political correctness essay questions

September 11, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

Print or web publication, on political correctness.

Power, class, and the new campus religion

Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.

A clarification, before I continue (since deliberate misconstrual is itself a tactic of the phenomenon in question). By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they couldn’t use expressions like “that’s a crazy idea” because they stigmatize the mentally ill. I heard a young woman tell me that she had been criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins—an act, she was informed, of cultural appropriation. I heard an adjunct instructor describe how a routine pedagogical conflict over something he had said in class had turned, when the student in question claimed to have felt “triggered,” into, in his words, a bureaucratic “dumpster fire.” He was careful now, he added, to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.

I listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it, by the “PC police”—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else regarded as members of the PC police.

I heard all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one college. And I have no reason to believe that circumstances are substantially different at other elite private institutions, and plenty of reasons not to believe it: from conversations with individuals at many schools, from my broader experience in higher education, from what I’ve read not only in the mainstream media but also in the higher education press. The situation is undoubtedly better at some places than others, undoubtedly worse at the liberal arts colleges as a whole than at the universities as a whole, but broadly similar across the board.

So this is how I’ve come to understand the situation. Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

I should mention that when I was speaking about these issues last fall with a group of students at Whitman College, a selective school in Washington State, that idea, that elite private colleges are religious institutions, is the one that resonated with them most. I should also mention that I received an email recently from a student who had transferred from Oral Roberts, the evangelical Christian university in Tulsa, to Columbia, my alma mater. The latter, he found to his surprise, is also a religious school, only there, he said, the faith is the religion of success. The religion of success is not the same as political correctness, but as I will presently explain, the two go hand in hand.

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What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

Dogma, and the enforcement of dogma, makes for ideological consensus. Students seldom disagree with one another anymore in class, I’ve been told about school after school. The reason, at least at Whitman, said one of the students I talked to there, is mainly that they really don’t have any disagreements. Another added that when they take up an issue in class, it isn’t, let’s talk about issue X, but rather, let’s talk about why such-and-such position is the correct one to have on issue X. When my student wrote about her churchgoing friend, she said that she couldn’t understand why anyone would feel uncomfortable being out as a religious person at a place as diverse as Scripps. But of course, Scripps and its ilk are only diverse in terms of identity. In terms of ideology, they are all but homogeneous. You don’t have “different voices” on campus, as these institutions like to boast; you have different bodies, speaking with the same voice.

That, by the way, is why liberal students (and liberals in general) are so bad at defending their own positions. They never have to, so they never learn to. That is also why it tends to be so easy for conservatives to goad them into incoherent anger. Nothing makes you more enraged than an argument you cannot answer. But the reason to listen to people who disagree with you is not so you can learn to refute them. The reason is that you may be wrong. In fact, you are wrong: about some things and probably about a lot of things. There is zero percent chance that any one of us is 100 percent correct. That, in turn, is why freedom of expression includes the right to hear as well as speak, and why disinviting campus speakers abridges the speech rights of students as well as of the speakers themselves.

Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

Which brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation—if necessary, by censorship. It makes a perfect, dreary sense that there are speech codes, or the desire for speech codes, at selective private colleges. The irony is that conservatives don’t actually care if progressives disapprove of them, with the result that political correctness generally amounts to internecine warfare on the left: radical feminists excoriating other radical feminists for saying “vagina” instead of “front hole,” students denouncing the director of Boys Don’t Cry as a transphobic “cis white bitch” (as recently happened at Reed College), and so forth.

But the most effective form of censorship, of course, is self-censorship—which, in the intimate environment of a residential college, young adults are very quick to learn. One of the students at Whitman mentioned that he’s careful, when questioning consensus beliefs, to phrase his opinion in terms of “Explain to me why I’m wrong.” Other students— at Bard College, at the Claremont Colleges—have explained that any challenge to the hegemony of identity politics will get you branded as a racist (as in, “Don’t talk to that guy, he’s a racist”). Campus protesters, their frequent rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, are not the ones being silenced: they are, after all, not being silent. They are in the middle of the quad, speaking their minds. The ones being silenced are the ones like my students at Scripps, like the students at Whitman, like many students, no doubt, at many places, who are keeping their mouths shut. “The religion of humanity,” as David Bromwich recently wrote, “may turn out to be as dangerous as all the other religions.”

The assumption on selective campuses is not only that we are in full possession of the truth, but that we are in full possession of virtue. We don’t just know the good with perfect wisdom, we embody it with perfect innocence. But regimes of virtue tend to eat their children. Think of Salem. They tend to turn upon themselves, since everybody wants to be the holiest. Think of the French Revolution. The ante is forever being upped. The PC commissariat reminds me of the NRA. Everyone is terrified of challenging the NRA (everyone in a position to stop it, at least), so it gets whatever it demands. But then, because it can, it thinks up new demands. Guns in playgrounds, guns in bars.

So it is with political correctness. There is always something new, as my students understood, that you aren’t supposed to say. And worst of all, you often don’t find out about it until after you have said it. The term political correctness, which originated in the 1970s as a form of self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic invocation of Stalinism. By now we’ve lost the irony but kept the Stalinism—and it was a feature of Stalinism that you could be convicted for an act that was not a crime at the time you committed it. So you were always already guilty, or could be made to be guilty, and therefore were always controllable.

You were also always under surveillance by a cadre of what Jane Austen called, in a very different context, “voluntary spies,” and what my students called the PC police. Regimes of virtue produce informants (which really does wonders for social cohesion). They also produce authorities, often self-appointed authorities, like the writing director at Scripps who decreed that you aren’t supposed to use the word crazy . Whenever I hear that you aren’t supposed to say something, I want to know, where did this supposed descend from? Who decided, and who gave them the right to decide? And whenever I hear that a given group of students demands this or says that, I want to ask, whom exactly are we talking about: all of them, or just a few of them? Did the group choose its leaders, or did the leaders choose themselves?

Let me be clear. I recognize that both the culture of political correctness and the recent forms of campus agitation are responding to enormous, intractable national problems. There is systemic racism and individual bigotry in the United States, and colleges are not immune from either. There is systemic sexism and sexual assault in society at large, and campuses are no exception. The call for safe spaces and trigger warnings, the desire to eliminate micro-aggressions, the demand for the removal of offensive symbols and the suppression of offensive language: however foolish some of these might be as policy prescriptions (especially the first two), however absurd as they work themselves out on the ground, all originate in deeply legitimate concerns.

But so much of political correctness is not about justice or creating a safe environment; it is about power. And so much of what is taking place at colleges today reflects the way that relations of power have been reconfigured in contemporary higher education. Campus activists are taking advantage of the fact (and I suspect that a lot of them understand this intuitively, if not explicitly) that students have a lot more power than they used to. The change is the result not only of the rise of the customer-service mentality in academia, but also of the proletarianization of the faculty. Students have risen; instructors have fallen. Where once administrations worked in alliance with the faculty, were indeed largely composed of faculty, now they work against the faculty in alliance with students, a separate managerial stratum more interested in the satisfaction of its customers than the well-being of its employees.

