The Emperor’s Woke Clothes
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In order for this to make any sense, you'd have to break it down specific things. Most people are going to agree with something like "racial slurs are not ok". They're not going to consider it "politically correct" to not use racial slurs, they'd just consider it common decency.
Maybe the same person who doesn't think racial slurs are ok, thinks it's unreasonable for someone to get bent out of shape about being called the wrong gender pronoun. But someone who takes the pronoun issue seriously is going to consider that just common decency and is going to draw the line for "politically correct" somewhere else.
I think this is a result of an intense propaganda campaign on the right that has distorted the meaning of political correctness so that it can mean anything the reader dislikes.
> I think this is a result of an intense propaganda campaign on the right that has distorted the meaning of political correctness.
I haven't looked up the etymology, but I've always assumed the term has been pejorative/satirical/tongue-in-cheek since its inception. Think about it -- it implies there's a different form of "correctness" that isn't actually "correct", but merely "politically correct" -- i.e. correct only in the context of overly carefully worded political pandering. I can't imagine somebody unironically choosing to describe their own speech as "politically correct".
To your pronoun example, using the wrong pronoun would not be politically incorrect, just potentially rude and offensive.
I suppose some of white supremecy could fall into the overlap that is both factually and politically correct. But most of what they say falls outside of the factual domain entirely (even if it is motivated by wrong facts) so the label of pollitically (in)correct is not relevent.
I feel you. I still cringe inwardly when someone says "begs the question" and they're not talking about a circular argument, but at some point you have to move on and accept that words can stray from their original definitions.
It doesn't help that I still have no idea what this new "political correctness" actually refers to; and I get a feeling people using the term are still trying to associate what they are referring to with the old sense of "political correctness". Eg, if you listen to people arguing against what they refer to as political correctness, they still almost always frame the argument as being for the ability to speak truth in some form.
Let's say Bob believes that sex is determined by your genitals at birth and nothing else. If someone wished to be called by a pronoun that doesn't match that, Bob would view this as being "wrong" compared to objective reality as he understands it. So he might go along with something to be "politically correct" although he considers it factually wrong. So Bob is being prevented from espousing the view that he believes to be the truth.
I can see how someone with a naive view of gramatical gender would disagree. (Actually, the fact that transgender people so consistantly change pronouns is somewhat problamatic to the prevailing linguistic thinking. I have never seen a fully satisfying account of why this happens. The best I have seen is that it is a sort of meta-linguistic social signal that the speaker accepts the transition, which does seem to fit nicely with calling it a form of political correctness).
I still see a difference in usage where the modern usage implies offensiveness; whereas the older usage implied a disagreement in policy. Eg, saying gender is determinex at birth could be PC in the classical sense because of, say, a policy allowing people to change the indication on their license, or psrticipate in other-gender's activities. Unless you want to claim that the taboo of mispronouning people is to support this type of policy (which it does do), then it wouldn't really fit. Although it is a very reasonable bit of sementic drift to include this in the classical meaning.
> correct gender pronoun
I don't think your average centrist knows what that it
I think you're illustrating exactly the point that was aimed for – everyone defines these vague concepts relative to their own perception. Even what is "center" is probably bound to vary wildly depending on ones own perspective.
What's also does vary is people's definition of the line segment, both directionally (what do liberal and conservative actually mean?), and where it starts and ends.
When I define the start and end, I'm typically not talking about centrism in SF, or globally. I'm talking about centrism in the USA. I realize not everyone here is American, but that may provide context for my statement.
This means that they are asking if it’s an issue that is negatively affecting the world.
If you think pronouns are an issue then you will not think political correctness is a problem even if your definition of it was more extreme than others because as far as you are concerned, few people are being politically correct.
If this study had asked, "Is calling people Native American a problem in our society", somehow I doubt anyone would have said yes.
