I can agree with that. Some people on the left are fanatical and unfair. I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day about the musical Hamilton, and how six years ago progressives treated Lin Manuel Miranda as the second coming of liberal Jesus, and now people are finding all these problems in the work they were praising six years ago, and acting as though we were all so similarly enlightened the entire time. It’s complete bullshit. It is incredibly difficult to keep up with changing trends these days. Shifts in social consciousness that once took decades can now happen in five years.
And some of it I just don’t accept. If someone corrects my language because of some nitpicky PC thing, the only thing that changes is that I don’t say that word around them any more. In that Brandeis list, the “we don’t say survivor anymore” particularly galls me. I am a survivor and so are my friends and coworkers and the people we serve. Yet some gaggle of sheltered children took it upon themselves to decide for me how I should or should not define myself.
Yes I am. That helps me to better understand the urgency some people feel around this issue, because to me the New Jersey situation is the default and it’s like… sure, racism exists, but the really bad stuff is rare, and the common stuff is pretty minor and also probably not very easy to change. (And I’d say the same for sexism in the UK.)
No. What I was saying in that thread is that there are downsides as well as benefits to PC culture, and we ought to weigh those when drawing up the sort of list these students made, or deciding whether some change is worth making. Like, for obviously racist stuff the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but some of the things on that list are pretty damn innocuous. And I know it’s just a list drawn up by students, but we’ve seen changes to equally innocuous things pushed in the real world.
This too. I think many progressives can’t imagine why anyone would object to PC changes unless they were racist, so their reply is “they just want to be able to say the n-word!” But it’s actually quite hard to keep up with all the changes, and many people just dislike change in general, most especially when imposed by an outside authority for reasons they don’t understand.
I’ve grown to the opinion, and I could be quite wrong, that much like there’s an East Coast bias in news and sports, there’s an East Coast bias (and somewhat Midwest as well) when it comes to PC and also how racial issues are covered. Obviously the Southwest and Mountain West and West have their pockets of what some might describe as extreme PC, but a lot of what seems to get, say, the WaPo or NYT going doesn’t really exist here. In a state that’s majority minority but only three percent black, the constant black/white stuff coming from like the WaPo has no resonance. Not that there aren’t our own issues with race relations, policing, and the like, but it’s a different set of interactions.
I feel like I see it at work. We’re a small part in the desert of a bigger company where all the bosses are in the DC area. Their response to criticisms of a lack of diversity (and I’d argue we’re pretty diverse at our site, though it would be good to hire more women) was to start some small scholarship fund. As soon as the Juneteenth law passed, they’re sending a bunch of emails regarding it and suddenly adding a holiday to a schedule that has been stingy for years. (No MLK, Presidents, Columbus, or Veterans Days, mostly). Frankly, I think they’re virtue signaling.
So you have this opinion from some that “I care about this and know about this, so of course everyone else should as well”. This, I think, is really where the backlash comes from. It’s not people wanting to be overtly racist and it’s not people wanting to be impolite. It’s people who are dealing with their own lives, their own experiences, and when activists begin treadmilling acceptable terms and telling them what they should be concerned with and the acceptable orthodoxy is, of course there’s pushback. Even from people who are generally on the activists’ side.
From my perspective, it’s a sort of “greatest trick the devil ever pulled” situation, where conservatives have succeeded in getting liberals to engage in battles where “PC” and “not racist” are synonymous. As long as they can keep the front somewhere around whether or not you’re “allowed” to say “picnic” or Chinese words that sound like slurs, they will never lose on the level of the actual injustices that are sometimes, but sometimes not, connected in any way to the euphemism treadmill arguments. They’ve engineered a situation where everyone is wrong: anti-woke people because they’re not actually doing anything to fix anything, and woke people because they’re fighting over things that will do little if anything to fix anything. Everybody’s righteously indignant, conservatives because they’re combatting the communist thought police, and liberals because they’re killing fascists, so the fight can just go on forever with no one making any ground because it’s all nonsense. And the more liberals are invested in that fight as an actual political thesis, the less they’re invested in a political thesis about fixing the injustice, because that’s politics.
Meanwhile, the injustice exists. Non-white people get treated like absolute shit all over the place, and these battles have no material impact on that. If I am a person of color who walks into a store and gets treated like a criminal, I don’t really care whether the person being racist to me is doing so because they had the conscious thought that I’m less than them because of my race, or whether it’s because of a complex chain of cause and effect involving their upbringing, my upbringing, and the ideas they were and weren’t exposed to. I just want to not be treated like shit. A bunch of people screaming about who is allowed to say what word is never going to change anything in my life, and it matters zero to me how much empathy is mutually extended by all parties to all other parties during those “conversations.” Take all the time you need learning the right words to say, just in the meantime stop being racist. The racism isn’t living in the words. And it is just not accurate to say that there aren’t people all over the place being racist all the time, whether they say the bad words or not.