In the inevitable power struggle between students and teachers, the former have gained the whip hand. The large majority of instructors today are adjuncts working term to term for a few thousand dollars a course, or contract employees with no long-term job security, or untenured professors whose careers can still be derailed. With the expansion of Title IX in 2011—the law is now being used, among other things, to police classroom content—even tenured faculty are sitting with a sword above their heads. Thanks not only to the shift to contingent employment but also to the chronic oversupply of PhDs (the academic reserve army, to adapt a phrase from Marx), academic labor is cheap and academic workers are vulnerable and frightened. In a conflict between a student and a faculty member, almost nothing is at stake for the student beyond the possibility of receiving a low grade (which, in the current environment, means something like a B+). But the teacher could be fired. That is why so many faculty members, like that adjunct instructor at Scripps, are teaching with their tails between their legs. They, too, are being silenced. Whether they know it or not, student activists (and students in general) are exploiting the insecurity of an increasingly immiserated workforce. So much for social justice.

The power of political correctness is wielded not only against the faculty, however, but also against other groups within the student body, ones who don’t belong to the ideologically privileged demographics or espouse the approved points of view: conservative students; religious students, particularly Christians; students who identify as Zionists, a category that includes a lot of Jewish students; “athletes,” meaning white male athletes; white students from red states; heterosexual cisgendered white men from anywhere at all, who represent, depending on the school, between a fifth and a third of all students. (I say this, by the way, as an atheist, a democratic socialist, a native northeasterner, a person who believes that colleges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvious by now, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.) I haven’t heard too many people talk about creating safe spaces for Christians, or preventing micro-aggressions against conservatives, or banning hate speech against athletes, or disinviting socialists.

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What I have heard, frequently, for as long as I have been involved in academia, are open expressions of contempt or prejudice or hostility against those suspect groups or members of those groups. If you are a white man, you are routinely regarded as guilty until proven innocent, the worst possible construction is put upon your words, and anything you say on a sensitive issue is received with suspicion at best. I attended a workshop on micro-aggressions at the University of Missouri last year. The problem with micro-aggressions, the leader said, is that they “create a space of hostility,” that they say, “you don’t belong; you are different in a way that’s not okay.” Those formulations precisely describe the environment that the groups I just enumerated often encounter at elite private colleges, except that unlike the typical micro-aggression, the offense is not inadvertent. It is quite deliberate. Racism may indeed be a system, but bigotry and prejudice are personal attitudes, and they are freely distributed (“cis white bitch”) across the political spectrum.

I am perfectly aware that men, whites, heterosexuals, and cisgendered people remain the dominant groups in society as a whole. But equality is not revenge. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are incomparably more powerful, and more entrenched, than their “reverse” counterparts, but that doesn’t make the latter anything less than reprehensible, especially when practiced against college students: individuals, in other words, who are scarcely more than adolescents, and who deserve the benefit of the doubt.

I was talking about trigger warnings with the writing director at Scripps. I told her that the only student I’d taught who was so uncomfortable with course material that he had to leave the room was a young Christian man (another Asian American, as it turns out), who excused himself before a class discussion of the sexually explicit lesbian novelist Jeanette Winterson. I was naïve enough to think that the director would be sympathetic to the student’s situation. Instead, she snorted with contempt. (For the record, I myself was none too happy with his move. But then, I don’t believe in trigger warnings in the first place.) Progressive faculty and students at selective private colleges will often say that they want to dismantle the hierarchies of power that persist in society at large. Their actions often suggest that in fact they would like to invert them. All groups are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Political correctness creates a mindset of us versus them. “Them” is white men, or straight cisgendered white men—a.k.a. “the patriarchy.” (The phrase “dead white men,” so beloved on the left, would have little force if its last two words were not already felt to constitute a pejorative.) “Us” is everybody else, the coalition of virtue (virtuous, of course, by virtue of an accident of birth). Which means that political correctness not only treats “them” as a monolith—erasing the differences among white people, like those between Jews and Mormons or English and Irish, thus effacing the specificity of their historical and sometimes also their present experiences—it effaces the specificity of everyone’s experience.

Political correctness expects us to plot our experience on the grid of identity, to interpret it in terms of our location at the intersection of a limited number of recognized categories. You are a lesbian Latina, therefore you must feel X. You are a white trans man, therefore you must think Y. But identity should not precede experience; it should proceed from it. And experience is much more granular, and composed of a vastly larger number of variables, than is dreamt of in the PC philosophy. I myself am a youngest child; I was raised in the suburbs; I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family—but more to the point, my consciousness and way of being in the world have been shaped by an infinite series of experiential particulars, a large proportion of which are not reducible to any category.

That, by the way, is one of the reasons to read literature, and to place it at the center of a college education: because it captures the complexity of lived experience, and of enacted identity, in a way that the categories of a politicized social science can never hope to match.

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group.

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous.

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

But it isn’t simply the admissions process. The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it.

And here we come to the connection between the religion of success and the religion of political correctness. Political correctness is a fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all. It provides a moral cover beneath which undergraduates can prosecute their careerist projects undisturbed. Student existence may be understood as largely separated into two non-communicating realms: campus social life (including the classroom understood as a collective space), where the enforcement of political correctness is designed to create an emotionally unthreatening environment; and the individual pursuit of personal advancement, the real business going forward. The moral commitments of the first (which are often transient in any case) are safely isolated from the second.

What falls between the two is nothing less than the core purpose of a liberal education: inquiry into the fundamental human questions, undertaken through rational discourse. Rational discourse, meaning rational argument: not the us-talk of PC consensus, which isn’t argument, or the them-talk of vituperation (as practiced ubiquitously on social media), which isn’t rational. But inquiry into the fundamental human questions—in the words of Tolstoy, “What shall we do and how shall we live?”—threatens both of the current campus creeds: political correctness, by calling its certainties into question; the religion of success, by calling its values into question. Such inquiry raises the possibility that there are different ways to think and different things to live for.

Political correctness and rational discourse are incompatible ideals. Forget “civility,” the quality that college deans and presidents inevitably put forth as that which needs to “balance” free expression. The call for civility is nothing more than a management tool for nervous bureaucrats, a way of splitting every difference and puréeing them into a pablum of deanly mush. Free expression is an absolute; to balance it is to destroy it.

Fortunately, we already have a tried-and-tested rule for free expression, one specifically designed to foster rational discourse. It’s called the First Amendment, and First Amendment jurisprudence doesn’t recognize “offensive” speech or even hate speech as categories subject to legitimate restriction. For one thing, hate is not illegal, and neither is giving offense. For another, what’s hate to me may not be hate to you; what’s offensive to you may be my deeply held belief. The concepts are relative and subjective. When I gave a version of this essay as a talk at Bard, the first comment from the panel of student respondents came from a young Palestinian woman who argued that “conservative narratives” like Zionism should be censored, because “they require the otherization, if not the dehumanization, of another group of people.” It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that many Zionists would say the same about what they regard as the Palestinian position. Once you start to ban offensive speech, there is no logical place to stop—or rather, where you stop will be determined by the relative positions of competing groups within the community.

