The origin of "Political Correctness"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have developed a theory on the origin of excessive “Political Correctness”.

Now, I am not opposed to some form of delicacy when dealing with other people, whose values, religion or whatnot are different from ones own: respect them, and don’t be a dick. It’s not that hard to do.

Whether you support or oppose it (and those view are usually deeply entrenched) you cannot escape the spectre. The right accuse the left of being too PC, the left accuse the right of being anti-PC. It leads to argument and fights and the odd forum-banning.

Today I feel that I now know what led to the rise of “Political Correctness” as a political and social phenomenon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is this: the modern H.R. Department.

This, THIS, is what is driving the madness on both sides of the debate. The H.R. department is solely and wholly responsible for making up descriptions of roles and functions in a way that no possible negative inference could be implied, and then changing the descriptions of those roles at the slightest hint that some poor sod down in accounts might feel aggrieved.

This lunacy has led to our new H.R. “portal” - an abomination of a website (from Oracle) named “Fusion” - which allows me not to “take leave”, like almost every other corporate drone on the planet, but instead I must make an “Absence Management Query” - who knows why that terminology was invented, but it follows the pattern, a vapid euphemism for everything: “let you go” (you are fired), “core competencies” (your job skills), “corporate culture” (The boss snorts coke off hooker’s bums in the boardroom, but YOU have to work weekends), “downsizing” (you are fired), and in that same light (in my current company) “Future fit” (aka, we are retrenching, and you are getting fired). Obviously “taking leave” is fairly innocuous, but like a cancer, this renaming infects everything in the HR dept, and in the form of P.C. is spreading outside of HR.

This trend, begun in the 70s, then caught on like wildfire and hence the rise of “Political Correctness”

It is all due to Big Corporate’s studious carefulness to avoid offending - obviously not to protect their employees (as everyone but the most callow intern knows that HR dont give a shit about employees) but to protect their corporations from being sued.

And culture is the poorer for it.

2

Strange. I thought “Political Correctness” was a bullshit term invented by people who could no longer use racial and sexist slurs with impunity?

3

I am not sure if the OP is spoofing but I thought the term originated from the Soviet Communist Party.

But if it’s a serious thread, then:

The whole reason there is a fight over PC vs. anti-PC is because both sides have drastically different definitions of what “PC” means.

Liberals think PC means = refraining from using racial or sexist or homophobic slurs.

Conservatives think PC means = saying that Oreo cookies are racist because they are white and black.

So when someone says, “I oppose PC,” liberals think, “You think saying the N-word is okay?” and when someone says I support PC, conservatives think, really, you want Oreo cookies censored due to being white and black?

4

Velocity, you are definitely on the right track. The fact that manson1972 posted what he did illustrates the great divide regarding Political Correctness. It’s not about using racial and sexist slurs, it’s about people perceiving things that are not intended to be offensive as actually being offensive.

Case in point: Party Like It’s 1776

They are holding a prom at a Constitution Center, but it’s somehow racist to reference the revolution, constitution or the year of our nation’s founding. Or if not racist, “insensitive”.

Give me a break.

5

Well, if you consider “Let’s try to find out what non-white people think of this thing we are doing before doing the thing” as PC, then there is no help for you.

6

If you’re going to try your utmost to couch unreasonable/hysterical things in terms to make them seem more reasonable or sensible than they are, then there is no help for you.

7

There probably isn’t, as I think getting all butthurt over “party like it’s 1776” is idiotic, as is expecting a HS principal to get approval from students for such a trivial matter. You really see that as racist or insensitive?

8

Me personally? No. But I’m white. I could understand how someone not white would find it insensitive though.

Come on guys, I don’t even have empathy or barely any feelings and I can understand that. It’s not that hard.

9

I think Velocity shares my opinion on the “PC” matter, but my OP (placed in MPSIMS, not Great Debates, by the way) was mostly aimed at bitching about corporate H.R.

OTOH as a Zimbabwean, I’d have no problem going to a Rhodesian- themed “party like it’s 1965” despite Nov 11 of that year not being very promising for my compatriots.

YMMV, but I’m pretty sure all agree that H.R. terminology is “odour-challenged post-intestinal matter”

10

The term is meaningless. It’s like “cooties.” People just throw it out when there’s something they don’t like.

It’s a completely pointless thing to try to frame what your HR system does with this term, (so I guess this thread is in the right place), but you’re not actually coming to any better undestanding about why they do what they do.

You can put any label you want on anything you want, but don’t think that gives any great insight.

11

Seconded.

For me, the OP only makes sense if HR had decided to substitute “Absence Management” for “Taking Leave” because someone had claimed they were mortally offended by the latter term. Which would indeed be silly, but highly unlikely.

