So, you’re arguing that the poster should have take the time to think about how his word choice would received by his audience, and considered changing how he was expressing himself in order to avoid giving offense?
Sounds good, but I thought you were opposed to PC?
I think it’s more than just “PC”, which is sometimes a vague term. People want to be sensitive on the one hand, but they also want the freedom to be able to point out things that they observe in their interactions with different people without being called a bigot or shamed into silence.
Take the issue of police brutality as an example. I’m staunchly in favor of requiring more oversight and higher standards of police training as a response to what are obvious problems resulting from police culture. At the same time, in many of the high-profile instances we’ve read about and talked about in public discourse over the years, it’s often the case that many of the individuals who wind up injured or killed by an officer probably could have handled the situation leading up to the violent encounter differently themselves, which is not to minimize the end result but to point out that police are forced to confront aggressive people and end up in aggressive situations. That’s one example I can think of, and there are probably several others as well.
Because when something is “not PC” the PC police demand it be taken back. I’m thinking of the Steve Martin tweet related to Carrie Fisher.
I agree this is the core what’s wrong with ‘PC’, and it’s particularly not explained away by people on this thread, not necessarily bad people, but among the same people who habitually try to win arguments by proclaiming the moral superiority of their positions, telling us it’s just about politeness and decency. No it isn’t, it’s about the crutch of claiming false moral superiority to bolster arguments.
When Dick Cheney insists on saying enhanced interrogation not torture, that could be dishonest euphemism* but there’s a limited overlap between excessive or dishonest euphemism and PC. PC deserves its negative image more due to the power game aspect than the euphemism aspect, IMO.
*I don’t view it as a cut and dried fact that there can’t be a usefully descriptive category of interrogation techniques that are coercive but not torture but for illustrative purposes, sure, one might at least reasonably argue Cheney was using euphemism at the deliberate expense of honesty.
I thought this was a good observation. The term ‘racist’ gets thrown around really easy nowadays for a word with so much baggage. For example, I’ve heard it said in conversation and internet discussion that ‘colored people’ is a racist phrase, where it would be more constructive to say that it is outdated or archaic. Casually slipping in that said person is acting like a racist triggers all sorts of defense mechanisms and such, which then causes the Anti-PC person in question to go on a tirade about how we’re being too sensitive.
Of course, then we get to arguing what exactly is being said when something is called racist. To me personally is conjures images of klan members which is why I think people get touchy when something they thought was innocent catches them that label
I appreciate your response. I think you’re spot on about lazy Twitter-inspired “journalism”. You’re right that my information about most problems in the world is largely through second-hand sources too. I’m an upper-middle-class white guy in America. I don’t have any real, meaningful problems. If I were to try and list the few personal inconveniences and discomforts in my life, I’d be embarrassed by the exercise and the whole thing would fit nicely in a “First World Problems” meme.
But isn’t that observation true of most Dopers and the issues we discuss? Just looking at current thread topics in Great Debates, we’ve got threads on Trump’s “Muslim ban”, on the mosque shooting in Quebec. I suspect these are not problems that are personally affecting more than 1% of Dopers, and they are, in a larger sense, pretty trivial problems (not meaning to be disrespectful to those dead and wounded in Quebec). Didn’t most Dopers get their information on these things based off something someone tweeted, or what they read on Facebook or heard on the news?
I never understood the stereotype about black people liking fried chicken. Everybody loves fried chicken because it’s damn delicious.
“Microaggression” is a bad, divisive word for this, because it carries the the clear implication “their purpose in saying this is to attack you”. That’s what the word “aggression” means - a deliberate attack. It’s not a good word to express the meaning “it gets on my wick when people do this all the time”
Also, different things get on different people’s last nerve, so if you’re meeting someone for the first time it’s rather entitled to assume that they even know what’s going to specifically get on your own personal nerves. If you’ve already told them you hate it and they keep doing it - well, fine, bring out the ‘m’ word with wild abandon. But that’s not actually what’s happening when, say, people share internet videos about how whatever grinds the gears of them and their four closest friends should be avoided by everyone on the planet with a Facebook account.
It’s always had negative connotations. It’s like saying, “how do we get people to like living in an Orwellian dystopia?” Hopefully, you never will.
I think pretty much definitionally it means you’re taking your thought and language policing too far.
The use of “PC” in a negative context IIRC was already around among the moderate left, as an ironic reference to the way that the more doctrinaire factions expected *everything *to be done to exacting ideological standards (e.g. politically correct art, politically correct personal associations, etc.), when it began being picked up by the Right. The apparent tipping points into making it what it is now were in the late 80s with Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and especially with Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education which (author and book) became a particular darling of RW media. So indeed you would be of a demographic that has only ever heard of it in its post-80s sense.
I’ll concede to your larger point while imploring you to pick a better example – American immigration policy is relevant to all Americans, under the umbrella of what has historically been called “national news,” e.g., news relevant to the nation.