In other words, again, by power. To take the most conspicuous issue around which questions of free expression are being disputed on campus, the disinvitation of outside speakers always reflects the power of one group over another. When a speaker is invited to campus, it means that some set of people within the institution—some department, center, committee, or student organization—wants to hear what they have to say. When they are disinvited, shouted down, or otherwise prevented from speaking, it means another set has proved to be more powerful.

When the latter are accused of opposing free speech, they invariably respond, “How can we be opposed to free speech? We are exercising it right now!” But everyone is in favor of their own free speech (including, for instance, Vladimir Putin). The test of your commitment to free speech as a general principle is whether you are willing to tolerate the speech of others, especially those with whom you most disagree. If you are using your speech to try to silence speech, you are not in favor of free speech. You are only in favor of yourself.

I see no reason that the First Amendment shouldn’t be the guiding principle at private colleges and universities (at least the ones that profess to be secular), just as it is, perforce, at public institutions. But public schools are very different places from private ones. Their student bodies, for the most part, are far more diverse, economically and in every other way, which means these institutions do not have to deal with a large bolus of affluent, sheltered white and Asian kids who don’t know how to talk to black and brown people and need to be “educated” into “awareness” by the presence of African-American and Latino students (who are, in turn, expected to “represent” their communities). When different kinds of people grow up together, rather than being introduced to one another under artificial conditions in young adulthood, they learn to talk and play and study together honestly and unselfconsciously—which means, for adolescents, often frankly and roughly—without feeling that they have to tiptoe around sensitivities that are frequently created by the situation itself. (In today’s idiom, they can be real with one another. The one thing students at elite private colleges very rarely are is “real.”) It’s true that neighborhoods and public schools are much more segregated than they were a generation ago, but students at public colleges and universities are still considerably less likely to come from affluent white/Asian bubbles than are those at wealthy private ones.

True diversity means true disagreement. Political correctness exists at public institutions, but it doesn’t dominate them. A friend of mine who went to Columbia and Yale now teaches at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. “When you meet someone at Hunter,” she told me, “you can’t assume they see the world the same way you do.” That’s about as pithy an expression of the problem at selective private colleges as I can imagine. When you meet someone at Columbia or Yale or Scripps or Whitman or any of scores of other institutions, you absolutely can assume they see the world the same way you do. And anyone who threatens to disrupt that cozy situation must be disinvited, reeducated, or silenced. It’s no surprise that the large majority of high-profile PC absurdities take place at elite private schools like Emory or Oberlin or Northwestern.

That same safe assumption, about the points of view of everyone around you, does not pervade selective private campuses alone, of course. It is equally the case among the liberal elite: at the Manhattan dinner party, the Silicon Valley startup, the Seattle coffee shop, the Brookline PTA. (That it is also the case in other realms of society, non-liberal and/or non-elite, is true. It is also no excuse, especially not for people who consider themselves so enlightened.) This is not an accident. Selective private colleges are the training grounds of the liberal elite, and the training in question involves not only formal education for professional success, but also initiation into the folkways of the tribe.

Which means that fancy private colleges have a mission public institutions don’t. People arrive at public schools from a wide range of social locations, and they return to a range that is nearly as wide. The institutional mission is to get them through and into the job market, not to turn them into any particular kind of person. But selective private colleges (which also tend to be a lot smaller than public schools) are in the business of creating a community and, beyond that, a class. “However much diversity Yale’s freshman classes may have,” as one of my students once put it, “its senior classes have far less.”

And this, I believe, is one of the sources of the new revolt among students of color at elite private colleges and universities. The expectation at those institutions has always been that the newcomers whom they deign to admit to the ranks of the blessed, be they Jews in the 1950s or African Americans today, will assimilate to the ways of the blessed. That they will become, as people say, “more white.” That bargain, as uncomfortable as it has always been, was more readily accepted in the past. For various reasons, it seems that it no longer is. Students of color are telling the whites who surround them, No, we aren’t like you, and what’s more, we don’t want to be like you. As very different as their outlook is from that of the white working class, their rejection of the liberal elite is not entirely dissimilar.

Selective private colleges need to decide what kind of places they want to be. Do they want to be socialization machines for the upper-middle class, ideological enforcers of progressive dogma? Or do they want to be educational institutions in the only sense that really matters: places of free, frank, and fearless inquiry? When we talk about political correctness and its many florid manifestations, so much in the news of late, we are talking not only about racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, or about the coddling of privileged youth, though both are certainly at play. We are also talking, or rather not talking, about the pathologies of the American class system. And those are also what we need to deal with.

Want more Deresiewicz? Try All Points, his blog about American culture, or these classic from the archives: “ The Disadvantages of an Elite Education ” and “ Solitude and Leadership .”

William Deresiewicz  is an essayist and critic. His book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life is based in part on his essays “ The Disadvantages of an Elite Education ” and “ Solitude and Leadership .” To read all the posts from his weekly blog, “All Points,” click here . He is a contributing editor of the magazine.

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How Americans feel about ‘cancel culture’ and offensive speech in 6 charts

Americans have long debated the boundaries of free speech, from what is and isn’t protected by the First Amendment to discussions about “political correctness” and, more recently, “cancel culture.” The internet has amplified these debates and fostered new questions about tone and tenor in recent years. Here’s a look at how adults in the United States see these and related issues, based on Pew Research Center surveys.

This Pew Research Center analysis looks at how Americans view the tenor of discourse, both online and off. The findings used here come from three surveys the Center conducted in fall 2020. Sample sizes, field dates and methodological information for each survey are accessible through the links in this analysis.

In a September 2020 survey, 44% of Americans said they’d heard at least a fair amount about the phrase “cancel culture,” including 22% who had heard a great deal about it. A majority of Americans (56%) said they’d heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% – the largest share – who had heard nothing at all about the phrase.

Familiarity with the term cancel culture varied by age, gender and education level, but not political party affiliation, according to the same survey.

Younger adults were more likely to have heard about cancel culture than their older counterparts. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of adults under 30 said they’d heard a great deal or fair amount about cancel culture, compared with 46% of those ages 30 to 49 and 34% of those 50 and older.

Men were more likely than women to be familiar with the phrase, as were those who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree when compared with those who have lower levels of formal education.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were about as likely as Republicans and GOP leaners to say they had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture (46% vs. 44%). But there were more pronounced differences within each party when taking ideology into account. About six-in-ten liberal Democrats (59%) said they had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture, compared with roughly a third of conservative and moderate Democrats (34%). Similarly, around half of conservative Republicans (49%) had heard of the term, compared with around a third of moderate and liberal Republicans (36%).

Americans were most likely to mention accountability when describing what the phrase cancel culture means to them. As part of the fall 2020 survey, the Center asked U.S. adults who had heard a fair amount or a great deal about the term to explain in their own words what it meant to them. Around half (49%) said it describes actions people take to hold others accountable.

Smaller shares described cancel culture as a form of censorship – such as a restriction on free speech or as history being erased – or as mean-spirited attacks used to cause others harm (14% and 12%, respectively).

