Why are some people so resistant to "political correctness"?

In My Humble Opinion
141

I agree with the other posters that it is merely a form of bullying to comply with the latest demands of the elites.

For example, is there any real linguistic difference between “colored person” and “person of color”? Although I know of nobody under age 60 who would use the term colored person, they almost universally use that term instead of the far more offensive term they learned growing up. In other words, to them, it is a polite term.

So, we went from negro to colored to black to Afro-American to African American, and at some point people react and deny that someone else gets to decree what words and terms are used. And who are these people anyways? I have never met a black person who disliked the term black. We say “African American” in polite or formal speech because someone (who?) decided that was the proper form.

The backlash against political correctness says, basically, “Fuck these people.” These type of people are the ones in today’s society that keeps racial animus alive by continuing to change the rules so that they remain relevant.

I mean, you cannot even mention someone’s race anymore, even if it is relevant. If someone asks me who Jim is, and I scan the room for him and see Jim, a 6’4" black guy, talking to a 5’9" white guy, I cannot politely point to him and say that he is the black guy standing over there. I have to say that he is the tall guy, or the guy on the left. That is simply absurd. Why do I have to do that? Because they (who?) decided that any mention of race is verboten unless I am apologizing for the actions of my ancestors.

It goes even further when words like crippled, retarded, blind, deaf, dumb, and handicapped are shunned out of conversation. When I was in college in the early 1990s, a social justice worker (whatever in the hell that is) told our class to never use the word “handicapped” but to use the word “disabled.”

She said that just because someone has a disability does not mean that they are handicapped.

??? What a load of shit that was. I could reword it and it is still meaningless:

Just because someone has a handicap does not mean that they are disabled.

It is pure shit, just so that these people do not have to get real jobs and stop trying to control the language.

Basically that is the backlash against political correctness: quit being so offended simply because someone (who?) tells you to be offended.

142

UltraVires, right on!

OP, your thoughts now?

143

+1

144

If you can’t even say who made these supposed decrees, why do you think they exist? Nobody gave me these directives; where did you get them?

145

Most things don’t have a Decree-er-in-Chief. Do you think some Christians get upset over the Christmas issue because someone issued specific orders to get upset?

146

Excellent observation by UltraVires.

The “Happy Holidays” thing has struck me, as a foreign observer, as being particularly bizarre. I know the Jewish community in the US is well-established and larger than here in Australia, so I understand the desire to not want to exclude them from season’s greetings, but I thought Kwanzaa was made up more or less out of whole cloth in the 1960s?

Even without that, I really don’t understand why someone who isn’t celebrating Christmas would be offended by being wished “Merry Christmas” - it’s a great time of the year where nearly everyone is on holiday and the sentiment is the same where it’s Christmas, Hannukah, or Kwanzaa.

147

As I think several people here have mentioned, “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” have been in use for far longer than there have been concerns about the War On Christmas. No one was using them for reasons of political correctness. It was just anothe way to celebrate, wait for it, the holiday season, which started around Thanksgiving for us Yanks, and continued until at least New Years. It encompassed the entire season and several holidays. I have never understood the outrage over using terms other than “Merry Christmas”. It seems to me that some people (on both sides) just like to get upset.

148

In the first instances, what did they actually say to you? In the retail instances, also, how did your saying Merry Christmas to the employees affect what they said to you? But I am sorry you were looked at askance. I hope you find the help you need to recover from that trauma. Do you have a safe space you can retreat to?

149

Both employees looked around furtively and told me in a somewhat apologetic tone and under their breath that they weren’t supposed to say Merry Christmas to anyone and they were supposed to say Happy Holidays instead. The ones who looked at me askance were either checkers working check stands or random high school/college age kids that for one reason or another I had occasion to say Merry Christmas to.

You must have me confused with a modern day college student. :wink:

Having said that, you’re completely missing the point. The point is that I have had personal experience with the fact that some retail businesses are now prohibiting their employees from saying Merry Christmas to customers, and that politically correct indoctrination (most likely drummed into their heads in school) is having the effect on certain young people that saying Merry Christmas is some sort of affront or social faux-pas that properly sensitive people don’t say.

150

Of course, there’s also the non-religious.

151

I’m not religious and I infinitely prefer “Merry Christmas” to any of the alternatives.

152

Who are these “elites”? People who actually give a crap about not offending others?

“Black” is an appropriate term. I tend to think it’s up to the group to decide what they want to be called. Why is that such an affront to you?

“these people”?

Perhaps you would be more comfortable going back to the “n” word.

Can’t you?

Because when we were in college, those terms were often used as insults (along with fag, homo, gay wad and other terms no longer considered PC).

Also, blind and deaf are ok to use.

[/quote]

She said that just because someone has a disability does not mean that they are handicapped.

??? What a load of shit that was. I could reword it and it is still meaningless:

Just because someone has a handicap does not mean that they are disabled.

It is pure shit, just so that these people do not have to get real jobs and stop trying to control the language.

Basically that is the backlash against political correctness: quit being so offended simply because someone (who?) tells you to be offended.
[/QUOTE]

This statement is just retarded.:rolleyes:

We have laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act so that “these people” have more opportunity to get “real jobs”. Granted, you aren’t going to find a lot of blind truck drivers or mentally disabled lawyers (insert joke here).
But again, I feel that people who are that much “anti-PC” are that way because of some innate sense that “those people” are inherently inferior and that they shouldn’t have to pretend otherwise with fancy double-talk language.

153

Me too, and I don’t personally know a non Christian person who would object to ‘Merry Christmas’. In fact, when asked they’ve told me that they are baffled that anyone would think they would be offended.

