I don’t think I could prove it, because it’s my own experiences & anecdotal evidence. But, I would say from my days of being a campus lefty, that the shoutdown/don’t let them get their ideas out there is a common tactic we discussed. A flyer I saw while taking a walk one day recently advertised this effort to drown out Bush’s state of the union address. This is not a tactic I see the right-wingers using (although I never listen to Rush because of his tendency not to take callers who disagree with him!)
In terms of the middle part of your post (which I snipped due to length)…I think I may not be getting my point across. The thing that bothers me is when certain assumptions are made about a political stance, due to political correctness. For example, in the example I gave earlier about certain ethnic groups having a permanent disadvantange. People might not SAY that you need to think a certain way, or that there is only one correct way to think. But if you say that you believe that racism is not the biggest obstacle to success for black people in the US, you may very well be branded a racist…no matter what your reasons or evidence for believing this is. This, to me, is the insidious problem with political correctness.
Yes, though the specific racial categories vary from culture to culture. The idea that there are different races of human being is a social construct not an objective bit of proof.
Physical characteristics that fit many people from Papua New Guinea and Australian Aborigines. Are they Negroid? Are they black?
That’s skin color, facial features, and hair texture. Well, duh, that was never in dispute. That’s a separate issue from what it takes to be black in this country. The US census defines black as:
It’s related to both actually. Since race is a social construct it can be a slippery thing to grasp.
I don’t think you have to be a slackjaw to mistake someone from Papua New Guinea or Australia as black.
The problem is that those generally agreed upon definitions vary from culture to culture and even scientist are not in agreement about the validity of races.
The point being that race is a social construct not a biological one. Though some still beleive it is biological.
You missed something here. It’s generally considered stylistically preferable to describe groups as, say, “blind people” rather than “the blind”. “Gay people” is definitely more polite than “the gay” (or “the gays”, or whatever). That’s the issue that this sentence is discussing; it’s considered politer not to regard a group of people as nothing but whatever their minority status is.
I have to wonder whether this is as garbled in transmission as the previous example you gave. At any rate, as the saying goes, any fool can make a rule, and any fool can follow it. If her teachers really are unreasonably telling her what to call herself, that’s pretty objectionable. But I have to wonder what the original circumstances were and how often it happened - my experience, and it certainly hasn’t been contradicted by anything in this thread, is that such things are frequently so heavily exaggerated that it’s hard to figure out the original story.
Funny how the anti-PC seem to be just as likely as the supposedly PC (though no one yet has turned up who identifies themself as PC) to engage in that silliness. Haven’t we seen people earlier in this thread talk about how they see others as “human” and are apparently [del]blind[/del] visually-impaired as to any other characteristics those “humans” possess?
Obviously it’s sometimes necessary to note a person’s skin color, sexual orientation, height, disability, and so forth. If some people are so ridiculously hypersensitive that they give lectures to anyone else who happens to so much as notice someone’s skin color, then they’re ridiculous idiots. Isn’t the problem, then, ridiculous idiots? There’s a lot of them out there. You should see the roads.
Ahh, yes, back to that old “indoctrinated in college” canard. Funny how my college forgot to indoctrinate me.
You should use whatever term your father prefers. Again, I simply can’t imagine what world you live in in which people jump on you constantly to correct your speech. I can’t say I’ve had anywhere near as many experiences as you apparently have.
What you seem to have missed, however, is the fact that there’s lots of dumb people out there who do and say a lot of dumb things. Would you agree that, generally, it’s best to refer to people using polite terms that don’t offend them? Would you agree that sometimes people make inadvertent mistakes that way? If those two things are true, then it’s perfectly reasonable to offer people some assistance in figuring out what terms are accepted and what terms aren’t. The huge logical leap you’re making is in imagining that there’s some sort of entity, “Political Correctness”, that invents arbitrary rules about what you’re allowed to call everyone around you. There’s not. There’s people who occasionally do dumb things like imagine that a phrase is offensive that actually isn’t. But what you’ve been describing in this discussion is a mixture of your own wholesale misunderstanding of a government document you read and people making well-meaning but obnoxious mistakes in correcting others’ behavior. I guess I don’t see what the major social problem here is.