I think this is all very much in line with what virtue signaling is, too. There are lots of battles that it is way more gratifying to be seen to be fighting than it is to actually fight them.
The kind of racism I know is so virulent that it frequently comes up apropos of nothing. Like, oh, I have a spare minute let’s hate on black people. The same way my husband’s brain defaults to X-men when he’s bored, I think some racists are like this.
And yes I can take a moment of self - reflection and recognize that probably because of my culture of origin, it’s difficult for me to think in a nuanced way about people who hold racist beliefs.
However, systemic injustice is a problem everywhere in the US. I used to work in Philadelphia in the 3rd poorest congressional district in the nation. The population there was largely Puerto Rican. The conditions in which people lived, in which children had to go to school, were appalling. These subtle prejudices that people hold, that “those people” are to blame for their own inability to succeed, are the very beliefs that perpetuate inequality. So what may seem on its face as “not urgent” is in fact killing people.
PTSD has been studied most in soldiers. But in research conducted in Philadelphia, Drexel doctors John Rich and Theodore Corbin have found PTSD rates of more than 70 percent among young men who survive being shot or stabbed. Steven Berkowitz, of Penn’s psychiatry department, citing the research conducted so far, suggests the PTSD rate among the urban poor at large could be as high as 40 percent.
“We’re talking about huge portions of entire communities that are impaired in terms of their basic functioning,” says Rich, chair of Drexel’s Department of Health Management and Policy. “These people are suffering and require medical attention, or the cycle will continue.”
You are right of course. Telling people they can’t say something doesn’t make them relinquish the beliefs that led them to say the thing. The only thing that really combats personal prejudice is exposure to people who are different than you are. Since a lot of people will never have that exposure directly, ISTM that’s all the more reason to push for more diverse representation in the media. One theory for the dramatic shift in popular opinion on gay rights over a very short period of time was the explosion of LGBTQ representation in the media. It helped to normalize what some people found unfathomable.
Frankly I think it’s easier for progressives to churn out these little lists than work to change US policy or do anything substantive. This is somewhat understandable because it’s very hard to move the needle politically. Making a social media post, though probably worthless, is at least something concrete. It’s extremely difficult to stay the course for these big picture injustices when there’s no clear path to victory.
I almost quit my job when the whole Kavanaugh thing went down because it seemed to me that twenty years of effort had resulted in absolutely zero progress. That’s emotional reasoning, not fact - based, but those are the kinds of personal challenges you have to deal with when you try to tackle an enormous social problem. I think for a long time I tried to compensate for my feeling of powerlessness by being an internet crusader. I also think a lot of this activism is driven by untreated trauma - mine certainly was - and part of it for me was learning to disconnect others’ stories from my own. Changing people’s minds used to feel like a matter of personal survival to me, until I dealt with all the personal shit holding me back professionally. But that’s a lot of work and I don’t think many people are willing to do it.
But it’s a continuum, not a black/white yes/no situation. Someone can be a virulent racist, and the next guy could be someone with a sheltered (in the sense that they weren’t exposed to other cultures) upbringing that lacks basic self-awareness. But don’t get a pass on decency just because you’re able to point to someone less decent than you. It’s possible to be a little bit racist. That’s not as bad as being a lot racist, but you can still be racist even if there are people that are way more racist than you.
Very few of these “PC gone Wild” offenses are committed by people in public office or public figures with wide popular support. Right-wing media is in the business of mining local news outlets for cases of stupidly PC individuals, frequently students or minor facility at small, insignificant schools, misrepresenting the controversy and blowing it out of proportion.
And, yes, liberals often fall into the trap of buying into the conservative spin placed on the controversy and weighing in. I wish they’d wise up.
A few examples of the misrepresentation.
The Utah schoolgirl who was shamed for cultural appropriation for wearing a Chinese style dress to prom. In actuality, someone took offense to the pose she struck while wearing the dress. The person that took offense was not a stranger to her, it was a fellow classmate who probably had a social history with the girl and her cohort of friends.
Or there’s the time they claimed a retailer pulled Asian bone broth from their product offerings because bone broth was cultural appropriation.
This had nothing to do with the product being bone broth, it had to do with the names the product carried, which were based on racist humor, making fun of the fact that foreign words often sound like English sexual slang.
Or the Oh No, Conde Naste fired the editor of Teen Vogue because she tweeted something mean about Asians a few years ago.
Actually, I don’t believe the higher-ups at Conde Naste ever clarified why her offer was pulled( and she never complained)….but it was probably more because Conde Naste and Anna Wintour were clueless as to the culture of their niche online media outlet with less than 20 employees, and it didn’t look good for a highly progressive magazine that prided itself on hard hitting White House reporting to have an editor that was literally in bed with the White House press shop and took pains to conceal the relationship.