Your larger point, I’m assuming, is that there’s a fair amount of recreational outrage here on the dope, which is certainly true, and it’s one reason I come and go. I find myself getting fired up about stuff that I ultimately decide doesn’t really matter. But you also touch on this whole idea of where we get our news. For most of my life, people watched The News or read the morning paper or whatever, which means all information is flowing through outlets with roughly the same journalistic standards. With social media, however, an in-depth National Review piece shared by my cousin who has a PhD in Chemistry and a wealth of world experience, someone I greatly respect, gets the same amount of screen space as the anti-vax article that my dumbshit cousin shares. Even if I really want to be a good citizen, it’s hard to maintain focus when all of these crap is landing on the same page.
Anyway, my point isn’t so much that we should distrust the specific mechanism by which we heard about a story, although that’s certainly something we should all be more mindful of, it’s that it’s very easy for a local story – one relevant to only a single school district (pop-tart gun) or state (any stupid Sheriff Arpaio story) – to take on greater significance than it really deserves. People end up creating world views that are at odds with reality. Read enough pop-tart gun stories and you’ll start thinking that the PC-police have gone too far and are ruining our kids, but the reality is that pissant stories like that just don’t matter. There are a lot of schools, a lot of parents, a lot of administrators. Who cares what one school did one time? Who cares what 6 schools did one time? It’s bullshit. But we like it, because our brains work that way.
Is it a microaggression if it’s someone who just asks everyone where they’re from when they meet them? I’m a white guy and get asked where I’m from all of the time, it’s a pretty common small talk question. If you’re going to claim that a common phrase that gets said to everybody is a bad, racist thing, it makes the concept just look absurd, and microaggression theory is full of that kind of nonsense.
Do you think that erecting a giant strawman definition of political correctness, then burning that strawman is going to change anyone’s mind? And if what I’m asking for really is what you think of as PC, and you think that PC is a good thing, why aren’t you practicing what you preach? The fact that ‘PC’ advocates often claim that PC is just about being polite to people, but then fail to extend that politeness to people that disagree with them is yet another reason people oppose it.
Funny thing here is, I was going to ask you precisely the same question.
Speaking of strawmen, where have liberals argued that you must be polite to all people, at all times, regardless of circumstance or context?
The general public sees (or would see, if they knew who he was) PC Principal on South Park as a hilariously accurate portrayal.
I agree. The TV show *Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher *launched in 1993. The show was meant to allow guests to speak their true mind, no censorship. The whole point was hey, we’re not going to be politically correct! I don’t believe the term “politically correct” is much older than that.
ETA: I would also add that in its early use, “politically correct,” while having a somewhat negative censorship connotation, was not as combative as it is today. For example, in the early 90s someone might say “queer” and another person might just say, “the politically correct term is homosexual.” There wasn’t all this “how dare you! Bigot!” There was more tolerance for insensitivity, or maybe just a more constructive approach to it.
A lot of these theories are trying to grasp pretty subtle ideas.
When you get asked where you are from. Are they asking what European country your ancestors are from? Is this a common thing? Is this a common experience among most white people to get asked about the nationality of their ancestry?
I was under the impression that this was considered a microaggression exactly because it is NOT commonly asked.
Microaggressions are not supposed to be bad racist things (they are supposed to be inadvertent) but a lot of hyperliberals have turned it into a bad racist thing. The mentality seems to be that if you are not fully up to date on the most recent crit race theories, you are being racist.
Personally, when I am asked 'where are you from, I ask if they mean ethnically or where I grew up. The usually response is “ummm, I meant both”
But people are being labeled bigots who are not bigots at all simply by not using the ‘correct’ up-to-the-minute terminology. That’s bullshit, pure and simple, and it’s stuff like this that gives PC the terrible reputation it has.
I grew up among the radical left and I assure you the term is both a few decades old and was utterly derogatory in its usage, including of the moderate left ( maybe especially of the moderate left 
). Old Trotskyists didn’t have much use for hippies and liberal democrats, who they tended to regard with different varieties of mild contempt.
So you think that my perception of PC and what it’s actual effects are is incorrect in some way, but you aren’t willing to actually make a coherent argument about what way, you’re just going to make snippy comments that fail to hold together. Glad to see a mod promoting real debate in Great Debates.
Yes, that’s a good example of a strawman argument, since I never made the claim you’re asking me to support.
I don’t like political correctness, because I feel it gets in the way of clear communication and is constantly evolving at a pace much faster than language in general. I am not able to keep up. I don’t know if the person posting above is serious or not, but using the acronym “POC” for a black person would render me clueless as to what the speaker meant, and I am sure if I used that term around here (where I live), no one would know what the hell I was talking about.
As a result, sometimes I feel I am at risk of unintentionally saying a politically incorrect term, that then allows myself to be labeled a bigot and any point I made thereby invalidated, while simultaneously making me a social ass.
Sometimes I struggle with understanding others that speak PC. Recently a teacher friend of my wife’s described herself to me as teaching the ‘exceptional’ class. I had no idea she wasn’t teaching the smart kids, but was actually teaching special education.
I hate to have to censor myself and make sure I am using the latest and greatest term all the time.
I have a 3 yr old at home. I just learned recently that you’re not supposed to use the term ‘stupid’ anymore… I learned from the horrified looks on the other parents faces after I said it describing an objectively stupid TV commercial in front of children. I’ve switched to using ‘asinine’ now.