Has American culture become or is it becoming too PC

[monstro]

@PritrumJ

Not if they are online and anonymous but in the real world there can be serious consequences to the kind of stigma you are associating them with.

If someone is in my office joking around with me in a way that isn’t funny and is offensive to me on a personal level, I’m going to ask them to please leave my office, because what they said isn’t funny to me. And if it stops, HR need not know about it.

But if it’s a daily thing, then yes, I might let HR know we’ve got a dumbass in our midst.

I don’t think this is unreasonable. Do you?

I’ve been in numerous workplaces. All of them had their characters who said blatantly sexist and racist (and other -ist) things. I have yet to see a coworker get reprimanded for this kind of behavior, let alone lose their job over it. Sure, I’ve heard of it happening to someone’s uncle’s next-door-neighbor’s Facebook friend. But never have I witnessed it myself. What I have witnessed is people tolerating an inappropriate buffoon just because no one wants to be a tattle-tale or a schoolmarm.

Besides getting fired from a job, what “serious consequences” are you talking about?

]You seem like a reasonable person so my guess is you haven’t come across the kind of toxic cultures I am talking about where people play politics with micro aggressive like actions and instead of worrying about being good people everyone has to worry if they happen to be doing or saying something that could be twisted around to hurt them.

Sorry, I just can’t relate to this anxiety. I never worry about saying something that could be twisted because I don’t talk ever about sensitive topics around people I don’t absolutely trust. Speaking plainly is simple for me. I can tell an off-color joke with the best of them, but I’ve never felt any pressure to do this around people I don’t know. If you can’t learn this skill, then your ass probably should be fired.

Through all my years on this message board, I’ve encountered a lot of loudmouth, blowhard, overly opinionated, overtly sexist/racist Dopers. And you know what? AFAIK, not one of them has ever posted a story about how they were fired for being unPC. If they are somehow able to hold their tongue and behave themselves professionally, anyone can.

If we lived in the kind of society you’re implying we do, folks like Donald Trump wouldn’t have millions of people pushing him to be next president.

My guess is people are overly defensive because they have been the victim of these kind of games in their real lives.

Your “guess” isn’t convincing enough evidence that there’s an epidemic of people having ruined lives over “PC games.” And why should I be saddened about a guy getting fired for making an inartful remark, when everyday tons of folks get fired for no reason at all. Welcome to the 21st century, where no one cares about your “goodness”. If you can’t conform to a reasonable standard of decorum, you will be winnowed out.

[brickbacon]

@Stringbean

This is what “too PC” looks like. It is the memo given to professors at UCLA on how they are offending students with seemingly innocuous phrases.

Some prime examples:

“Where are you from or where were you born?” = You are not a true American.

“America is a melting pot.” = Denying the significance of a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience and history.

“I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” = People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.

And on and on it goes…

It a steaming pile of pissy-pants stick-up-your-ass politically-correct horseshit.

You are, unsurprisingly, completely ignoring the context of those examples. The point isn’t that asking where someone is from is inherently racist or aggressive, but that when someone asks you that specifically because you aren’t a nondescript White person, it might be partially based on inherent biases.

[Shagnasty]

@brickbacon

You are, unsurprisingly, completely ignoring the context of those examples. The point isn’t that asking where someone is from is inherently racist or aggressive, but that when someone asks you that specifically because you aren’t a nondescript White person, it might be partially based on inherent biases.

Look at the whole list though (and it is a real memo as far as I am aware). There are many examples of things people probably shouldn’t say or do but some of them are absolutely baffling. Also included in the list are:

“I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
“Gender plays no part in who we hire.”
“I don’t believe in race.” (a bunch of Dopers could get nailed by that offense).

I cannot even begin to understand why someone would mix in obvious good advice like “While walking through the halls of the Chemistry building, a professor approaches a post-doctoral student of color to ask if she/he is lost, making the assumption that the person is trying to break into one of the labs.”

with the examples above.

