Author: Rachel Liesching and Ethan Weiss
Rachel Liesching
Most people cringe at the phrase “politically correct,” either out of fear of being accused of violating those norms society deems “correct” or simply because the phrase is used so loosely and often so ambiguously. The rough argument behind politically correct language is familiar to anyone who has taken an Occidental class in the social sciences: language is a powerful and discursive tool that ascribes value to certain forms of experience and excludes others, and so public discourse must be especially careful of treading on the feet of any one class of personal experience. However, the real elephant in the room is not the words we use; it’s the near-constant refusal to examine the ways in which you, I and everybody we know participate in systems of discrimination and oppression.
The preoccupation with avoiding exclusory language has done much to prevent any honest discussion of where those constructs come from or why they exist in the first place. In truth, politically correct speech, as a discourse that accurately reflects the pluralistic reality of the world, has never existed at all. For all its supposed good intentions, it has been little more than a way to avoid intensely discomforting and thus intensely necessary conversations. For example, when someone prefaces saying something overtly racist with, “I’m not racist, but . . .”
It isn’t enough to recognize difference; difference and identity needs to be interrogated and problematized. We need to go farther than acknowledging that language reflects or constitutes relations of power—our identities and values are subject to far more institutional forces than we would like to think. For example, privilege, while not a moral value nor something that can be changed in most cases, is something that needs to be accounted for in any discourse. The failure to recognize this ends any effective conversation before it can really start.
Politically correct speech has a noble intention, but the real problem is when the twenty-something-year-old undergraduate ascribes a near-immutable degree of righteousness to their way of understanding the world. Out of either fear or laziness the boundaries of their finite personal experience become the boundaries of the world. Truly constructive discussion doesn’t demand the dissolution of personal values and opinions. It does, however, require intense personal effort and risk over a sustained period of time. The willingness to talk about identity and privilege can’t end the moment one steps outside the classroom and back into the flurry of campus life. It must be a constant thought it the back of every student’s mind when they engage in any sort of discourse.
Ethan Weiss
Where the ambition of any institution of higher learning is rigorous study and courageous innovation, the community of Occidental College should fear the stifled state of debate on campus and consider whether of all things, its democratic values and a dogmatic emphasis on political correctness, may be impeding the conversations out of which real progress is made.
Writers from Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century to Charles Taylor today have observed American society and the way democracy and absolute equality diminish the possibility of innate value. When all things are declared equal, the possibility of a single best solution or outcome falls away and with it the possibility of real debate. Where we are taught to constantly give polite deference to the opinion of another, we must also be aware that real debate stagnates when we choose not to assert the supremacy of our own ideas (if we view them as such, which we should). It does not violate a commitment to open-mindedness to argue vigorously for the primacy of one’s own point of view.
That dragon may yet be hibernating beneath the fabric of American society at large, but already it manifests here at Occidental, where an insistence on the inherent correctness of every opinion suppresses what contentious conversation might otherwise occur. On one hand, we might blame the lackluster debate at Occidental on a reluctance to make a stir. On the other, we should consider whether we as a community are so hung up on accommodating difference that the practical result is a slinking back into ourselves, justified with a nod to some notion that every opinion is valid and deserves the benefit of the doubt.
This is no suggestion that one group of people is more correct than another. Rather, it suggests that at Occidental, the legitimate and honorable proposition that “all people are created equal,” has been corrupted and re-rendered as “all opinions are created equal.” Political correctness as a respect for all people has, in other words, helped along an entirely different idea—that we cannot reject others’ opinions without making offense—whose growth both threatens constructive conversation and ultimately undermines the democratic values we prize originally.
We should not be afraid to call someone else wrong. We should not feel that to disagree is to disrespect. At the same time that we celebrate diversity of opinion, we should not be so complacent as to pretend a multitude of opinions means a multitude of right answers. Now, discuss.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