The idea that “political correctness” is some major social problem only works insofar as it’s some phenomenon associated with actual power. If people were actually enforcing “correct speech”, that would be a problem. The policy you cite above regarding preferences in government work is a bad example, since organizations generally have all sorts of rules for how you may speak when you’re representing them - style guides at newspapers or other businesses setting standard rules for capitalizing names of companies or which order quotation marks and commas go in are perfectly normal. If your problem is that you have a few hypersensitive friends who have invented brand-new rules for how you’re allowed to refer to other people, tell them that they’re being ridiculous. But rhetoric surrounding “political correctness” seems to take for granted that we’re at the mercy of some shadowy group that sets the rules for how every ethnic group and minority is referred to, and that’s simply not the case. No one cares if you refer to black people as black people; black people, on the whole, don’t mind. The term “black” is certainly perfectly normal in academic writing and in newspapers and magazines. If some tiny fraction of the population decides to invent their own rules for what you’re allowed to call others, why is that a problem? You don’t have to follow those rules. You don’t actually have to follow any such rules - in fact, you can refer to black people as “niggers” and Jewish people as “kikes” and women as “cunts” if it makes you happy. Said niggers, kikes, and cunts might get upset with you, and that’s perfectly appropriate. Any time you speak, you take the risk of offending someone. That’s not a new thing; that’s not a problem inherent with liberal politics or the academic world or minorities - it exists in every aspect of how people communicate with each other. The question you have to answer is whether some terms are more likely to offend than others, and how much you care that people are offended. If people around you throw offended hissy-fits whenever you describe tacos as “Mexican food”, then you might consider looking for a smarter crowd to hang out with.
In my experience, political correctness is a bogeyman (bogeyperson?) that some folks like to point to, requisite with the far-out example or two, as sensitivity run amok. When in reality, what’s happened is that over the past fifty years or so, through political action and research, many previously disenfranchised groups have challenged dominant groups’ labeling and opted for their own. Does any one group have 100 percent agreement on what they prefer to be called? Of course not. But most of the calls I’ve heard for changing language - police officer instead of policeman, firefighter instead of fireman, people of color instead of minorities - seem to be reasonable changes that are more inclusive than their previous incarnations.
I’ve found existing in a “PC world” (I work and go to school in the People’s Republic of Cambridge) isn’t difficult at all. It just requires listening, asking questions, and not being afraid or insulted if someone suggests that another term might be more appropriate. I hang out with some pretty left-leaning folks and I have never heard one of them say, “The definitive term for my group is [insert group name here], and any other terminology is greatly offensive.” It’s more nuanced. For instance, among Native American friends in academia, I get the sense that Native American (if nation affiliation is not known) is the preferred term but there are plenty of people who use Indian - one of the more politically active Native American groups is AIM (American Indian Movement). But I know folks who are Cherokee, Lumbee, and are happy with Indian or Red. If I use a term that someone isn’t comfortable with and they let me know, I’m able to either change it, explain my use of the term I prefer, or keep things as is. No biggie.
As someone who identifies as African American and Black, I’m also confused why this generates so much consternation. I like the term Black because it is inclusive, and I came up in a time when that word was being reclaimed as something positive (Black and Proud, Young, Gifted and Black… you get the idea). I like African American because it links Black Americans to a geographic space which we historically downplayed, or were even embarrassed to associate with - but it also is unspecific meaning that the legacy of the African diaspora is that we have a difficult time understanding where in the continent we’re from. I’ve done geneaological work and it abruptly ends during slave days in the US. That is a focus of unity for Black Americans - so we are attempting to connect, I’m sure in some ways that confuse Americans from a prescribed region or population from Africa. (I had a friend from Ghana who used to point out the inconsistencies in dress and traditions during February.) But that’s okay. That particular linkage - is unique to Black Americans, of an activist mindset, who experienced or resonate with the experiences of linking to Africa from the 1960s onward. My Ghanian friend was Ghanian-American, if he so chose to identify himself as such, or Ghanian, or Black. I have a friend who is Ethiopian by birth - born there, parents from there - but identifies as African American out of a sense of political and experiential unity with Black Americans born in the US. (Growing up in the South might have forged this identity.)