About a third of conservative Republicans who had heard of the phrase (36%) described it as actions taken to hold people accountable, compared with roughly half or more of moderate or liberal Republicans (51%), conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) and liberal Democrats (59%).

Conservative Republicans who had heard of the term were also more likely to see cancel culture as a form of censorship: 26% described it as censorship, compared with 15% of moderate or liberal Republicans and roughly one-in-ten or fewer Democrats, regardless of ideology.

In the September 2020 survey, Americans said they believed calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable than punish people who don’t deserve it. Overall, 58% of adults said that in general, when people publicly call others out on social media for posting content that might be considered offensive, they are more likely to hold people accountable . In comparison, 38% said this kind of action is more likely to punish people who don’t deserve it.

Views on this question differed sharply by political party. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to say that this type of action holds people accountable (75% vs. 39%). In contrast, 56% of Republicans – but just 22% of Democrats – said this generally punishes people who don’t deserve it.

In a separate report using data from the same September 2020 survey, 55% of Americans said many people take offensive content they see online too seriously , while a smaller share (42%) said offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal.

Americans’ attitudes again differed widely by political party. Roughly six-in-ten Democrats (59%) said offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal, while just a quarter of Republicans agreed – a 34 percentage point gap. And while 72% of Republicans said many people take offensive content they see online too seriously, about four-in-ten Democrats (39%) said the same.

In a four-country survey conducted in the fall of 2020, Americans were the most likely to say that people today are too easily offended . A majority of Americans (57%) said people today are too easily offended by what others say, while four-in-ten said people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, according to the survey of adults in the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

In contrast, respondents in the three European countries surveyed were more closely divided over whether people today are too easily offended or whether people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others.

Opinions on this topic were connected to ideological leanings in three of the four countries surveyed, with the largest gap among U.S. adults. Around two-thirds of Americans on the ideological left (65%) said people should be careful to avoid offending others, compared with about one-in-four on the ideological right – a gap of 42 percentage points. The left-right difference was 17 points in the UK and 15 points in Germany. There was no significant difference between the left and the right in France.

In the U.S., the ideological divide was closely related to political party affiliation: Six-in-ten Democrats said people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, while only 17% of Republicans said the same.

• Free Speech & Press
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• Political Discourse
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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center .

Many Israelis say social media content about the Israel-Hamas war should be censored

Americans’ views of offensive speech aren’t necessarily clear-cut, many adults in east and southeast asia support free speech, are open to societal change, americans’ views of technology companies, most americans say a free press is highly important to society, most popular.

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Philosophy in the real world

Political Correctness: Its Origins and the Backlash Against It

Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt University

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Please note: This article contains language some might find offensive.

Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” In response to outrage at his statements like this one, Donald Trump replies : “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct”. On this vague platform Trump has made himself a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

So what is political correctness?

To be politically correct is to choose words (and sometimes actions) that avoid disparaging, insulting or offending people because they belong to oppressed groups. Oppressed groups are those subject to prejudice, disrespect or discrimination on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or physical disability.

The term emerged in the west in the 1970s as a kind of self-parody used by activists in the various new social movements and the New Left more broadly. It was borrowed from the English translation of Chinese Communist texts, particularly those of the Cultural Revolution, seen by most in the New Left as doctrinaire and Orwellian. “Ideologically sound” and “the correct line” were similar borrowings.

If the interjection “That’s politically incorrect” was uttered with a wry knowingness, it had a serious intent – to challenge the user to think about the social power of a word and the injury it might cause.

As this form of language policing spread into the wider community it became a highly effective means of confronting the deep-rooted prejudices embedded in everyday words and expressions.

We should recall that in the 1950s Aboriginal people were casually referred to, even by educated people, as “boongs” and Aboriginal women as “lubras”. The leader of the ALP, Arthur Calwell, received chuckles when defended the White Australia Policy with “two Wongs don’t make a White”. In that era, grown women were habitually trivialised as “girls” and for a laugh schoolboys would mimic the facial expressions, hand gestures and voices of kids with cerebral palsy, or “spazzos”.

All of these, and a thousand more, had the effect of reinforcing the subjugation of people already in a weak or vulnerable position in society. Beyond mere politeness or civility, political correctness was “political” in the sense that it aimed at bringing about social change at a time when racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes found expression in everyday language and attracted no censure, even though the words were humiliating, disparaging or threatening to the minorities in question.

Some expressions and behaviours criticised as politically incorrect were subtle, and could leave those reproached puzzled and angry. Why is it sexist to open the door for a woman? Isn’t it just politeness? Or is it a reflection of a patriarchal social structure in which men were expected to be chivalrous toward the “weaker sex”? In the same way, women were excluded from pubs because their sensitivities had to be protected.

Shifting taboos

So political correctness forced us to think more deeply about our own ingrained and frequently unconscious oppressive attitudes. As a genuinely perplexed student I once asked a more experienced activist: “Why is it acceptable to call a bloke a prick but not acceptable to call him a cunt?”

“Because”, he replied, “men aren’t oppressed.” I saw it straight away. Apart from the vulgarity of the word, it was politically incorrect to use as an insult a word that denigrates women by sexually objectifying them, as if they are defined by that “repulsive yet irresistible” thing.

The history of the word “cunt” throws more light on the evolution of political correctness. This good old Anglo-Saxon word was heard even in high society in the 16th century – the young aristocrats utter it in the BBC film of Wolf Hall – but it was taboo by the end of the 18th century when it became “a nasty name for a nasty thing”. In Australia in the 1950s it was absent from written English and polite conversation but enjoyed a vigorous life in the vernacular, particularly amongst working-class men.

But from the late 1960s its vernacular use came under sustained criticism from feminists for the way it was used as a weapon to dehumanise women, to keep them as sexual objects, and within a decade or so its use had sharply declined. Wives and girlfriends spoke up and when used it was done so with more care about who might be within earshot.

In recent years, “cunt” has been partially rehabilitated; the taboo has been lifted so that we can hear it used on ABC television. This is so in large measure because the status of women in Australian society has improved so much that, while forms of discrimination persist, it is hard to describe them as oppressed as a gender. And women’s own sexual expression has blossomed, including reclaiming the word in forums such as The Vagina Monologues . As a result, the word has lost much of its hidden political freight and its shock-value, although it remains vulgar and many women still find it discomforting.

This process of rehabilitating taboo words fortifies the claim that political correctness is not a mere fad of the moralising left but is directly connected to oppression and discrimination within the social structure.

In a similar way, in the 1960s it was common to hear Anglo-Australians disparage immigrants from southern Europe as “wogs” and “dagos”. These descriptors were deemed politically incorrect and, when it was explained that they wounded those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, they mostly fell out of use.

Yet as those ethnic groups worked their way into a position of social equality their confidence increased to the point where they began to use the words themselves in an ironic way, such as in the TV program “Wogs Out of Work”. It didn’t matter any more. An Anglo today might use “wog” ironically; but if used seriously as a form of abuse the user would be regarded as weird – or even “unreconstructed”!