Despite protests to the contrary, there is such a thing as being too PC. I had to suffer through it as an undergrad in the early 1990’s and then it faded away only to make another rather recent resurgence that is just as attractive as the bell-bottom pants fad that pops up every now and then. It is like The Plague. Just when you start to believe it was just an old-timey disease, there is a new outbreak somewhere. BTW, PC has nothing to do with being nice to people because that isn’t part of the working definition. Being nice to people is simply called kindness, tact and manners. PC thought is all about artificially manufactured standards for language control, social control and potential punishment for “offenders”. Those standards are usually quite arbitrary and defined only by people on the fringe of Leftist thought.

[CCitizen]

@Shagnasty

PC thought is all about artificially manufactured standards for language control, social control and potential punishment for “offenders”.

Also PC means Penal Code – United Kingdom has no First Amendment – hundreds of people have been jailed there for offensive tweets.

[brickbacon]

@Shagnasty

Look at the whole list though (and it is a real memo as far as I am aware). There are many examples of things people probably shouldn’t say or do but some of them are absolutely baffling. Also included in the list are:

“I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
“Gender plays no part in who we hire.”
“I don’t believe in race.” (a bunch of Dopers could get nailed by that offense).

I cannot even begin to understand why someone would mix in obvious good advice like “While walking through the halls of the Chemistry building, a professor approaches a post-doctoral student of color to ask if she/he is lost, making the assumption that the person is trying to break into one of the labs.”

with the examples above.

Again, context matters. Few of the statements listed are inherently racist or aggressive. Just as going out of your way to tell a person who happens to be Black that he or she is articulate isn’t necessarily mean spirited or wrong. The point is that they are often spoken in situations by people people who are biased or ignorant. What the memo is trying to get across is what is often implied in a statement like, “I don’t believe in race”, or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” in the contexts they are often used.

Let’s address the latter statement since it seems particularly innocuous. Such a statement is almost always stated when someone doesn’t think race or ethnicity or gender is a relevant qualification for something, and is making a point to say that without saying it. Now it may certainly be reasonable to argue such a think is not relevant in a given situation, but I almost always find people focus on those issues to the exclusion of things like nepotism, looks, irrelevant test scores, or whatever else. Additionally, the basis for the exclusion seems not to be the result of deliberation and consultation with those who disagree, but rather a snap judgment based on the fact that they don’t feel the race/gender/etc. has matters in their life. I’ve found they often also assume that consideration of those things results in a qualitatively worse outcome, and that others are planning to use that criteria base on specious logic.

So when you read that memo, keep in mind that it’s not saying anytime someone says X means they are ignorant racists, or that the statement is inherently bad. Rather, it’s saying that such statements often have baggage that the speaker may not intend in a given context.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Personally, I think anyone who complains about the world becoming too PC should grow a fucking spine.

[octopus]

PCness is nothing more than an attempt to control thought by first controlling language and expression. It’s a despicable left wing rhetorical weapon.

[Foggy]

I may have gone a bit overboard with the quotes.:o
But this shows that like any other word or phrase the meaning has change over the years. There is no definitive definition of the term, or consensuses on how to apply it.

Have some people overdone it, of course! What have we NOT overdone?
Only 97 days until Christmas, have you done your shopping yet?

From Wikipedia: Political correctness

Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct, commonly abbreviated to PC) is an ordinarily pejorative[1][2][3][4][5] term used to criticize language, actions, or policies seen as being excessively calculated not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. The term had only scattered usage prior to the 1990s, usually as an ironic self-description, but entered mainstream usage in the United States when conservative author Dinesh D’Souza used it to condemn what he saw as left-wing efforts to advance multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, opposition to hate speech, and changes to the content of school and university curriculums.[6] The term came to be commonly used in the United Kingdom around the same period, especially in periodicals such as the Daily Mail, a conservative tabloid that became known for the trope “political correctness gone mad.”