Similarly, I have Latino/a friends who identify strongly with being Guatemalan, or Mexican, or Puerto Rican, but also identify as Latino because of a shared political identity and struggle. I have friends who identify even more strongly as Chicano/a, linking to a specific political movement and period of time. I also have friends who reject these terms and see themselves as Americans first, and potentially of Mexican descent after. Bottom line, we all have distinct stories to tell of our experiences, and I think when someone raises an objection it’s often to share that unique experience. Sometimes it’s just to be a pedantic ass, too, but I see that less often.
Returning to the Larry Summers issue… trust me, the gender differences thing was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. An autocratic leadership style, terse relationships with the faculty, and exceptionally poor judgment in interacting with certain constituencies at Harvard led to his downfall. He isn’t the first president in the school’s history to court controversy - look at Harvard in the 1980s during divestment… but he might have been the most politically unaware. Folks I know who have worked with him say that “bull in a china shop” approximates how he deals (dealt, I guess) with situations.
That’s been my experience as well. For the most part I’ve had no difficult communicating my ideas in a college setting, though I have run into tidbits of silliness including the whole “he and she” versus “he” debate, but it really hasn’t prevented the flow of ideas. I think PC is largely a myth.
The he/she thing is a good example. When I used to write policy for the student life division at my old campus, I used the neutral “student” instead of he or she. Because we don’t want to insinuate that the only people who get in trouble are male… that’s definitely not true!
My AP stylebook encourages the use of “he or she” if it isn’t unwieldy. I’ve learned to interject male and female pronouns in my speech, especially when I lecture. (Not in the same example though. I know there are transexual folks out there, but it tends to confuse people: “The student should report the incident as soon as he is able. Following the report, she should seek out a staff member.”)
The PC complaints remind me of the conversations I had in undergrad re: affirmative action. You know, “Hey, my uncle lost out on a job because a Black guy applied even though he was less qualified, etc. etc.”
I’d say that both sides engage in that sort of tactic - as you’ve alluded to, the right has been successful in setting up their own landscape in which leftist views can be distorted and ridiculed at will. Sadly, there’s a lot of people who get all of their political knowledge from blatantly, unabashedly right-wing sources like Rush. Even if he’s not engaged in the kind of tactics you’ve described and limits his rudeness to those who call his show, it has the same general effect of stifling political discourse.
Yeah, I tend to run on . . .
I guess that I’m not sure what “political correctness” is anymore since it seems to be used to describe all manner of mostly unrelated concepts.
I agree with you in general that it’s not inherently racist to deny the presence of racism in our society. (I think, though, that people have generally become far too willing to pretend that it’s not a serious problem anymore.) But there’s a further wrinkle here - because some racist people use statements like that as a way to advance a racist agenda. It’s like a slightly less pernicious equivalent to Holocaust denial. There’s no logical reason why a Holocaust denier must be an anti-semite. Someone could, without the slightest shred of distaste for Jews, decide that the Holocaust never happened. In fact, that’s what how most Holocaust deniers describe themselves. But few people are so foolish as to assume that any given Holocaust denier is unlikely to be an anti-semite, because denying what happened to European Jews is a tool quite popular with people who hate them.
Likewise, the view you describe towards racism is also one that’s heavily endorsed by racists. One of the interesting things about the internet is that it provides easy access to all sorts of extremist propaganda, and one thing you’ll see repeated over and over on websites of White Supremacists is claims that racism isn’t a potent force in society anymore (the ickier ones don’t seem to feel any need to pretend to be against racism.) It’s not logically required that you have to be racist to have that viewpoint. In fact, most people who believe that racism is no longer a significant social problem are not racist. But it is the sort of viewpoint that goes along with racism.