The oppression of Aboriginal people remains because racial prejudice against them runs deep, and we could expect an outcry at the broadcast of a television program titled “Boongs On the Dole”, and not just from latte-sipping inner-city lefties. Even those conservative commentators who have led the charge against political correctness routinely engage in politically correct self-censorship. So what’s behind the backlash?

The Backlash

The backlash began in the United States in the early 1990s when conservative intellectuals began to use “political correctness” to criticize the left for imposing their views on others and suppressing dissenting opinion.

In universities, more traditional subjects were being augmented or replaced by others dealing with feminism, queer politics, post-colonial history and so on. Leading conservative began to attack the liberal-left for making certain topics of study “off-limits”.

Soon “political correctness” was being used as a pejorative, not least by right-wing shock jocks such as Rush Limbaugh. In the United Kingdom, the Daily Mail began a campaign (still running) against “political correctness gone mad” with stories, many of them made up, about ordinary people prevented from flying patriotic flags or schools banning musical chairs because it encourages aggression or the BBC replacing “AD” (as in 2015 AD) with “CE” (for Common Era).

The backlash struck a chord with some sections of the public, disproportionately among white males who felt that equal-access policies were discriminating against them and who generally felt put-upon by demands that they make deeper changes to traditional attitudes and behaviours. The subliminal message of the backlash has been that you don’t have to feel bad about believing what you do, so don’t listen to the PC moralisers.

The reversal of the connotation of “political correctness” was a clever means of turning the moral tables. It authorised a return of some of the oppressive behaviours. On the streets one who objected to a racial insult or sexist remark could be dismissed as just being “PC”, that is, sitting on a moral high horse, and the offended party might be recruited with “See, she doesn’t mind” or “It’s just a bit of fun”.

As this suggests, the contest over political correctness has historical significance. If we consider the struggle between left and right in the Anglo world over the last five decades it’s pretty clear that the right won the economic and political war (neoliberalism, the 1%, increasing corporate power, the rise of money politics and so on) and the left won the culture war.

For conservative activists losing the culture war rankled deeply.

In the United States, the urge to fight back explains the sharp shift to the right of the Republican Party from the mid-2000s. It explains how Donald Trump, running for president on a platform of political incorrectness, can “get away with” a series of racist and sexist insults yet retain the support of conservative men and women .

In Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott is still fighting the cultural battles of his university days – in his resistance to gay marriage, his monarchism and his loathing of “the green-left”. The bestowing of a knighthood on Prince Phillip attracted almost universal derision but for Abbott it was his way of sticking two fingers up to those he could not defeat at university.

It is true that the liberal-left has provided ammunition for the conservative backlash. At times enthusiastic feminists, particularly when first finding their voices, took PC too far by demanding prohibitions on words and activities that only the hyper-alert would hear as disparaging or offensive. “Wimmin’s rooms” and “herstory”, for example, were made for parody.

The truth is that for many well-meaning people some PC demands are hard to come to terms with, and they have struggled. In The Office Ricky Gervais turned this confusion into excruciating comedy, perhaps reaching its most complex moral tangle in the episode including the joke about the Royal Family and the black man’s cock.

In 2012 the Centre for Independent Studies published a booklet titled You Can’t Say That! containing four short articles by conservative academics and commentators. Janet Albrechtsen complained that “the PC virus has infected so much of what we do, what we read, how we live, how we think” and demanded the “right to offend”. People of a more conservative bent, she opined, feel intimidated about expressing their opinions because they fear censure from the thought police.

What is most striking about these papers is that none of the authors seems to have any interest in understanding from where political correctness derives its social power. None saw it as embedded in social structures; they could not get beyond their righteous disdain for the latte sippers who have been imposing this new form of censorship.

There is a reason for their blindness. Conservatives concede that discrimination exists (even if it is exaggerated) but they see society as essentially good and not in need of structural change. So they do not accept that the injustices that animate activists reflect something rotten in society; instead they are merely the product of individuals behaving badly.

Against the grain

Nevertheless, and surprising as it may appear, I have some sympathy with their complaint. In the age of Twitter and Facebook there are some disturbing examples of people who have been set upon for quite minor infractions. Justine Sacco was publicly shamed and then sacked for tweeting to her 170 followers a dumb joke about AIDS as she boarded a plane to Africa.

The swimmer Stephanie Rice deserved to be corrected for tweeting the word “faggot” but not the monstering that reduced her to public tears and caused her sponsors to withdraw. A PC pack mentality has developed and it turns with particular ferocity on anyone who questions the presumptions of a certain kind of liberal feminism.

In addition, the well-meaning PC commitment to multiculturalism became a campaign against all forms of tradition. To take one example, I am not a Christian but I believe that the cultural legacy of Christianity runs deep and should not be discarded wholesale.

The King James Bible, for instance, has profoundly shaped our use of language, the language of the atheist as much as the parish priest. The Book of Job is perhaps the deepest meditation we have on the human condition. And the New Testament’s stock of parables and stories imbues our moral thinking, generally in positive ways.

In western societies like ours, a rounded education includes this legacy. A child who grew up without exposure to the cultural riches of the bible – including the nativity tale – would be one whose education had serious gaps in it. Yes, those cultural riches should be approached critically, and not treated as holy writ.

But let’s remember that in China, with the spread of nihilism, moral decline and the emptiness of affluence, even the Chinese Communist Party has rehabilitated Confucius, the sage who had been denounced and banished during the Cultural Revolution. Now that was politically incorrect.

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What Research Says About The Consequences Of PC Culture

One of the most popular arguments against political correctness is that it stifles speech, but a Cornell study found that it boosted creativity in mixed-gender groups. Tamir Kalifa/AP hide caption

One of the most popular arguments against political correctness is that it stifles speech, but a Cornell study found that it boosted creativity in mixed-gender groups.

By now, you've surely seen Jonathan Chait's sprawling takedown of what he describes as a dangerous resurgence of political correctness in the 21st century. In his telling, a "PC culture" that flourished on college campuses in the '90s is back, stronger than ever thanks to Twitter and social media, and it's been crippling political discourse — and maybe even democracy itself.

There have been elated cosigns . There has been sharp pushback .

I'm not the first to point out that Chait offers little in the way of hard evidence to back up his warnings. He gives a lot of weight to comments lifted from a Facebook page and an incident in which a feminist studies professor shoved a protester. He also notes the complaints lodged by a few high-profile and well-connected authors that Change.org petitions, Twitter hashtags and other forms of social media pushback have made them gun-shy about opinionating online.

But when we're worrying over the future of human communication — and the future of democracy — anecdotes and isolated incidents are only part of the conversation. They aren't enough on their own. And since Chait doesn't present research on how political correctness may or may not affect the way people exchange ideas, I decided to go looking for it.

Michelle Duguid, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, has co-authored one such study, inspired by an offhand debate with some colleagues over whether political correctness hurts or helps productivity. Unlike the rest of us, Duguid and her peers had the means to empirically test their positions. The result is a study published last year by Cornell University .

