If you haven’t heard or read the term “politically correct” lately, you have not turned on your TV, read the news online or in print, and certainly not followed this year’s election. And you just may be the most sane among us. As for the rest of us, I think it safe to speak for the majority, we’re up to our eyebrows with all the talk about political correctness, or as it’s commonly called, PC. If a political candidate can build an entire campaign on it, and if that campaign resonates with millions of voters, this PC stuff must be pretty darned powerful. But does anyone really know what the heck it is?
I did a little research and learned that “the term ‘politically correct’ was first coined in the late 1920s by the Soviets and their ideological allies around the world to describe why the views of certain of the party faithful needed correction to the party line” (Washington Post editorial, 11/15/2015).
I also learned that historians have written revisionist histories to impose current cultural standards on past events and cultures. That doesn’t sound like an honest or ethical thing to do.
Various online dictionaries offer these definitions:
the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
agreeing with the idea that people should be careful to not use language or behave in a way that could offend a particular group of people.
marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving especially ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation.
So far, I’ve learned that political correctness started as a way to be sure Soviet party members toed the party line, has been applied by some historians to make history more palatable to modern audiences, and has been adopted by others as a way of showing respect to people of all demographics. The term can also be used pejoratively. Our understanding of the term suffers not from a lack of definition but from a plethora of loosely related and sometimes contadictory definitions. And that is precisely where Jesse Walker begins in the excellent and informative article “What the Hell Does ‘Politically Correct’ Mean?: A Short History” (01/30/2015). http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/30/what-the-hell-does-politically-correct-m
In his opening paragraph, Walker addresses the multitude of meanings which have been assigned to the term:
Amanda Taub’s Vox piece denying the existence of political correctness does get one thing right: The phrase political correctness “has no actual fixed or specific meaning.” What it does have, though Taub doesn’t explore this, is a history of meanings: a series of ways different people have deployed the term, often for radically different purposes.
Walker goes on to echo what we learned from the Washington Post editorial writer: the term first gained prominence in 1920s Soviet culture. He adds:
By then [mid-1980s] the term was fairly well-established on American campuses. When future Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol debuted his comic strip Thatch in Brown’s student newspaper in 1988, he included a faux superhero called Politically Correct Person, a character forever correcting people’s language and consumer choices.
Walker’s history continues:
The end of the 1990-91 academic year . . . happened to be the [time] the phrase had its national coming-out party. The December 24, 1990, Newsweek featured the words “THOUGHT POLICE” on its cover; inside, a Jerry Adler article argued that “where the PC reigns, one defies it at one’s peril.” A month later, John Taylor’s cover story “Are You Politically Correct?” appeared in New York magazine. The Wall Street Journal ran a series of pieces attacking political correctness. And around the same time that issue of P.C. Casualties appeared, President George Herbert Walker Bush warned the graduating class at Michigan that “the notion of political correctness” was replacing “old prejudices with new ones.”
Whew! Busy year!
Walker says, “’Politically correct’ had now entered the mainstream lexicon—and, maybe more important, the conservative lexicon. But what did people mean when they said it?” And we’re back to our starting question. Various understandings and use of the term include “anything left of center”; “what conservatives call political correctness is really ‘just politeness’”; it has been viewed by some as a myth; and definitions are subject to “the jargon of the week.”
With that as background, Clint Eastwood has provided an up-to-the-minute definition in an interview with Esquire Magazine, which is currently being reported in the Huffington Post: “If Trump Offends You, Just F**king Get Over It.” As you recall, this is the same man who talks to chairs. To the Esquire interviewer he said this:
You know, he’s [Trump’s] a racist now because he’s talked about this judge. And yeah, it’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican parents or something. He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody—the press and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, well, that’s racist,’ and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.
He continues:
(S)ecretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.
Eastwood says he will vote for Trump, even though it’s a “tough one,” but has not yet endorsed him. However, Trump is not the point here. The point here is the power of political correctness overload to incite the kind of rebellion and political turmoil which has turned 2016 into a year to which history will certainly not be kind. And I think Mr. Eastwood’s comments get to the heart of that power; those who are the most angry and vocal about political correctness are those who see it as Eastwood does: “kissing up,” “kiss-ass,” wimpy, “walking on eggshells,” and having every action interpreted as racist or some kind of phobic. He says, “When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.”
And that’s the first point on which I agree with Mr. Eastwood. He and I grew up around the same time, and he is correct in saying those things were not considered racist; but I would argue that they damn well should have been considered racist. I recall people freely telling ethnic jokes; in fact, they were the most popular jokes during my childhood and young adulthood. There were “hillbilly” jokes, jokes about people of color, and in various geographic areas jokes about minority populations specific to that region. I spent the late 1960s in the Detroit area where there was a large Polish population, so there was a whole series of “Polock” jokes. Jeff Foxworthy, in the 1990s, introduced us to redneck jokes. And of course, jokes about women have transcended all decades and cultures.
An interesting observation about all of this ethnic “humor” is that most of the jokes were interchangeable, depending on which group the joker wanted to denigrate. Just substitute the name of your group into the opening line, and you had a ready-made joke for your next party. Whether the subject was “hillbillies,” rednecks, dark-skinned people, or Polish people, they were always portrayed as ignorant, uneducated, unsophisticated, backward, and socially inept. Throw women jokes into the mix, and it’s easy to pinpoint the yardstick by which everyone else was being measured (and falling short): the white male, of course.
Is THIS the America Clint Eastwood and the angry rally goers want to go back to? Is this what they think will make America great again? Are they just tired of having to be respectful and polite to people who are in some way or ways different from them? Do they just want us all to go back to being casually and openly racist, sexist, and in other ways prejudiced? Is it such a grievous burden to bear that we must use language which reflects love and respect for all of our fellow human beings? What a sad, sad commentary on our failure as a culture!
Do Mr. Eastwood and the rally goers want to go back to the America where the N word was spoken freely, where there were separate entrances, water fountains, and restrooms for whites and blacks? Would they like our dark-skinned friends to be banned from libraries and restaurants? Do they want to return their fellow humans to the back of the bus? Is that politically incorrect enough for them? Again, has it been such a grievous burden to bear to allow all citizens the same rights and privileges and to be spoken of with equal respect?
I have to go back to Eastwood’s statement, “But everybody—the press and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, well, that’s racist,’ and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it.” I’m going to argue that racism IS “a big hoodoo.” It’s a VERY “big hoodoo.” And we don’t need to f**king get over it; we should have made a whole lot more progress than we’ve made toward eliminating it. It seems the last two and a half decades of having to watch their cultural language, including eight years of having a black man in the White House, has made some of our fellow citizens into little pressure cookers just waiting for someone to give them permission to blow their lids; and they have found that permission, and they’re exploding. This short video is absolutely terrifying. Note the dominance of white males.
I agree with the earlier statement that what these people call political correctness is really just politeness, so maybe it’s time to give it a different name, to remove the stigma left by the decades of baggage. Maybe we could call it love, courtesy, respect, human dignity, kindness, or godliness. Maybe then we could stop thinking of it as a burden and start seeing it as a privilege to share this beautiful planet with so many different kinds of people and to have our own lives enriched by what each one adds to our collective experience.