At any rate, I again think that the idea that racism is more-or-less yesterday’s problem is quite common; I have a bit of a problem with the idea that any viewpoint that is expressed as frequently as that one is really being repressed somehow. If certain terms, ideas, and so forth are being repressed by the forces of political correctness, how the heck did they get so popular? And if they did, doesn’t that prove that political correctness isn’t really the problem people are making it out to be?
Which is why I’ve made it clear that I’m only talking about “black” as defined by the United States government. I think I’ve made that pretty clear.
And yes, race is a social construct. The reason we don’t refer to Washington DC as Maryland is also because of social constructs. Are you under the impression that a social construct means “words mean whatever I want them to mean?” Come on now.
Are they from sub-Sahara Africa?
Of course not. But you’re slackjaw if you throw established definitions out of the window and insist that these people are black just because they have dark skin and fuzzy hair. Might as well be insisting that Bob Ross is a black man. It takes the same type of logic.
That’s really interesting to read . . . I can’t say that I’m surprised that the issue turned out radically different from how it got reported in the papers.
" No one’s trying to restrict anybody’s use of any terms. You’re not being “oppressed” if you face the natural social consequences of your actions."
And went on to say, "That’s the problem. So much “exaggeration” occurs in discussion of “political correctness” that it’s almost impossible to discuss the issue on realistic terms. There’s a big difference between the “politically correct” avoidance of racial slurs and this entirely imaginary commandment not to use perfectly normal words like “black” and “blind”. "
So the article shows that there are people out there trying to restrict the use of certain terms. The article does give do’s and don’ts involving perfectly normal words. Handicapped is out, Disabled is in. Here it is again:
“Persons with a disability” or “individuals with disabilities” instead of “disabled person.”
“Persons who are deaf” or “young people with hearing impairments” instead of “deaf people.”
“People who are blind” or “persons with a visual impairment” instead of “blind people.”
“A student with dyslexia” instead of “a dyslexic student.”
The point is that those phrases that they want changed to something else are not slurs. Most people would not feel calling someone a dyslexic student or disabled person is meant as an insult. But yet there are groups out there saying not to use those phrases, and the article is an example of this.
People who are blind= ok
blind people =not ok
And I would agree with you if the PC term was based on a more accurate description. Most people who are labeled blind actually have some sight, so visually impaired might be more correct. But this isn’t about being correct, it is about someone deciding the phrase “blind people” is bad, and “people who are blind” is good. And then telling others they better stop using one phrase, and adopt the new one. And what makes this all crazy is that the National Federation of the Blind doesn’t have a problem with the phrase, “the blind.” But that doesn’t stop some groups from telling others not to use the phrase.
Um, I’m not seeing how. It seems like DMC and I both pointed out that you wholly misinterpreted what you read, and I furthermore pointed out that there’s nothing wrong or unprecedented with the government having certain standards for how documents are to be written.
Not at all. That article is establishing a house style for references to such things; as I pointed out before, there’s nothing unusual in the least about that.
I’m not terribly fond with the awkward style they’re establishing, but such is life.
You’ve provided no evidence that anyone is doing that, aside from your [del]dumb[/del] [del]retarded[/del] [del]mentally challenged[/del] developmentally disabled friends. (Just kidding. I just wanted to use all the strikethroughs. Your friends are misguided, though.) A government office is perfectly within its rights to establish a house style, and it’s no shock if they tread very carefully in order to avoid offending even the most sensitive people. That doesn’t make it a commandment for you to refer to those people any particular way; it just establishes a particular set of rules for government employees to use in the course of their work.
This is true, but seriously, I don’t think it’s quite the same thing as “shout so loud no one can hear him.” If you can find a cite for a campaign, driven by the right, to literally shout down someone you disagree with, I would love to see it, and will stand corrected.
I just meant that I didn’t need to re-post 3 paragraphs literally in the next post! Didn’t mean to imply that it was TOO lengthy!
