus says stupid things. That’s why hundreds of thousands of people tune in daily. We don’t like what he said, and we don’t condone his opinions or his delivery. He is being paid to entertain people, and for some reason, the current public taste embraces the abhorrent things he says. So shut up. We ain’t firing him. He’ll be back on the air in the morning, and if you think he is crossing the line, stop listening to his program, you dopes.”

Had the radio execs responded in such a way, the outcry would have grown exponentially for about three days. Then, when the same radio people repeated their position a few days later, the outcry would have dwindled to a whimper.
Now, don’t get me wrong, though I generally despise the litigious nature of our culture, I think the offended basketball players had every right to accuse Imus of slanderous or damaging remarks that could adversely affect their status in life. However, I think the judge who heard that case should have said, “Look, a public figure said a stupid thing on the radio. Each of you, so far as I have seen, carries herself with a degree of dignity and class that further exposes the stupidity of his comments. Why not continue to show the fool what a dimwit he is by being above the whole thing?”

The negative characterization, in fact, had little true damaging effects on the character or public perception of those young ladies. Why did the girls lower themselves by accepting the public viewpoint? In effect, the public lived down to the standard thrust upon it, and the ‘victims’ followed suit. Our current culture has established a set of items that are presumed to offend, and everyone waits for the signal to feign offense.

Here’s the simple point. Most political correctness is false in every way. If black people call each other by the ‘n’ word, in what they say is proper context, then the word isn’t the source of the offense. If the word isn’t the source of the offense, then the offense emanates from the speaker. That is, the offended person or group is offended because the speaker hasn’t the right to traffic in a term that has been historically and traditionally offensive. In other words, the victims feel offense because they are supposed to, not because they feel any genuine offense. Hence, the political correctness issue is almost always grounded in pretext, presumption, and falseness.

I don’t have a reliable test for these issues, but I wish I did. So, let’s invent a test using an example of relatively harmless political correctness. I was once chastised for referring to middle-aged women that I work with as ‘girls.’ They should be considered as ‘women’, or ‘ladies’ I was told. However, when I said to my seventy-year-old grandmother and two or her friends, “How are you girls doing today?” they giggled well, like girls, and thought it was cute. In two contexts, each with women older than thirty, I was supposed to know whether reference to them as girls was offensive or not.

So the test is this: if the speaker has to guess about the propriety of a particular term, then the problem is not with the speaker, but with the listener. If there is not definitive intention to offend inherent in the derivation of the term, then there is no offense. Using this test, the ‘n’ word is verboten, and that’s ok with me. But it’s verboten in ALL public discourse, even if the speaker and the listener are complicit in adopting acceptance of the term in their own private context. In short, if it’s wrong, it’s wrong. If one has no definitive reason to know that it’s wrong, it’s not wrong. How’s that?