Here's how the study worked: The researchers asked hundreds of college students to brainstorm new business ideas for an empty restaurant space on campus. But first, they separated the students into groups and instructed some of the groups to discuss an instance of political correctness they'd heard or personally experienced. They did this to effectively put the notion of political correctness into their collective heads and impose what they call a "PC norm" on the group as a whole. (You can read the study for the science behind this.) Other groups got no such instruction.

The researchers found that groups that had both men and women and had been exposed to the PC norm went on to generate more ideas — and more novel ideas — for how to use the vacant lot than the mixed-gender groups that hadn't discussed political correctness. (The ideas were graded for "novelty" by an independent panel, based on how much an idea diverged from the rest.)

The researchers' takeaway: By imposing a PC environment, they had made it easier for men and women to speak their minds in mixed company. They had "reduced the uncertainty" that can come with interacting with someone from the opposite sex.

"Our work challenges the widespread assumption that true creativity requires a kind of anarchy in which people are permitted to speak their minds, whatever the consequence," Jack Goncalo, the study's lead author, has said .

"The big part of it that we found is that you should act a certain way [in any group setting] and there are sanctions if you don't act in that way," Duguid told me.

All groups have implied norms — maybe around political correctness, say, but also around things like how to dress or speak or pray — and not following those rules might earn furious side-eyes if not straight-up ostracism.

What's more, the researchers believe political correctness could have "similar, and perhaps even stronger effects" in groups with other kinds of diversity, like race, "which can heighten uncertainty and trigger anxiety."

"Until the uncertainty caused by demographic differences can be overcome within diverse groups," they conclude, "the effort to be PC can be justified not merely on moral grounds, but also by the practical and potentially profitable consequences of facilitating the exchange of creative ideas."

That is to say, it's a lot easier for people in mixed company — i.e., everywhere, increasingly — to come up with great ideas together with the benefit of a social blueprint.

Duguid warned me that my hunt for more peer-reviewed research on the subject of political correctness and group dynamics would be short. She called the field "barren," and indeed her study is the only one I've found so far that looks squarely at political correctness and speech.

And to be sure, this study measured creativity in a workplace-like setting, while Chait's major concern is the marketplace of ideas. He's not necessarily suggesting that PC culture is bad for business. It's liberal discourse that's under assault, he warns, and political correctness threatens to take the very foundations of democracy down with it.

"Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree," Chait writes.

But I would argue that the Cornell study has a place in this conversation. It's measuring people's abilities to communicate with each other in productive ways, as well as the ways imposing constraints on speech helps or hurts that effort. It's not that big a jump to apply implications for workplace performance to the realm of political effectiveness.

Chait's certainly right about one thing: The culture wars play out differently in the age of social media. But the rancor we see on Twitter may not be an indication that political correctness is making it harder to talk to each other. It may be simply be a byproduct of where the debate is taking place. The rules of engagement on social media platforms are in their infancy; after all, Twitter only introduced a "report abuse" button in 2013 . And Twitter, famously, magnifies voices, meaning a few dedicated, sufficiently loud dissenters in a conversation can sometimes feel like an angry, critical mass. It's much harder to encourage — or trick — the thousands of people fighting across a given Twitter hashtag into norms of politeness than a controlled group of study participants.

It's just one study, but we know that political correctness is a measurable thing. Future studies might even bear out Chait's thesis. But marshaling a whole bunch of compelling anecdotes about the pernicious effects of political correctness isn't enough to make Chait's point true.

Rethinking Political Correctness

by Robin J. Ely , Debra Meyerson and Martin N. Davidson

Summary .   

Reprint: R0609D

Legal and cultural changes over the past 40 years ushered unprecedented numbers of women and people of color into companies’ professional ranks. Laws now protect these traditionally underrepresented groups from blatant forms of discrimination in hiring and promotion. Meanwhile, political correctness has reset the standards for civility and respect in people’s day-to-day interactions.

Despite this obvious progress, the authors’ research has shown that political correctness is a double-edged sword. While it has helped many employees feel unlimited by their race, gender, or religion, the PC rule book can hinder people’s ability to develop effective relationships across race, gender, and religious lines. Companies need to equip workers with skills—not rules—for building these relationships.

The authors offer the following five principles for healthy resolution of the tensions that commonly arise over difference: Pause to short-circuit the emotion and reflect; connect with others, affirming the importance of relationships; question yourself to identify blind spots and discover what makes you defensive; get genuine support that helps you gain a broader perspective; and shift your mind-set from one that says, “You need to change,” to one that asks, “What can I change?”

When people treat their cultural differences—and related conflicts and tensions—as opportunities to gain a more accurate view of themselves, one another, and the situation, trust builds and relationships become stronger. Leaders should put aside the PC rule book and instead model and encourage risk taking in the service of building the organization’s relational capacity. The benefits will reverberate through every dimension of the company’s work.

A white manager fears she will be perceived as racist if she gives critical feedback to her Latino subordinate. A black engineer passed over for promotion wonders whether his race has anything to do with it, but he’s reluctant to raise this concern lest he be seen as “playing the race card.” A woman associate who wants to make partner in an accounting firm resists seeking coaching on her leadership style; she worries that doing so would confirm the notion that women don’t have what it takes to make partner.

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The Purpose of Political Correctness

Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian , has covered many of the cultural and political controversies that have emerged in the U.S. and Britain over the past half decade, including debates over Islamophobia and the cultural aspects of Brexit. In her first book, “ We Need New Stories: The Myths That Subvert Freedom ,” Malik argues that much of the angst and anger over “cancel culture” and free speech are the result of misleading stories that Americans tell themselves. Her aim, she writes, is to “tackle the ways in which history, race, gender, and classical liberal values are being leveraged to halt any disruption of a centuries-old hierarchy that is paying dividends for fewer and fewer people.”

I recently spoke by phone with Malik, who was born in Sudan and lives in London. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the state of free speech, how much of cancel culture is really corporate damage control, and why the work of the anti-racism consultant Robin DiAngelo represents “an extreme bout of group narcissism.”

It seems to me that fights over political correctness or cancel culture are happening more within liberal institutions. Does that seem accurate?

That is entirely accurate. The front line has moved, as you accurately point out, from between right and left, or right and progressive, to within progressive circles and within liberal circles. And now we’re hand-wringing about these issues as well—political correctness and freedom of speech.

Free speech is a really big one that liberal institutions, liberal media institutions in particular, are quite disturbed by. And that’s a new development, and it’s a function of three things. One is the success of the right in mainstreaming these negative notions about progressive or left-wing culture, or social-political activism culture in general. The second reason is that liberal spaces have become really quite preoccupied—especially since the election of Donald Trump, in America, and the Brexit vote, in the United Kingdom—with the sense that the right is doing something right, and we were doing something wrong. And, actually, maybe we need to be more tolerant or more curious or more engaged or more open to these notions that we had rejected before. And now they have come roaring back at us and taken us completely by surprise. So it’s also a crisis of confidence within liberal spaces and within the liberal media.

