The Uselessness of "Political Correctness"

Political Correctness (PC) is a gentle effort at social engineering that discourages the use of language that is derived from racism or other forms of intolerance. The belief was that if people no longer could verbally express their contempt of members of minority subcultures, then the physical expressions of contempt would eventually disappear.

In the early 1970's, comedian George Carlin fired an early warning shot against PC with his routine on "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television". The psychological foundation of this routine is that words themselves are neutral. The power of words comes from the attitudes and actions that they describe.

The fact that decent, polite (white) people no longer use the word "Nigger" is meaningless when white dominated society remains actively hostile to people of color. The hostility is not revealed in our language. It is not reflected in our entertainment (TV, movies, music). It is exposed in our statistics. Unemployment. Incarceration. Poverty. High School Graduation. Civilians killed by police.

The altering of our language use over the last 60 years has served only to drive the attitudes and actions of racism "out of sight, out of mind". Over that time, the Civil Rights Movement resulted in the suppression of physical expressions of racism through legislation and enforcement. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The US Army leading black children through the screaming and spitting (white) mobs in Little Rock. Court ordered busing in Milwaukee. Affirmative Action.

It might have been a perverse result of the success of Political Correctness in altering our public language that the legal and enforcement actions lessened. Did the Supreme Court decide that the Voting Rights Act no longer needs to be thoroughly enforced in Texas because (white) people talk nicer about their black neighbors? Is our new Attorney General pulling back on the investigations of police cultures in Ferguson and Baltimore and Cleveland because the civilian killings were done by police who aren't (publicly) speaking of their targets in racial epithets?

Racial bigotry, along with all the other forms of intolerance, is a cancer on our nation. Separating out, isolating, and diminishing the abilities of any American minority culture weakens us. We have been seeing obvious lessons in this from World War II through today. Whether it was the black squadron of fighter pilots from Tuskegee or the black baseball and football players of the 50's or the black Math geniuses of NASA or the black business leaders of today, we see spectacular achievements from those talented (black) people who have overcome the obstacles that surround white culture. What we don't see is the cost of the wasted opportunity of those who were not exceptional enough.

The joke about women in the workplace may hold true across all cultural divides:

A woman has to work twice as hard and be twice as smart as a man in order to get half the credit. Luckily, this isn't difficult.

Is our defense of "white privilege" only a reflection of our insecurity over our own abilities? Do we (whites) really believe that allowing opportunity to be shared with blacks (and Jews and Muslims and LGBT and immigrants) will leave less for us? History has proven that false in practically every generation since our founding. Every time that we have expanded our vision of America to include more of us, we have become greater. Every time we have locked the doors, we have become less.

"We shall overcome someday". But we won't do it by insisting that people not use "Bad Words" (Carlin's description). We will only overcome by a united effort toward national wholeness.