An example I'm more familiar with personally is spastic, my disabled sister went to a school literally called "The Spastic School" until the term was deemed un-PC in the 90's, then it became "The special School" and something else now. I'm aware of the change but a couple of decades on it's not uncommon to run into someone that doesn't realize spastic became a derogatory term, simply because it's not a situation the encounter very often.
The change seems to be even harder for words used everyday. In Australia (and probably the UK) Sheila is often considered a derogatory term for a woman, but many older men will use it the way we use chick/girl/women. It seems like the frequency of use creates a self-reinforcing pattern, you won't find many people under 50 using the word and the over 50's that do will keep using it until the die.
So aside from sensitivity, for many it's just resistance to change for various reasons.
How about we all just go with the assumption that others aren't jerks?
We can have rational discussions about what we like and don't like. If I use a pronoun that you feel doesn't fit you, it's most likely an honest mistake, even if it happens a few times. Likewise if I disagree with you on a social policy, it's very likely that I'm not bigoted toward whichever group you want to protect, I may think it's not something that government should be involved in or perhaps I haven't read the evidence you have and thus I don't think it's a problem that needs policy to fix.
If we all assume the best intentions in others, I think we'll all get along just fine.
Saying ACAB or kneeling before the American flag will cause offense in many let alone something more inflammatory like "screw the troops". One could regard all of the above as wrong but that is the whole point - so do the current for the mainstream political correctness. Despite it literally being related to the state and thus far more politically correct and power linked than even the most tedious pedant about terms for minorities.
"It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say."
seems to worry more than I do. I don't keep tabs on this ever-changing carousel of ethnic labels, but I do know what not to say, and that seems to have kept me out of trouble. Jew? Jewish? C'mon, is it really that common that a Jew is getting bent out of shape because you didn't use "Jewish"? Perhaps a vocal/powerful minority will hold the feet of other vocal/powerful people to the fire, but it's not like their minions infiltrate the common man. My Jewish neighborhood doesn't appear to care enough to say anything.
I've often wondered if those complaining aren't really saying, "Black? African-American? I'm always confused on which term to use when denigrating another ethnic group. For instance, in the following sentence, 'Blacks are always the ones...'." Maybe if you're polite, no one cares as long as you at least tried to use one or the other.
The "small tribe of devoted conservatives" is much, much larger than "progressive activists". Activists in general tend to be richer and better educated and since income corresponds with race, white. That's because if you're poor, you don't have the time or the money to become an activist.
This isn't really saying very much.
That said, the actual amount of racially homogeneity described in the study is:
Progressive Activists: - Eleven percent more likely to be white - 80% V. 69% – Seven percent more likely to be between ages 18 and 29 - 28% V. 21% – Twice as likely to have completed college - 59% V. 29%
Devoted Conservatives: - Nineteen percent more likely to be white - 88% V. 69% – Fourteen percent more likely to be older than 65 - 34% V. 20% - and much less likely to be born between 1985 and 2000 - 11% V. 27% – More likely to come from the South - 45% V. 38%
Link to study in question: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a227...
Regardless the study sorted people into groups and then the article attempts to draw conclusions from that sorting that doesn't necessarily follow.
The demographics of the "progressive activists" doesn't say anything about the makeup of people are likely to support policies that could be defined as politically correct--just the makeup of people who are likely to support all progressive policies.
The only thing you can get from the GP's quote is that white people tend to be overrepresented on both extremes of the political spectrum.
[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a227...
People who support behaviors that other people would label politically correct, wouldn't use that term themselves.