The third thing is just the proliferation of social-media channels. There is now so much content out there that, before, we just didn’t see, or that liberal institutions weren’t particularly exposed to. These debates were confined to the academy and activist spaces. And now they’re everywhere, and liberal institutions, be they political parties or media organizations, have to reckon with how to deal with this kind of content—what to amplify, what to ignore. And, in that reckoning, they have become embroiled in it themselves.

Do you think, though, that these institutions are at risk of losing something valuable? I know you don’t see it as a free-speech issue, but do you think that there is a real danger of losing valuable ideas?

I do agree that these conversations that are happening within these liberal spaces are legitimate and valid and sometimes concerning. I’m not tempted to say that just because there is no cancel-culture crisis or there is no free-speech crisis it doesn’t mean that what is happening within liberal institutions in terms of limits on what people feel like they’re allowed to say, what people feel that they are permitted to get away with, in terms of slightly divergent political positions, is not a worry.

The thing that I think is happening falls along multiple lines. It’s, in part, a generational issue. There is a clear generational divide between people who feel like there needs to be less tolerance of certain political positions, certain opinions, certain views on race, on gender, on sexuality. I think the younger generation has a much more zero-tolerance approach to these things.

But there is a second part to that dynamic, which is that there are also more people in those liberal spaces that fall on the sharp end of the debates that people previously were quite indulgent of. There are more people of color. There are more people from immigrant backgrounds. There are more people who are gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, and the progress that we have seen in liberal institutions in opening up their doors to people from different backgrounds means that there is now a conflict about agreed-upon red lines that existed in those places before those people came in. And so it’s also a discussion about how a society expands and includes new people in these spaces that are very influential and that manage and amplify national debates on quite controversial or quite sensitive issues.

We can’t expect that to happen without some messiness or excess. And that’s where I disagree with people who have a moral panic about excessive patrolling of what people are allowed to say or what they’re not allowed to say in the public space or in the media. Excesses are expected, but they are not everything. We can’t collapse everything into the excesses or the transgressions that we see in these spaces, where people go too far in insisting that certain views or certain people who hold those views are ejected or shunned from their jobs or from polite society. I think that we should try to use them as guiding points in how we plot the path forward and how we calibrate our responses. But to expect these huge shifts in the makeup of the media and liberal spaces to happen without incident is unrealistic.

I perceive much of what’s going on along the lines of what you said, that people are being brought into élite institutions, and there’s this huge earthquake happening. It does seem, though, in America at least, that some of the excesses are being driven more by college-educated white people than by people of color.

That aspect of it is purely because white people still dominate these spaces in which we see these excesses. So I see this particularly in publishing, and it’s been a personal frustration of mine to see publishing open up so much to people of color, but only with respect to race-related grievance nonfiction or race-related grievance fictional suffering porn. Marginalized identities and marginalized views, by the nature of being marginalized, do not own the means of cultural production. They’re not in the newsrooms. They’re not in the commissioning meetings in publishing houses. They’re not on the boards of U.S. colleges. And, because white people are over-empowered or overconfident when it comes to their correct politics—not political correctness—they then go and enact what they think is the correct way to be an ally. And most times these ways are narcissistic, self-involved, and actually detrimental to the wider cause.

One thing that we have to be very mindful of is that, when there are offers of big cultural or corporate concessions to the demands of, for example, race-equality movements, those offers are not for us. They are not for the marginalized. They are not for people on the periphery. They are for the white consumers of politically correct, or politically-consonant-with-the-moment products. And those products are books. They are news articles. They are sometimes literal soup packets and milk bottles that have different branding on them. Then we end up in a situation where we prop up the status quo by catering to the white consumer’s guilt and the white consumer’s desire to appear politically aware and have the right credentials.

Did you follow the story in which the Philip Roth biography was discontinued by Norton after allegations of sexual assault against the author, Blake Bailey ? (Bailey has denied the allegations.)

Yes, they are my publisher. So I have to.

This seemed to me like a corporate damage-control situation, where the publisher had screwed up by not taking seriously initial allegations against Bailey. So they did damage control, in the form of pulling the book, which everyone I talked to seems to think was bad. Now you are unable to get a book, which some people see as an abridgment of speech, but no one is happy about the situation, and no one feels this was a good thing for women’s rights or social justice.

Yeah. Cancel culture, in many instances, if one bothers to look underneath the hood, is corporate damage-control culture. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as nicely as “cancel culture,” and what the commercial entity sees is not what you and I see. It doesn’t see the contours of the social, racial, or gender-related grievance. All it sees are dollar signs or lack thereof. And so its response is, “How much of a risk is this to us?” They don’t make these decisions based on a commitment to higher principles such as free speech, or because they believe in a particular thing that they want to produce. In the end, books are products. And the people who publish books are vulnerable to public opinion.

Milo Yiannopoulos’s book was withdrawn by his publisher for no other reason than that Milo had made controversial comments about having sex with minors. Milo had said several things for many years beforehand that were controversial, but this was seen as one that was particularly commercially damaging. All the language that Milo’s publisher was using before it made the decision to withdraw his book was about these lofty ideals, about free speech, about how it can’t get involved in curating the public marketplace of ideas. You know, all they do is take people’s ideas and their experiences and they publish them, and they basically have no active role. And then, suddenly, they had a very active role.

One thing that does seem different to me about corporations now, though, is that they are often concerned about their employees and also the consumer. I think that social media is part of this, because employees have their own outlet to talk about these things. And this also goes to the age difference you were talking about.

Yes. In the book, I talk about something called growing pains. This is a function or a feature of growing pains in a society. And you’re right—these institutions, publishing houses, corporations, people are worried about their employees turning against them and exposing them in public spaces. You have more nascent whistle-blowers than you would’ve had ten years ago, and that is a function of social media.

I guess the choice of the word “whistle-blower” comes down to whether you think these things are good or bad.

Yeah. It’s very hard to be someone who is actually quite excited and inspirited by these belated transformations that are happening in these élite liberal institutions, while also seeing incidents that seem like the pendulum swinging too much to the other side, that do seem like overcorrections. It’s a very bloodless thing to say, but that’s what happens when change takes long to happen. You get a situation in which you are stormed, as opposed to things happening in a regulated, modulated, sensible way. When you don’t manage change well, you end up with a sort of coup, and coups are nasty.

And I’ve seen things that are concerning, when people have committed a professional error or faux pas and then been punished for it by losing their jobs, even though they have gone through an internal process of adjudication and discipline, because it had come out into the public space. That I find concerning. You start then behaving like politicians, and you start thinking about reputational damage. You start thinking, Maybe we just throw this person under the bus to show that we are moving in the right direction. And so that method is one I find extremely disconcerting, because real people are getting caught up in it. But to collapse all of it into that, I think, is not accurate.

We were talking about corporate damage control, and you said you didn’t think that it was ideological. Robin DiAngelo’s work on white fragility has been used by a lot of corporations for training seminars, but her book is also developing what you might call an ideology, and one held not by underrepresented communities but by educated white people.