Scholars on the political left have said that conservatives and right-wing libertarians such as D’Souza pushed the term in order to divert attention from more substantive matters of discrimination and as part of a broader culture war against liberalism.[7][8] They have also said that conservatives have their own forms of political correctness, which is generally ignored.[9][10][11]

In 1793, the term “politically correct” appeared in a U.S. Supreme Court judgment of a political-lawsuit.[12][13] William Safire states that the first recorded use of the term in the modern sense is by Toni Cade in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman.[14]

According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn Journal[1]

Stuart Hall suggests one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one:

According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: 'Not very "politically correct", Comrade!'[18]

Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term “thought police” in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which “captured the press’s imagination”.[5] “Political correctness” here was a label for a range of policies in academia around supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as “canon busting”).[5][19] These trends were at least in part a response to the rise of identity politics, with movements such as feminism, gay rights movements and ethnic minority movements. That response received funding from conservative foundations and think tanks such as the John M. Olin Foundation, which funded D’Souza’s book.[20]

Mainstream usages of the term politically correct, and its derivatives – “political correctness” and “PC” – began in the 1990s, when right-wing politicians adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideologic enemies – especially in context of the Culture Wars about language and the content of public-school curricula. Generally, any policy, behavior, and speech code that the speaker or the writer regards as the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy about people and things, can be described and criticized as “politically correct”.[citation needed]

Right-wing political correctness

“Political correctness” is a label normally used for left-wing terms and actions, but not for equivalent attempts to mold language and behavior on the right.
…
In 2003, Dixie Chicks, a U.S. country music group, criticized the then U.S. President, George W. Bush, for launching the war against Iraq.[36] Subsequently, they were criticized[37] and labelled “treasonous” by some US rightwing commentators (including Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly).[10]
…
Paul Krugman in 2012 wrote that “the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which – unlike the liberal version – has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order”.[11]

In 2003, French fries were renamed “Freedom fries” in the U.S. Congress cafeterias in response to France’s opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq,…
…
Some radical right-wing groups argue that “political correctness” and multiculturalism are part of a conspiracy with the ultimate goal of undermining Judeo-Christian western values.

[Foggy]

@octopus

PCness is nothing more than an attempt to control thought by first controlling language and expression. It’s a despicable left wing rhetorical weapon.

Nope.

[brovolone]

Everyone just wants to stir shit up over nothing on social media to look important and cool.

I blame the guy who responsible for Facebook.
For not just this, but everything.

[octopus]

@Foggy

Nope.

Yep. Hope you haven’t been triggered.

[Jackmannii]

Popular music in America has definitely become too PC. Why, this evening after checking out this thread I put my Ipod on shuffle, and the very first tune that came up was Wanda Jackson singing “Fujiyama Mama”:

I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too, the same I did to them, baby I can do to you
Cause I’m a Fujiyama mama and I’m just about to blow my top
Fujiyama-yama Fujiyama
And when I start erupting ain’t nobody gonna make me stop

They just don’t crank out memorable songs like that no more.

[PritrumJ]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

This is the disconnect, I think. Shame is a very powerful tool of social change. What possible evidence do you have that it doesn’t work?

What you usually see is that someone, on being confronted bluntly with their poor behavior, gets defensive in the moment and argues that they’re in the right. But that’s not the only effect. If they hear it enough times, they’re likely to stop engaging in the poor behavior, because the social cost is too high.

Now, I may be wrong that this is how it works. But your say-so does is not persuasive. If you’ve got evidence that blunt criticism for antisocial behavior is ineffective at curtailing that antisocial behavior, let’s see it.

No I think you are right about it stopping certain explicit behaviors. I do not have evidence beyond my personal experience. I worked with an overtly racist employee who would make off color jokes and pick on a black coworker. Some people gave him flack about it and he stopped. Six months later he got promoted and was managing that same black coworkers. He would always give him assignments no one wanted, keep him late and was generally just an asshole to him.