> The contemporary pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. This usage was popularized by a number of articles in The New York Times and other media throughout the 1990s,[12][13][14][15][16][17] and was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind,[7][9][18][19] and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[7][9][20][21] and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization and multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curricula.[7][8][20][22]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#1970s
Here's one concrete example: during one of my company's all hands meetings our head of HR and head of Diversity gave presentations about our diversity numbers and diversity hiring policies. One of the top voted audience questions was what the company says to people who point our diversity policies constitute lowering the bar for diverse candidates (I actually discussed the question with the person who ask it. He wanted to give HR the opportunity to say something along the lines of "we do have different hiring policies for diverse candidates, but we still ensure all offer recipients are qualified.") Our head of HR denied that we lower the bar, and furthermore said that this question is hurtful. This is an understatement, she basically publicly shamed the asked of the question. The thing is, our company does lower the bar. We allow diverse candidates from "non traditional" backgrounds (coding boot camp, and new grads from non-tech related majors) to apply while non-diverse candidates from such backgrounds are automatically rejected if they don't have a referral. In our phone screen, non-diverse candidates get one chance to pass, while diverse candidates get a second if they don't pass on their first try. I think we don't intentionally hire any unqualified applicants, but to say we don't lower the bar is objectively false. We do indeed set explicitly more permissive hiring policies for diverse candidates. I wanted to ask what HR means when they deny lowering the bar given that we have policies explicitly to that effect. But it was clear that the company had constructed a view of politeness the in which pointing this out was unacceptable - I'm taking unacceptable to the same degree as calling a female co-worker a "bitch". So the result was that our head of HR was allowed to lie with impunity due to a politicized construction of social norms.
That is what I would call "political correctness". I agree that it's a subjective and murkey boundary, but I would draw the line where a group is constructing a view of social norms that has the effect of constraining valid political discourse. Of course this effectively passes the buck to the other question of "what is valid political discourse?" but I think at least 80% of people would agree that affirmative action is valid political discourse. Let alone pointing out when lies about the company's policies are being promulgated by staff.
When "politically correct" is used as an attack on someone else's words, it nearly always means "being polite to a person or group the attacker dislikes".
When "politically correct" is used by a small number of academic theorists to describe the conscious substitution of vocabulary in order to conform to a particular subculture, it means... what I just said.
There are a reasonably large number of people who think that the second definition describes every situation actually covered by the first.
Is it an "attack" on immigrants to approve of Republicans' immigration policy?
Is it an "attack" on women to say that a 20-25% representation of women in tech is an acceptable figure?
There are many places (the company at which I work, for one) where such statements genuinely are seen as attacks.
While it's true that abject denigration and truly extreme political views (I'm talking actual white nationalism, or nationalist socialism here not what is usually referred to by flippant usages of the word "Nazi") deserve to be socially rejected. In that sense political correctness is good. However, I think a substantial amount of what we PC advocates try to pass off as basic respect is constraining valid ideas. And that has the consequence of a handful of people thinking their views are the majority when they really aren't.
If person A describes person B as homosexual" or "African American" instead of "gay" or "black" instead of in order to not offend person C who is straight and white is that an example of being polite or political correctness?
I would say the latter.
Anyway I only gave the book 3 stars, but an example is Subway removing pork from stores after strong demand from a religious group.
Subway didn't actually do that though. Some franchises in India have lamb and chicken instead of pork and beef, and some have no meat options at all. 185 franchises in Muslim neighborhoods in the UK (out of over 1500) serve only halal meat, which means by definition they don't serve pork.
Those were just business decisions based on local preferences. You can't get pork at a Subway in a 90% Muslim neighborhood because there isn't a demand for it, not because people forced subway to stop selling it.
I was under the impression there was some pressure and not just lack of demand, but if that's not the case then a possibility is Taleb's use of the kosher lemonade example.
http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/subway-removes-ham-and-ba...
This post said it was removed by 'Strong demand' so you can see where I came to my understanding. Whereas it did not say removed by lack of demand, as what I think you implied.
See it is easier to remove the product, than it is to keep the surfaces clear of the offending product. Do you see how it would be wise to remove it? The point still stands.
The article you reference is a rehash of a sensationalist Daily Mail article. The orginal article is even linked at the bottom.
That article distorted a PR release by subway talking about customer demand for one type of product, and presented it as something else.
The demand for halal meat was actually in opposition to animal rights groups who campaigned against halal meet because they don't agree with the way the animals are slaughtered.