154

It’s pretty clear in context that the other poster was referring to politically correct ‘sjws’ specifically as ‘those people’, not handicapped people or other disadvantaged groups, despite your transparent and dishonest attempt to twist their words.

I have no idea whether the other poster finds you inferior. That’s up to them to say.

On topic: I don’t have any particular problem with ‘PC’, just with hypocrisy and bigotry masked as ‘PC’

155

Well that’s not even PC, it’s just idiotic human resource management, resulting in cowed employees, and I’d think twice about a business that treats their line staff like that. My prescription if I were the shopkeeper: “If you don’t know better and you speak first, be as generic as possible; but if you know otherwise or the customer speaks first and says Merry Christmas, by all means reply in kind. Whatever the case, act cheerful and positive. If some putz gets upset that you said or did not say either of them, just get them through the checkout and out the door and take a break.”

156

I respectfully disagree. I believe a lot of people are strongly anti-PC not because they want to go around using racial epithets, but because they despise people telling them what to do and how to think.

For example, I wouldn’t describe a black person as a “nigger” because the word is obviously offensive - and here’s the critical part - it has been since long before I was born. The people to whom the word was traditionally applied are, to my understanding, united in agreeing the word is offensive - as is pretty much everyone else.

But I cannot possibly fathom how “black” could be construed as offensive, or how “person of colour” could be reasonably seen as preferred nomenclature when “coloured” is (from what I gather) considered quaint at best (when coming from someone one’s grandparents’ age) or perhaps also offensive.

Basically, the ground rules change all the time (it seems), without any rhyme or reason - but the consequences of failure to keep up with them are well out of proportion to the “offence” - which, as a member of another ethnic/cultural/sexual orientation group, I’m never allowed to have, it seems, but that’s besides the point in this response.

I don’t want to (and don’t) use racial epithets to describe people, because it’s a shitty thing to do. But I also despise the idea that the penalty for having the “wrong” opinion on some issues could be the loss of one’s livelihood. While some issues (such as using words like “nigger” or “gook” to describe members of certain ethnic groups) are so clearly and universally agreed as being beyond the pail, there’s also a lot of areas where the ground rules seem to have arbitrarily shifted and there’s not necessarily consensus on what and isn’t an Approved Opinion - take the recent thread of the offensiveness of the term “Cisgender” as an example.

Most of people decrying the smothering effect of PC aren’t doing it because they secretly want to use all the naughty hurtful words to people of different skin colours - they’re decrying it because political correctness has moved from “don’t be a racist fuckwit” territory into a censorship tool to silence opinions unpalatable to the progressive side of the social/political spectrum.

So, like I was saying before - I think a lot of the backlash against modern political correctness ties into the “people now being lambasted and/or villified for not being progressive enough” aspect of things. In other words, it’s not merely enough to to agree people of other ethnicities or sexualities or genders or whatever are people too and deserve the same rights as everyone else; it almost seems like a lot of modern social discourse has turned into some awful game of I Am More Tolerant Than You, with the penalties for Insufficient More Tolerance being potential pillorying, ostracisation or worse.

It doesn’t help anyone and it creates a situation which alienates a lot of people who would otherwise be on board with most of the “don’t be a tool” aspect of things.

157

Not quite. The “not very religious” family had a simple nativity scene in front with a sign that said “Peace on Earth”

158

I would be curious as to your (and the OP’s) thoughts on the examples from my earlier post upthread, because when I think of PC I think of things such as (sorry no cites):

  1. a Carleton University (in Ottawa, Canada) administrator, in order to avoid controversy, had the male/female signs (the pictograms with stick figures in skirts (or not)) on washroom doors replaced by the ones that look like Volvo trademarks. A female student complained that it was sexist.

  2. maybe this was just a Canadian thing, but does anyone remember the big “issue” about how man-hole covers had to be called “maintenance holes”? That didn’t seem to last too long.

  3. how about “animal companions” instead of “pets”. I wouldn’t want to offend the cats would I?

  4. an issue (there were a few magazine articles about this, back in the day) about “waiter” and “waitress”. Apparently even “waitron” was a suggested alternative - maybe in Star Trek - really?

  5. in the late '80s/early '90s there was, for a while, an issue about how we shouldn’t call children “kids”

  6. how about the “holidays” instead of Christmas? Btw “Christmas” isn’t exclusive - I’m secular but the period of time towards the end of December is Christmas. Calling it something else changes nothing.
    Note: maybe we should ban “holiday” since it’s a contraction of “holy day”
    maybe we should ban “goodbye” since it’s a contraction of “god be with ye”

  7. there was also a issue about some female university students who wanted their Bachelors degrees to be called something else - like, a Maiden of Arts (or science or whatever).

  8. Basically, free yoga classes offered at the University of Ottawa have been scrapped because of complaints by some students and volunteers about “cultural appropriation”.

According to the instructor:

“I guess it was this cultural appropriation issue because yoga originally comes from India,” she said on Sunday. "I told them, ‘Why don’t we just change the name of the course?’ It’s simple enough, just call it mindful stretching.… We’re not going through the finer points of scripture. We’re talking about basic physical awareness and how to stretch so that you feel good.

“That went back and forth… The higher-ups at the student federation got involved, finally we got an email routed through the student federation basically saying they couldn’t get a French name and nobody wants to do it, so we’re going to cancel it for now.”

So someone volunteers to teach a free course, and this is the outcome, thanks to PC.

When I think of PC I think of the above examples and similar.

159

Well, of course it’s . . . oh, wait, you said “Volvo,” not . . . Never mind. :o

160

Well those would be interesting pictograms:cool: