It’s more a hypothesis, than a theory, I’m not trying to prove anything. Perhaps my OP title was inaccurate.
However, I think the “linguistic lubrication” (and that, sir, is a wonderful phrase) originated in the bullshit that H.R. spouts and spread like a cancer to other areas.
This objection makes no sense. Sure, it’s difficult for POC to celebrate the condition of their ancestors and brethren at that time, but then, can they nominate a year that they’d be happy celebrating? After all, after slavery comes Jim Crow, then after Civil Rights comes decades of casual and institutional racism, with enormous racial problems and unfairness to this day, where we have Trump.
Basically, never celebrate any year.
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I heard an explanation once, and I don’t know how grounded in reality it is, that it came from protests: Ideally, a protest should be about one thing. If you’re protesting wage-and-hour laws in regards to a certain industry, you want the protest to be about that, and that alone, to get as big of a group behind you as possible. Once people start talking about anti-immigration, on one side, or protection for gender identity, on the other, you’ve split the movement, and now you’re not going to get a damn thing done as regards wage-and-hour laws. So being politically correct means not allowing any idiot with a sign to march with you, or get up on the podium, in order to keep it focused.
Of course, these days it’s a snarl term, something you can throw at anyone to discredit them. It’s meaningless, and quite deliberately so, because attaching a meaning to it beyond BAD THING would make it less applicable to all your enemies.
That said, some things are PC-in-the-bad-sense, like calling “French fries”, “Freedom fries”, or demanding that anthropogenic climate change isn’t real, or demanding that there are only two genders (… which somehow “disproves” trans people… never quite got that one…) or demanding that abstinence-only sexual education works. Those are all pretty damned PC.
I can accept “Freedom fries” as an ironic example of PC, but the other three are not even in the ballpark. Politically correct is generally defined as: a word or expression used instead of another one to avoid being offensive; avoiding language or behavior that any particular group of people might feel is unkind or offensive; extremely careful not to offend or upset any group of people in society who have a disadvantage, or who have been treated differently because of their sex, race, or disability.
Or, as the urban dictionary defines it: A way that we speak in America so we don’t offend whining pussies.
Climate change, gender identity and promoting abstinence are political issues, but they are not examples of political correctness.
What I think of when I think of “political correctness” starts with a sense of tabled topics. X is not up for discussion; it’s wrong, period, and what rock have you been hiding under if you don’t already know that?
It’s different from controversial. To label something politically incorrect is to say that there is no controversy, it’s bad, it’s known to be bad, it’s embarrassing (or should be), it’s a political faux pas.
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It goes off the rails in two ways:
• There’s a political agenda when a cluster of people opt to behave as if a topic that’s already been decided as far as they’re concerned is tabled for everyone. It’s one thing to be an American in the 21st century and say that it is politically incorrect to believe, state, and act on the belief that white people are inherently superior to other races. That’s racist. We’ve been through all that. It is not open to discussion. Yeesh. Etc. It’s a somewhat different thing to behave the same way towards someone who says “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen” and go off on the speaker for classism and for shoving everyone into the binary gender categories and oppressing the working class and omitting the nonbinary and intersex folks. We do not have the same near-uniformity of understanding about the political incorrectness of using the terms “ladies” and “gentlemen”.
• More deeply, there’s an inherent problem with the whole idea of “this is not up for discussion”. There’s a strong anti-intellectual freedom element to the notion that any subject is flat-out off limits, that all the important people have already weighed in on it and that no one who is not a troll could ever voice any even marginally dissenting opinion.
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Meanwhile, though, charges of “political correctness”, mocking it and deriding the people who ascribe to it, etc, are often voiced when folks are actually trying to explain why they don’t want people to continue to do this or say that or to continue to believe this or act on that belief. In other words, they aren’t reacting to folks chopping off the conversation and saying “this is not up for discussion and you’re just wrong”, they’re reacting to people trying to have a discussion by saying, themselves, that “this should not be up for discussion, you’re trying to impose political correctness”.
In other words, they’re often the ones trying to derail intellectual freedom and shut down the discussion by shouting “political correctness run amok!!”
No, they’re all PC in that they’re factually wrong/stupid but must be accepted as correct to fit in with a political group. Thus, they’re politically correct, and if you deny them, you get members of a political group whining at you.
This, a thousand times this.
Well, if it’s at a Constitution Center, it really should be Party Like It’s 1789.