[PritrumJ]

@monstro

If someone is in my office joking around with me in a way that isn’t funny and is offensive to me on a personal level, I’m going to ask them to please leave my office, because what they said isn’t funny to me. And if it stops, HR need not know about it.

But if it’s a daily thing, then yes, I might let HR know we’ve got a dumbass in our midst.

I don’t think this is unreasonable. Do you?

If you were offended on a personal level then no. That is not what I am talking about. If you take what a coworker said out of context because you are competing with him then it is.

I’ve been in numerous workplaces. All of them had their characters who said blatantly sexist and racist (and other -ist) things. I have yet to see a coworker get reprimanded for this kind of behavior, let alone lose their job over it. Sure, I’ve heard of it happening to someone’s uncle’s next-door-neighbor’s Facebook friend. But never have I witnessed it myself. What I have witnessed is people tolerating an inappropriate buffoon just because no one wants to be a tattle-tale or a schoolmarm.

Besides getting fired from a job, what “serious consequences” are you talking about?

I think loosing a job is very serious. People who in college with overly PC cultures also have to worry about getting socially stigmatized. If you are out of college this is less of a problem.

If we lived in the kind of society you’re implying we do, folks like Donald Trump wouldn’t have millions of people pushing him to be next president.

Donald Trump would have lost his job at the place I work.

Your “guess” isn’t convincing enough evidence that there’s an epidemic of people having ruined lives over “PC games.” And why should I be saddened about a guy getting fired for making an inartful remark, when everyday tons of folks get fired for no reason at all. Welcome to the 21st century, where no one cares about your “goodness”. If you can’t conform to a reasonable standard of decorum, you will be winnowed out.

I am just a couple years out of college and in a fairly new job with a lot of office politics. I also graduated from a VERY liberal college where a couple people I knew, and thought were decent people, had their reputations trashed. Maybe this is not an epidemic and my experience has been unusual. Just because I have to, and do, play politics does not mean I have to agree that it is an ideal situation. I think people should care about other peoples intentions and their " " goodness" ".

[brickbacon]

@PritrumJ

No I think you are right about it stopping certain explicit behaviors. I do not have evidence beyond my personal experience. I worked with an overtly racist employee who would make off color jokes and pick on a black coworker. Some people gave him flack about it and he stopped. Six months later he got promoted and was managing that same black coworkers. He would always give him assignments no one wanted, keep him late and was generally just an asshole to him.

Did you not show him The Pursuit of Happyness? Surely that must have worked, no?

[JRDelirious]

@monstro

You know, oversensitivity and butthurt goes both ways. If I respond unfavorably to a casual remark that has a racist, sexist, or homophobic tinge, there’s nothing stopping the speaker from shrugging his or her shoulders and accepting my criticism good-naturedly.

And if that’s as far as it all goes we are all living in a fine environment. But as you point out it does not always stop there.

OTOH…

@brickbacon

What the memo is trying to get across is what is often implied in a statement like, “I don’t believe in race”, or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” in the contexts they are often used.

Let’s address the latter statement since it seems particularly innocuous. Such a statement is** almost always** stated when someone doesn’t think race or ethnicity or gender is a relevant qualification for something, and is making a point to say that without saying it. Now it may certainly be reasonable to argue such a think is not relevant in a given situation, but I almost always find people focus on those issues to the exclusion of things like nepotism, looks, irrelevant test scores, or whatever else.
…
So when you read that memo, keep in mind that it’s not saying anytime someone says X means they are ignorant racists, or that the statement is inherently bad. Rather, it’s saying that such statements often have baggage that the speaker may not intend in a given context.

(Emphasis added by me) — So you “almost always” hear it said in the process of dismissing race or gender as extraneous factors, as opposed to others. IOW the use of in the “straight” sense is so rare that people are justified in assuming we are not using it that way? At least I hope that person gets to ask us what we mean and is willing to accept our answer. Now, you see, the curious thing about that is that in my native cultural environment, that phrase is often used to say the decision should not be affected by political alignment or national origin(*) – so you can imagine someone who grew up here arriving at a stateside college and rattling it out with no idea whatsoever that it has this other baggage.

