At the recent special program on Tuesday, September 15, Rosalind Wiseman responded to a question about political correctness (PC) by saying we need to focus on the issues themselves, not the PC culture that determines how we talk about them. For the most part, I agree, but I am going to break this rule for moment: let’s talk about political correctness.
Critics of political correctness believe PC culture to be a pressuring cultural force that aims to inhibit free speech and police free thought. But political correctness is, to put it simply, treating other people with the the dignity they deserve. It’s about being aware of other people’s experiences, respecting those experiences by using tolerant and understanding language, and creating a society that is welcoming to those that have often been at its fringes. In short, political correctness is all about being sensitive.
To many people, sensitivity is a problem that plaguing the new liberal generation. Certain people believe that the “oversensitivity” of the far left is dangerous and unreasonable because it relies on emotional reasoning, not logical deduction. These people argue that political correctness, which supposedly protects and defends this oversensitivity, is making debate harder and thus making society more conformist. Attempting to remain politically correct at all times certainly makes some debates harder to have. Political correctness makes it hard to debate whether black people are lazy or whether women are qualified to be leaders. But you have to wonder, are such debates necessary in the first place? These “debates” do nothing but solidify harmful stereotypes about the merits of certain groups of people.
In countless articles and op-eds, writers have tried to undermine sensitivity by claiming it to be unnecessary. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” there is a claim that oversensitivity —and political correctness in the college environment — can be prevented if one focuses on avoiding “fortune-telling,” the prediction of negative outcomes or “negative filtering,” which is focusing on the negative. I don’t doubt that is the best tactic after an unpleasant first date or when contemplating a bad exam grade, but it is dangerous to imply that students asking for the empathy of their peers are making a big deal out of nothing. Their obstacles in the real world—because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.—are not the consequences of “fortune-telling” and “negative filtering.” They are the result of living in a society that has struggled with being honest about its history of oppression. It seems tactless to imply that if he practices, every young man of color can learn to ignore his habit of thinking about what might happen to him every time he passes a cop car or that if she just believes, a young woman can be paid an equal wage, even though there is documented evidence that this won’t happen. We cannot merely ignore our realities.
Yet, whenever someone endorses politically correct language, in an effort to protect their dignity, he or she would be accused of hindering free speech by enforcing PC culture. The consensus is that all opinions must be heard, regardless of whether you agree with them or not. But the people who defend the humiliating and degrading conversations that PC culture seeks to eliminate rarely have to deal with the consequences of such talk and thus do not understand that what is being said has real-life impacts on how certain people are seen, treated, and heard. To them, such talk is harmless, the simple voicing of one’s humble opinions. If someone is emotionally affected by what is said, he or she is being overly sensitive and must learn to think logically. Concerns about the language and ideas that are being presented aren’t “reasonable” because they are often the result of an emotional reaction.
But discrimination of any sort is an emotional experience and it requires emotional reasoning. Discrimination is not something to be abstractly discussed as if there is a possibility that it doesn’t exist. The people who can dare say that political correctness is the consequence of “oversensitivity” don’t realize how it feels to undergo an experience of discrimination. It becomes easier to dismiss the language of political correctness because it’s a little burdensome, regardless of the fact that political correctness is an attempt at fixing what’s broken, not fixing what isn’t necessary to fix. Political correctness is an attempt to correct reality, and the inability for many people to understand this sheds light on the troubling idea that it’s possible for progress to go “too far.”
I agree that PC culture sometimes seems to be overkill. It’s ridiculous to refuse to read The Great Gatsby or Uncle Tom’s Cabin because those works contain elements of misogyny and racism. If you are a person of color, a woman, or a GSRM [Gender, Sexual and Romantic Minorities] in this country, there is little you can do to escape those forces. People who criticize PC culture, especially PC culture in institutions of higher education, are right when they say we don’t have a choice in what we experience — there is no escaping the fact the world is oftentimes an ugly, unwelcoming place and no number of trigger warnings is going to help. But we do have a choice in how we want to talk about our experiences and how we can educate others on them. We are faced with a choice to condemn the types of ideas and language that only serve to harm us. Opponents of political correctness mistake this as something unsavory or even unnecessary. They think that political correctness is an inability to confront the things that we disagree with. Trust me, we are confronting those things. We confront them everyday when we wake up, turn on the news, or walk down the street. Our own tidily labeled terms like microaggressions and trigger warnings cannot blind us from the reality of our experiences. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, however, and we try by asking the people around us to exercise sensitivity when speaking on delicate issues, or in other words, to be politically correct.