I would agree with this, and in the area of controlling languge as has been described, I think it’s rather silly, perhaps, but not dangerous.
Please note that I did not deny the presence of racism…I said that it is not necessarily the main obstacle to success in the Black community. These are the kinds of things I am talking about. I believe my statement was reasonable, and you automatically assumed that I meant that there is no longer any racism, which is clearly an unreasonable position.
But, see, you have hit on the exact reason I find it so distasteful. It may be true that real racists may espouse certain viewpoints that someone who is not racist might also espouse…for different reasons. Where political correctness comes in is that the non-racist does not have the opportunity to show his legitimate reasons for such an opinion, because he has already been branded a racist and dismissed as such. Basically, I find that the attitude is that if you have a certain level of openmindedness and acceptance of people, it is thought that this will automatically and necessarily lead you to a particular political philosophy. Ergo, if you are not of that political philosophy, then you are automatically thought to be a racist/sexist/etc. This is the “political correctness” that I am referring to (you are right…the definition is all over the place). Generally speaking, a conservative will consider a liberal at worst misguided and wrong. On the other hand, a liberal will consider a conservative to be evil and bad. This is the crux of it, IMO.
Racism is most definitely a problem, but I don’t think, quite frankly, that PC affects your garden-variety racist, who really wouldn’t give a damn if liberals think they are wrong. The kind of people it affects are people like me. Most of my friends are liberals (my best friend on earth is a socialist). I feel very often as though I have to watch what I say (not with her, but with other people…her parents, for instance), because I know that if they found out that I tend to vote Republican, they would never look at me the same way again.
You are right that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but isn’t it true that many of the problems the faculty had with him stemmed from the perception that he was too conservative? For instance, and I don’t remember the story very clearly, wasn’t one of the problems that he opposed divestiture from Israel?
I actually think that appearance is pretty much all there is to it, certainly when dealing with other people. My husband has a Hispanic last name, and, as his father is an immigrant from a Spanish-speaking country, considers himself to be Hispanic. On the other hand, he has blonde hair and blue eyes, so despite his heritage and despite his last name, he is not considered Hispanic by anyone other than himself, his family, and the census bureau.
Granted, “Hispanic” is an ethnic group and not a race, but nonetheless, the reason people do not consider him to be Hispanic is because, in their opinion, he doesn’t look like one.
But racial perception is not the same thing as racial classification, so it really doesn’t matter if your blonde-haired husband doesn’t “look” Hispanic. Legless lizards look like snakes, too, but no one is going to seriously argue that they are snakes. The only reason why your husband is Hispanic is because he meets the established definition for Hispanic. It’s not because he looks a certain way.
Now if he were to go to a country where appearance actually does determines race, then the ballgame would be different. He’d be white regardless of his heritage.
It seems a bit more complex than that - the trend seems to be, as you pointed out “gender neutral”; the logical, common sense approach would be congresswoman, and obviously, spokeswoman, for example when the sex is female, so clearly it wasn’t simply a matter of the female sex being slighted. “Spokesperson” is just, well, stupid and clumsy.
Otherwise, we’d hear Firewoman, and Policewoman, and oddly, Mailwoman, right?
Apparently this doesn’t meet stylistic guidelines, though there is a seeming inconsistency in application. What’s a PC person to do? /s
The point is to expunge any perceptive differences among the sexes, apparently. Better pack a lunch.
He believes “it”. His family believes “it”. He probably has been affected by the history associated with “it”. He probably sees himself a part of the general culture that surrounds “it”. He may feel some degree of kinship with those who are also “it”.
There’s more to feeling a part of a race or ethnic group than just looking a certain way. You may see him as being just a regular ole white person, but he doesn’t, based on what you’ve written. That alone is signficant.
But even if he didn’t see himself as being culturally and ethnically Hispanic, that doesn’t mean his appearance has anything to do with whether he should be considered such. “Hispanic” has even less to do with appearance that “black” does.