Anyway, in my experience, “PC” seems to get thrown around mostly by right-wingers trying to delegitimize objections to bigotry, i.e. things having no discernable relation to the content of the OP.

12

Political Correctness is a catch-all term that has gone beyond efforts to not offend minority groups, beyond HR departments, beyond racial insensitivity, beyond reasonable communication, in an effort to have a society where no one can be possibly be offended. This goal is clearly unreachable, and some of the efforts to reach it are almost humorous. At least it would be if it wasn’t forcing people to watch every word they say least it be offensive to someone, anyone.

Little Billy is a liar. He habitually lies in order to create drama between the other students and with staff. He lies when the truth would work just as well. He lies about his progress on assignments. He is to a point where nothing he says can be believed unless it can be verified another way. Is Billy a habitual liar? I would say so, but only in small groups of trusted staff.

In all other communications? Billy is an “inaccurate reporter.”

13

My recollection, such as it is, is that the term was first used by LEFT wingers: first seriously (by the kind of folks who wear red berets and proudly identify as members of the revolutionary communist party) and then, rather quickly, tongue in cheek and with a wry sense of humor about it all.

I remember an Alison Bechdel Dykes to Watch Out For strip in which Mo is preparing to attend a social or dance at the local LGBT center and tries on different apparel; in one panel she’s put on a t shirt with “lavender menace” and a hat festooned with political pins (or something of that general ilk) and shakes her head: “Too P.C.”

The left has (nearly) always had a sense of humor (albeit often an exasperated one) about its own ponderously serious rule-imposing types. It’s not a sense of humor that completely dismisses the underlying concern that our everyday behaviors and vocabulary and so forth might be problematic, but there’s a whiff of dismissal towards the obligatory rule-following thing in and of itself.

When the right embraces a similar suspicion for the following of rules for their own sake, their crit of political correctness will carry more weight.

14

I was in a volunteer group in the late 80s that was a hotbed of PC. We had a specially difficult time with anything to do with being handicapped. I mean, that word itself was right out, as was “challenged” or anything else we could come up with.

My favorite suggestion was “differently othered.”

15

To the best of my knowledge, it is in fact not a Soviet term.

The article you linked to kinda sorta seems to imply that it is, but it never states it outright. This Codevilla character is quoted as saying that…

… But never says 1) where in the world these “Communists in the 1930s” lived, nor 2) if any of them ever actually used the term “political correctness.”

Do you have a better cite?

16

I totally disagree with the OP’s theory of the origins of PC speech.

On one hand, we have folks on the left, who I think in general we should take at face value as far as their intent to move past certain terms that cause offense for various people. Whether or not some on the left take it too far, and use the effort as a sword to attack conservatives rather than a shield for various minorities, is a reasonable debate. Especially when it comes to some extremes, of course.

On the other hand, the invention of terms by corporate American to serve as linguistic lubrication for fucking you over, cannot be seen as the same phenomenon. The origin and intent is completely different.

17

My mom used a wheelchair due to polio. She once commented that she went from "crippled’ to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “mobility challenged” but I’m still in this chair.

18

The HR thing is obfuscation, a kind of “weasel words” where they avoid saying what they mean.

PC is simply this: Recognize that not everyone agrees with you, and stop pretending that they do.

Very different.

19

What is your authority for saying what “PC is”?

It ostensibly starts as you say but quickly transforms into a tool of control.

Around 1950, the American Communist Party started an internal PC campaign (although they didn’t call it PC). Where today we hear the terms “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, they used the term “white chauvinism”. Now the left applies PC to the entire country.

From American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, by Joseph Starobin, then foreign editor of the American edition of the Daily Worker:

Dorothy Healey, in California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990, U. of Illinois Press):

Healey was eventually accused of “white chauvinism” herself. She gave in to the charge because she thought the whole thing was a farce and this would end her involvement. But she was ordered to sign a written statement, which was used against her in her later dealings with the Party.

The above quotes are from my post in a similar thread: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=19222702

Here’s an account of how Dalton Trumbo was criticized for a number of instances of “white chauvinism”, including writing of a black child who was “clean and dressed in his Sunday best.” That supposedly implied “that the black child was ‘clean on only special occasions’, and hence the description was racist to the core.”

Here are a couple of quotes from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and ex-communist.

“Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.”

–“Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism”, in Our Country, Our Culture - The Politics of Political Correctness (1994), Partisan Review Press, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Philips

“Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.”

–The Sunday Times, London (10 May 1992)

20

To be fair, there is much that H.R. shares with the Soviet Communist Party.

Doing things "for the greater good’ - check
Encouraging mindless collectivism - check
Spewing propaganda to keep the proles happy - check
Pretending to care about the well-being of the public - check
Enticing/encouraging high levels of work with both carrot and stick - check (mostly the stick, though)