Getting back to the topic of political correctiveness on todays college campuses.
Let’s say you had a son or daughter entering college. what advice would you gave them when confronting someone or some group with a different belief especially if that person was in a position of power - like a college professor?
Ex. The movie “God’s Not Dead” where the professor REQUIRES the students to write out “God is Dead” on day one (granted that was an extreme case).
For me I’ve told them to just keep their mouth shut, smile, and get thru professor wacko’s class. Maybe write an honest review on a blog or a “rate your professor” site but to do so in public could cause you alot of problems and yes, a professor out to get you can be very dangerous to ones academic career. Best just to smile and get by.
What an utterly terrifying scenario. What do I tell someone to do in this case? Well, obviously they’ve somehow been transported to a low-budget preachy Christian melodrama, but realizing that will do them no good, because how can one escape one of these productions? I have no idea. It’s a story worthy of Sartre.
More realistically, what would I tell someone like my ex-girlfriend who attended business school and was lectured on the first day about the evils of unions, or my lesbian high school friend whose teacher lectured on how homosexuals should be imprisoned and how slavery was the best thing that happened to black people? It depends. In the former case, it was clear that the business school professor had no interest in dissent, and she was at the school to get a useful degree; she kept her head down. In the latter case, the teacher was being deliberately provocative and welcomed argument; my high school friend argued long and vociferously with him, and earned his respect for doing so.
The US has never allowed freedom of thought, its just that the obligatory opinion which you are forced to hold has changed in a direction you dont prefer.
I submit as evidence the violence the mormons encountered when they didnt meet the christian criteria, twice being driven out of their homelands, their leader killed in supposedly protective custody, the convenient assassinations of every uppity black leader bar farrakhan, mcCarthyism, Segregation laws relating to miscegenation (race mixing) no sir, America legislates for personal preferences, no other country bar Nazi Germany does that, even India with its castes systems didnt go that far…
So the latest dictatorship is flamboyant pink instead of royal british blue or soviet red, there has been no revolutionary war for freedom, Animal Farm was a parody of the american civil war, good of Orwell to disguise it enough so that it wasnt censored, but not too much that keener minds wouldnt get the references to the return of the neighbouring farmers to the exhibition at the end.
It’s truly embarrassing how weak and worthless the average college kid is. It’s just an extension of high school basically. Snot nosed little kids that still need mommy or daddy to wipe their ass. But in their minds, they have it all figured out. College campuses are basically full of losers that are still living the high school dream of being popular. It’s embarrassing.
I didn’t see anyone else say this, so I shall. There’s nothing about political correctness that prevents freedom of thought. Political correctness is just basic respect for other people. This sort of respect actually makes it easier to get together and discuss things. Offending people has a way of making them defensive and causing them not to listen to what you are saying.
There is also this growing myth that college was this place where all these people with diverse views got together and just talked, without anyone getting upset, without protests and what have you. That’s just never been the case. I’m sure there have been actual times where people were asked to voice their views like this. Perhaps it happened in appropriate classes. But colleges have never been this libertarian utopia.
Instead of seeing how much more inclusive colleges are today, they are compared against this mythological perfection. That’s what people mean when they say there have always been those activists who take things too far–the young adults who haven’t learned the nuances.
And, no, it doesn’t mean their causes are any less important, at least, on the whole. Until society is perfectly fair, perfectly nondiscriminatory, and perfectly just, there will always be a cause to fight for.
Some people use “PC” to mean people asserting the right to be offended by anything, no matter how absurd. That has, of course, led people to whine about “PC” in cases when the offense is quite reasonable too.
And on the other hand, some people do assert the right to be offended by even ridiculous things, and sometimes use that as a tool to shut down speech or legitimate discussion.
So use “PC” at your peril, it’s a highly loaded term.
Given that there’s people in the US who think Jessica Alba isn’t white enough, not really; I’m still wanting to know if those same people hold the same belief about Cameron Diaz. In this same century, I’ve had coworkers who had seen their careers curtailed because there was no way in Hell they’d get invited to “the right clubs” due to their race (no blacks, Jews or Catholics); their company’s leadership being a bit of an old boys’ club (women should get close to manager’s offices only as PAs), the inability to join the right clubs meant you could not “get the right profile” for advancement.
I agree with you in that it would be nice if such stupidity did not exist in this century.