There are probably 100 million or so liberals in the US, and in any group that large there are going to be dumbass people doing dumbass things. Unless these PC offenses are committed or cheered on by elected officials or popular public figures they don’t deserve oxygen, and I do wish people would at least look a little deeper instead of jumping in to defend a misrepresented situation.
Wow. I didn’t know people like that existed. I’ve heard eg people ranting about immigrants get racist, but not just bringing it up out of nowhere.
Now that is an urgent problem. But those people aren’t going to helped by changing some bit of language or white people examining their biases, but only by concrete action. And beyond the issue of political will, it seems to me that no one really knows how to break the vicious cycle of violence and trauma. There are small scale programs attempting to help, like in the article, and that’s all.
This is definitely true. But it also fuels the perception on the other side that it’s about looking like you’re helping rather than actually helping, ie virtue signalling.
It is my view that well-meaning liberals are doing the exact wrong thing in response to trauma. While it makes sense to take collective action against the systems that hurt us, on an individual level, healing requires an honest assessment of what we’re doing internally to make ourselves feel worse, and confronting external triggers to prove to ourselves that however unsafe we may feel, we are in fact safe. You have to become adept at testing faulty assumptions and combating cognitive distortions.
Avoiding trigger warnings and the like is therapeutically contraindicated. Blaming the trigger for how we feel rather than the individual who inflicted the trauma is unhelpful. If someone is so traumatized by exposure to gun violence that they can’t hear the phrase, “killing it!” without reliving their ordeal, they have a responsibility, yes, I said responsibility to deal with their own shit so that they can exist in the real world where people use violent euphemisms. Sanitizing their environment will not help them. I think we are creating a culture of people who are not psychologically resilient. Ironically I think some of these people speaking out against injustice are some of the least empowered. We need a new blueprint.
I will say that, for better or for worse, the behavior of virtual signalers and similar people works well to give me easy notice of people to avoid. They tend to be exhausting to deal with, especially online, and the beauty is that I can stop dealing with them. They’re especially bad when everything has to tie back into their cause or they’re repeating known falsehoods like the truth.
In a few situations it would be reasonable to avoid that phrasing, but it’d be more situational, like if you were a teacher and knew your student had recently lost a parent to stabbing (teachers are usually told about events like that), then maybe avoid that phrase when they first come back to school. Don’t ban it, but avoid it. Be aware that, if the student goes quiet after hearing that phrase, it might be due to recent events rather than that they’re not paying attention.
Six months later (or probably a lot earlier), everyone needs to stop walking on eggshells, and it’d probably be a relief for the kid to be treated like a normal person.
I don’t think we’re actually creating a culture in which people are not psychologically resilient, though. What we might be doing is creating a culture where resilience is assumed to be unusual, or even abnormal. That, I do find extremely problematic.
I don’t know if either you or @Spice_Weasel have read this:
It makes some similar points about trigger warnings and resiliency, and compares the culture around them on university campuses to cognitive distortions derived from CBT.
I don’t see how we escape the conclusion that we’re doing that, at least from what I’ve experienced. I have encountered dozens–maybe a hundred?–of people in academia in the last couple years who have used words like “violence,” “rape,” “assault” and “attack,” with the intention of connoting their literal meaning, to describe the expression of ideas that people didn’t like. To be clear, I don’t mean truly odious ideas like Holocaust denial or hate speech, where at least the figurative meaning is clearly warranted. I mean, for example, the use of idioms that the listener didn’t understand, or corrections of pronunciation, or statements that a person could “use whatever pronoun you like for me, ha ha ha.” Saying “early bird,” or saying “I almost got arrested,” or referring to “women’s rights.” In other words, maybe some stuff that it would be OK in the right context to describe as a micro-aggression, but also stuff that is absolutely OK to describe as nothing, but which in fact was described using the most extreme language available to describe things a person can do to another person. (These are realish examples, although I’m fudging the details so as not to be immediately referring to real cases).
That isn’t to say that it’s like the official position of any university that those things are fireable offenses, or anything, or that it’s the median position of academics. And it’s very anecdotal, certainly. But in the elite academic circles with which I’m familiar, this kind of language, and the attitude it reflects, is not only not discouraged, it’s increasingly welcomed. The trend is clearly toward more people more frequently claiming more severe harm from less severe conduct. I’ve seen faculty report themselves and encourage students to report them, under circumstances where the students themselves didn’t perceive a major offense. The most notable thing to me, as a person with some experience with people who have lived through significant trauma, is that the people making these claims don’t seem to be doing it cynically. They present as people who have been affected in the way that they describe.
Just, I hate to say it, but… unreasonably so. There’s something going on there. Anecdotally.