This story is actually a counter to your point in that respect.
The problem is that the Daily Mail took something akin to McDonalds serving biscuits in some places and english muffins in others, and turned it into a "Muslims are taking over" scare piece.
There is a better example of your original point. McDonald's stopped carrying halal meat in the US after a lawsuit by animal rights groups.
My instinct, on seeing this finding, was to unpack how people might understand the term "political correctness" and the rhetorical contexts in which it is used. Considering how much the article relies on one survey question, there is very little unpacking of the term--just one paragraph which poses two slanted alternatives and concludes that people probably mean what the author thinks they mean. I'm open to discussing how some activism might be more valuable to the activists than to anybody else, but this article doesn't make a very strong case.
I wonder how Americans feel about "chain migration" or "fake news." Meh.
Setting aside whether or not this situation is good, the author clearly thinks it is not, or even accurately describes the situation, the answer to this sort of question can be found in this excerpt from "Skin In The Game" by Nassim Taleb:
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Nobody likes having to be PC, but I think we all to some extent realize that there are words that we can use whose very usage is considered offensive. For example, Donald Trump is often called non-PC by his supporters and racist by his opponents; but even he's not going around using the "N-word" (which I'm not even comfortable writing in this pseudononymous context).
Of course we chafe at perceived restrictions to what we are "allowed" to say, and we all dislike that things not intended as offensive will be automatically interpreted as offensive even if we were not aware of the offensive implications. Nobody likes that we have all become mini-police officers who wince when someone makes an innocent mistake. And it's entirely possible that this has a slippery slope of treating things as offensive that nobody actually finds offensive because we're worried that some possibly imaginary people will be offended -- that is, we are offended on other people's behalf.
But even so we continue to tiptoe around the fringes, waiting for pop culture and colloquial usage to tell us whether it is appropriate to say "black" or "the gays", both of which seem to have entered ordinary non-offensive usage, but at one point felt pretty offensive.
To be clear, even if he had used entirely politically correct terms, the "racist" charge would still be there over the clearly-racist-in-intent immigration ban, supporting literal white supremacists, and dog whistling on the national stage.
Reality is that you won't suffer much at all in repercussions if you get a word slightly or somewhat wrong. Most people know to avoid using the N-word, or "chinks", or "fags", etc. You see repercussions when it's clear you also carry actual racist beliefs, or when it's clear that you're intentionally calling someone by the wrong pronoun because you're trying to take a political stand.
I've used the wrong pronoun plenty of times, and people have subtly corrected me, but nobody has batted an eyelash because I wasn't making some sort of stand. "Oh, it's 'she' now, ok, sorry." Despite only living in extremely liberal areas, I've also never been asked to use any exotic pronouns. The more I see people complaining about it, the more I think that it's a straw man.
Sure, there are examples of people being oversensitive, but oversensitive people are a fact of life. You can choose not to be around them.
Does the author of this article not realize who controls literally every lever of power in the country?
By "the American democratic majority" does he mean "people who spend too much time on Twitter" and "tenured college professors?" Because that's the only way this thesis about anyone being browbeaten into submission can have even a tenuous relationship with reality.
I occasionally had people stare at me like I was an idiot, often when I was being an idiot. But I never really got silenced or punished for it.
Maybe my college was an unusually free speech kinda place, but I am yet to be convinced that there's actually a problem of any sort.
I mean, professionalism is expected, but not “PC”.
"The pipeline isn't the problem; the work environment is the problem". <== This refers to the hiring pipeline and difficulties of hiring programmers from under-represented backgrounds
"Seeking to hire candidates from under-represented backgrounds does not mean that the standards for evaluation are being lowered even slightly for anyone."
Where I'm at (LA), I've never heard of anyone saying that. Not the biggest sample size, but around here it seems like the general attitude is “so the best you can” not “it’s your responsibility to fix all wrongs, no matter the cost”