There’s a working question in the Differences chapter that deals with political correctness. It seems to me that in a lot of cases political correctness has the potential to hide prejudice. You can be when we hear things like ‘African-American,’ ‘Homosexual,’ ‘Mentally-handicapped person,’ ‘Native-American,’ and so on, you get the sense that people are saying something different inside their heads, or they use different words around their friends and stuff. There’s a fundamental dishonesty in it. And in most cases, yeah, it’s important to be polite and go to certain extents not to offend people. But there’s got to be something important about just talking to straight with people. We all talk differently, and i’d prefer someone to use the words with me that they’d regularly use.
A couple of chapters ago our mentioned the marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek in its discussion of Ideology. There’s this youtube video linked below where he riffs on the dangers of politcal correctness. His basic argument is this: political correctness is a more subtle and dangerous mode of control—of Totalitarianism. He uses the analogy of employer and employee relationship. If the employer, the boss, is friendly and buddy-buddy with his employee, the employee will find it more difficult to rebel against whatever injustice he feels. Whereas if its the more classic form of shouting just shouting down brutal orders, the employee will find much more justification in rebelling, going on strike and so on. There is a distance, or wall that political correctness creates between us.
I agree that political correctness has the potential to hide prejudice, and that it creates a distance between us. As someone who has to identify as “African-American” when filling out forms, I would personally rather be called “black.” Or simply an American, for that matter. I wasn’t born in Africa, so why can I not be simply an “American”? Also, as someone who is gay, being called a homosexual feels weird, and honestly I’d rather not have to identify with any sort of word at all when it comes to my sexual preference. I know that the categories that are present in our society allow for easy identification, but I hope to one day live in a world where labels don’t feel restrictive.
I completely agree with what you’re saying. Whenever I watch the news and a politically correct term is used, it always seems forced. I can’t imagine anyone referring to themselves 100% of the time as the politically correct label, or even more, getting angry if the term isn’t used. I think that political correctness definitely creates a wall between us. Going the extra length to classify an individual out of fear of retaliation from their entire group almost creates an “us versus them” mentality. So in a way, racism, sexism, etc., is still perpetuated this way, only through the lens of being polite.
That’s a fascinating video–one that calls for the use of “friendly”–and even racist–“obscenities” over political correctness as a form of “self-discipline” that obscures actual (and often racist) contexts, and that makes it more difficult to identify those contexts. He also, though, says that political correctness is better than open racism. I’m not quite sure what to do with this. In a way, Zizek’s examples depend upon a sense of bonding over the voicing of racist ideas in a non-committal way. When he approaches two black authors and jokes about not being able to tell them apart because they both look alike, he is voicing a racist idea he doesn’t himself hold. He’s gesturing towards racism as a way to create a sense of shared community. He is playing fast and loose with cultural designations as a way to show a shared sense of fluency in navigating them. He thinks that by voicing these racist ideas, he is both articulating that they exist–that there is this barrier–and that they should not be empowered, that they are absurd. This is, of course, risky. Just the other day in class, I used the word “unnatural” in relation to same-sex marriage to voice the way that critics of same-sex marriage would classify such a union. By voicing that phrase, which was contrary to my own thinking on the subject, I was voicing a discriminatory idea as a way to deflate it, to call attention to its absurdity, to give it less power.
I guess the real danger is that politically correct language superficially obscures the kinds of racism / sexism / ageism, etc that is active on deeper levels. I think on a personal level, this self-correction is crucial. It’s a good thing that those emerging from contexts that enabled a certain racist / sexist language self-correct. It means that one is subject to others in all their diversity, that one’s “context” doesn’t reign supreme. But I agree that it can be a bad thing when such language doesn’t just offer a self correction, but rather a suggests a deeper erasure of problems we face when it comes to building a just and equitable environment. So complex!