(*but often just as insincerely.)

[brickbacon]

@JRDelirious

(Emphasis added by me) — So you “almost always” hear it said in the process of dismissing race or gender as extraneous factors, as opposed to others. IOW the use of in the “straight” sense is so rare that people are justified in assuming we are not using it that way?

No. One doesn’t follow the other. I feel you should not make assumptions about such things if possible.

@JRDelirious

Now, you see, the curious thing about that is that in my native cultural environment, that phrase is often used to say the decision should not be affected by political alignment or national origin(*) – so you can imagine someone who grew up here arriving at a stateside college and rattling it out with no idea whatsoever that it has this other baggage.

And? I think it’s pretty clear contexts will vary. I was stating my experience. That said, race, gender, etc. are far easier to ascertain than political orientation or national origin and have comparatively widespread perceived disadvantages and prejudices. The number of people who go out of their way to not hire minorities, for example, dwarfs those who want to actively take steps to avoid hiring a democrat, for example. So while I don’t discount your experience, I don’t think it’s a particularly compelling.

[monstro]

@PritrumJ

Donald Trump would have lost his job at the place I work.

Do you think this is a bad thing?

I don’t invite loudmouth blowhard trolls into my house. It’s my right to reject someone like this from my social circle. So I don’t know why an employer should be compelled to give a loudmouth blowhard troll a job. We aren’t entitled to a job.

I am just a couple years out of college and in a fairly new job with a lot of office politics. I also graduated from a VERY liberal college where a couple people I knew, and thought were decent people, had their reputations trashed. Maybe this is not an epidemic and my experience has been unusual. Just because I have to, and do, play politics does not mean I have to agree that it is an ideal situation. I think people should care about other peoples intentions and their " " goodness" ".

You’re going to see people fired over for reasons that are a lot more trivial than an off-color joke. If you live in an at-will state, you can be fired for just about anything. Without warning.

Here are the top reasons people get fired. Note that being unPC is NOT on this list.

I think people should care about other peoples intentions and their " " goodness".

The road to hell is paved in good intentions. Anyone can claim that a comment was “innocent” with their fingers crossed behind their back.

I believe in patience and compassion. I don’t think people should get fired for saying something the wrong way. But if a person makes a habit of putting their foot in their mouth and their coworkers are pissed off enough to file a formal complaint against them, then all their self-proclaimed “goodness” is irrelevant. Being a good team player means not annoying the shit out of your team.

[inscrutable]

@Bryan_Ekers

Personally, I think anyone who complains about the world becoming too PC should grow a fucking spine.

Like the spine your children are growing in organized sports with no scoring, because “everyone is a winner”?

[Trinopus]

@Shagnasty

. . . “I don’t believe in race.” (a bunch of Dopers could get nailed by that offense). . . .

This one is vaguely amusing: half the people here would argue that there is no such thing as race – “Race is a social construct” – and the other half would suggest that this is racist, as it denies the experience of people of various specific races.

If there is no such thing as a “black” person, then why are there “black studies” classes?

Another interesting “have it both ways” example is intrinsic sexual roles. Standard feminism says there aren’t any such things…but the whole transgender movement is based on the idea that there are.

The real facts are complicated, and, while these might seem to the naive as contradictory, they aren’t.

Obviously, race exists. People in Beijing don’t look like people in Nairobi or Krakow. But race doesn’t exist when you have billions of people who are born of different-race parents. Race ceases to be meaningful in an age of widespread travel. What “race” is the child of a Korean mother and Anglo father? Asian? White? Both and neither!

Same with sex roles: there are such things, and some of them are genetic and intrinsic, so that a person can meaningfully say, “They feel like the opposite of their cis-sex.” But traditional feminism is still right in seeking to reduce the pressure of these roles in limiting anyone’s freedoms of choice.

And that’s the REAL key to the PC movement: don’t tell people what they can’t do!