I’m not sure I follow the distinction. I think in terms of evidence we know that young people are more psychologically fragile than they have been historically, with higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal behavior. Social media is frequently blamed, but parenting may also be a factor. My husband’s expertise is in the treatment of OCD and anxiety-related disorders in children. A huge and ongoing issue is the parents’ tendency to respond to children’s anxiety by coddling it. By which I mean, “Susie is distraught and only calms down when she can sleep with us, so she sleeps with us more and more nights, but her anxiety keeps getting worse, oh and now she needs a drink of warm milk before bed, and also now soothing music… You can’t possibly expect me to allow my child to feel distress, can you?” From a purely evidence - based standpoint, coddling anxiety is the absolute worst thing you can do. It teaches children that there are certain unpleasant feelings that should be avoided at all costs, and it’s reasonable to expect people to accommodate you so that you don’t have to feel those feelings. So anxious, coddled kids become anxious, coddled college students. It’s probably not the only factor, but it is a factor.
Yeah, I think I got in trouble for sharing that one on Facebook. My views on this subject are not popular among my fellow progressives. I guess if people don’t want to take responsibility for their own emotional lives, I can’t stop them. But it’s a lot of needless suffering.
Just to be clear, “suck it up, kid” isn’t an appropriate response either. It might look something like, “I’m so sorry you are feeling so much anxiety. What is this feeling like for you? Where do you feel it in your body? It’s hard to feel anxious, but we all feel that way sometimes. We have the tools to get through it. We can take deep breaths (or whatever) and remind ourselves that even though it feels like we’re in danger, we’re actually safe. Okay, why don’t you go lie down for 15 minutes? After 15 minutes you can come sleep with me if you still want to. If you start to feel anxious, remember to breathe and focus on your body.”
IDK how this would really go, I’m just spit balling. But the point is you have to let kids know they are safe, the feeling is not going to hurt them and you will be there to help them through it. But anxiety cannot run the show.
While this might belong more in the latest PC thread, I can’t help but feel like people are taking one single part of themselves and making it their whole identity. Not that there isn’t some power in that and if it’s part of your dealing with your own emotional life, it’s probably a good thing as long as you use it to help heal. But I feel like there’s a trend towards using some part of an identity to gain power or even do something as trivial as scoring points on the internet. Sort of like they make themselves completely one-dimensional and unable to deal with life in any other lens.
I’m trying to figure out how to put this better and I simply can’t.
I would strongly disagree with the idea South Park is a right-wing skewed series. They’re extremely pro-weed (“Tegridy!”), anti Chinese interference in things, and from my perspective tend to take a centre-Libertarian viewpoint.
The thing is, it’s not pure bullshit. The people doing the latter are overreacting and not what normal people mean when they talk about PC culture getting out of control. Normal people mean stuff like “People losing their jobs for saying ‘I don’t support gay marriage’ although I have no problem with people being gay” or “Health centres facing boycott from angry activists for saying someone with a hairy body and a penis can’t use the women’s changing rooms” and stuff like that.
There’s also the “anti-colonialism” backlash mostly being driven by privileged white kids in countries that only exist at all because of colonialism. If you want to live a “Traditional” lifestyle exactly how whoever the native people of your country are did prior to European settlement, no-one’s stopping you (for the most part). Of course, that would mean giving up your iphone, internet, car/public transport and modern medicine…
Exactly. A lot of this stuff simply wasn’t an issue a couple of years ago, and now it’s bigoted to say “I don’t think it’s appropriate for someone most reasonable people would consider to be a man to compete in the women’s category events at the Olympics”.
This is pretty much my feelings on the matter, but instead of “imposed by an outside authority for reasons I don’t understand”, it’s “imposed by an outside authority I don’t agree with, without discussion or involvement on my part, and with the threat of social ostracisation or worse attached for not agreeing”
Saying it skews right-wing does not mean that everything is 100% the right-wing position (indeed, the implication is the exact opposite; “skewed” implies that there is some weight on both sides, just not equal weight).
But these are weird examples you picked. “Anti-China interference” is something pretty much universal across the American political spectrum, as there always needs to be an antagonist, and right now that’s China (taking the #1 spot from Russia). But if we had to say which side engages in more anti-China rhetoric, it’s the right.
And, as you say, pro-weed is more a libertarian position than left or right.
I dispute that. That’s exactly what most people think of WRT PC culture: absolute myths.
And we have two threads now where I have asked for examples of the supposed truth behind all this, and got nothing. Just repeated exhortations to take it seriously.
Cites for either of these happening?
If the latter did actually happen though, I think I would be among those boycotting, because it would be a silly notice about an imagined problem. And a boycott is someone freely choosing not to purchase a product or service…you have issues with this kind of freedom?