I think it’s only an ideology insofar as it is an extreme bout of group narcissism. I don’t think that there is any sort of politically transformative goal behind it, other than to further reinforce white liberal narcissism. And it’s basically so flamboyantly extra, right? Which I think is a giveaway, in this performative-solidarity literature and performative-solidarity consumption of that literature. It makes me think that it is actually more about engaging in cultish self-help trends or self-improvement trends than it is about wanting to enact profound change in which your demographic loses quite a lot of capital actually, if you were to do it right.

The second reason why it’s a kind of group narcissism is that it promotes this notion that identity politics is about easing the passage of people of color in élite spaces. It’s about being nice to them. It’s about accommodating them and understanding how white people need to undo so much of their programming so that they can welcome people of color in their own spaces. It’s about giving people a piece of the pie, as it were. And so, instead of helping the grass roots to drive and push the periphery more toward the center—for example, by encouraging participatory democracy, voter registration, etc.—all it does is it basically expands the weekend barbecue. It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians. So, while we are busying ourselves with corporate H.R. techniques, a ground movement of entitled white grievance has been building up in the United States.

You say in the book that we could do with more political correctness rather than less. Where do you think that we need more political correctness?

Well, I think we need more political correctness in the way that we have commodified people’s pain in our media discourse. One of the things that have been very difficult to see over the past five years, in particular, is this creation of an almost Colosseum-like public arena, where people shout at one another, and abuse one another, and we bring down the dignity of people as they try to make points about their safety and their respect.

For example, the Muslim ban was a very big moment in my life, because it was so clear to me that we had reached a point where we had so dehumanized Muslims in our public consciousness and in the public space that it became possible to enact that kind of law, and the ensuing discussion was people kind of equivocating, right? People being, like, we need to figure out what’s happening with the bad Muslims, so we can keep the good Muslims in. All of that was extremely undignified, extremely painful, extremely detrimental to the perception of Muslims. I think it’s a function of people on the right, in particular, thinking that having less political correctness was the way forward.

It’s just about respect. It’s about how, when you extend a certain sanctity of language and dignity to human beings, that then extends to their real life. And so, when I say we need more political correctness, I’m talking primarily in the realm of the media, where, on the opposite side of the spectrum to the discussions that we were having earlier about the constrictions of liberal space, we also have seen a commodification of the conflict between identities. I think that has been damaging to the public discourse. I think that it has contributed to racial tension and has contributed to a general fraying of our relationships. And so the reason I encourage political correctness is that it’s tense out there. We all are bringing certain ideas, certain backgrounds, certain religions to the discourse. And the only way we can oil that conversation is to extend the protocols of political correctness to everyone.

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The Two Kinds of PC

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When I went to college in the late 1970s, a few of my professors still referred to female students as “girls.” Many of us spoke of Asian people as “Orientals.” And a physical education instructor taught me to shoot a basketball with a flick of the wrist that we called the “faggy wave.”

But I also engaged in lengthy debates -- inside and outside the classroom -- over abortion and affirmative action. Everyone understood that these were hotly contested questions in American society. So we assumed that they should be vigorously debated at American colleges, too.

It’s rare to hear outright slurs against women or minorities on campus today, which is a very good thing. But we also don’t encounter a full range of opinion about controversial public issues, especially those dealing with race and gender. And that’s because of political correctness, which comes in two very different forms that we too often confuse with each other.

Political correctness one (PC-1) aims to change our language for describing human difference, so it doesn’t demean others. When a professor calls his female students “girls,” he’s implicitly questioning their membership in the adult community. It’s a matter of basic decency to use another term.

It’s also a way of helping all of us to communicate across our differences. If you want to have a substantive conversation with an Asian person, calling her “Oriental” isn’t a good way to start. It’s better to follow a few simple PC-1 rules, which signal the mutual respect that real dialogue requires.

By contrast, political correctness two (PC-2) inhibits that dialogue by imposing liberal political orthodoxies. It’s not just about using the right words, so that everyone feels included and respected. It tries to promulgate a set of right answers, thereby constraining our discussion of important questions.

Consider affirmative action, which remains the great undebated issue in American higher education. According to a 2006 survey by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, which they reported in Professors and Their Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 43 percent of American professors oppose race-based affirmative action in college admissions. But you almost never hear them speaking out against it, because -- yes -- it has become politically incorrect to do so.

On abortion, meanwhile, a 2005 study reported that 84 percent of professors were “strongly or somewhat” pro-choice. But that means about one out of seven professors was opposed to abortion rights. And you wouldn’t know that from listening to our dialogues on campus, where most pro-life faculty members keep quiet.

Likewise, our students have learned to bite their tongues if they dissent from PC-2. Every semester, conservative students “come out” to me in their essays and exams. When I urge them to share their views in class, their reply is always the same: we’ll be ridiculed or shouted down.

In a 2010 survey asking college students whether it was “safe to hold unpopular positions on college campuses,” only 40 percent of freshmen “strongly” agreed. And just 30 percent of seniors did so, suggesting that students feel more constrained by PC-2 the longer they are in college.

Of course, PC-1 imposes constraints of its own. So what? It should be politically incorrect to call grown women “girls” or Asians “Orientals.” Listening to Donald Trump and his followers, you might think that these new terms represent a totalitarian threat to American liberties. But it’s hard to see how Trump -- or anyone else -- is harmed when we ask them to use a more respectful vocabulary for describing their fellow citizens.

The real harm arises when we try to enforce the revised terminology with official sanctions and penalties. In their zeal to promote PC-1, too many of our colleges and universities have enacted speech codes that bar insulting or offensive language regarding race, gender, sexuality and more.

Every court that has examined these codes has found them unconstitutional. Speech codes make slur-spouting bigots into First Amendment martyrs. And they reinforce the real danger to free speech on campus, which is ideological rather than linguistic.

If a college bans racist statements, critics of affirmative action will be less likely to speak their minds lest they stand accused of racism themselves. If it bars sexist comments, anti-abortion voices will be constrained. And if homophobic speech is prohibited, faculty members and students who oppose same-sex marriage will be discouraged from sharing their point of view. That can’t be good for our colleges or even for the liberal causes that so many of us hold dear, which can only benefit from a full and complete debate.

Terms like “Oriental” and “faggy wave” inhibit that debate, and I’m ashamed that I ever used them. But I’m also ashamed that many of our colleges and universities have created new restrictions on opinion that stifle discussion as much as the old slurs did. The question is whether we can find the language -- and the courage -- to engage in a real debate about the issues that divide us. Politically correct words can help promote conversation. Politically correct pieties will kill it.

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In 1948, a renowned British journalist, George Orwell, wrote his famous novel 1984 , in which he described a totalitarian society where people had no freedom to express their thoughts without fear. In this novel, the government, in order to limit citizens’ capacity of thinking about censored topics, invented a new language, Newspeak , which widely used euphemisms for omitting prohibited words. In Newspeak , many words were simply excluded, because if there was no word to determine a crime, then the crime itself could not be committed. This strongly correlates to the modern phenomena of political correctness, which has a similar approach and ethical value.

The concept of political correctness seems ridiculous and ineffective due to the aggregate of several factors. The first of them is that expressions meant to omit an “uncomfortable” topic still directly point at it. For example, if you call a blind individual “a person with sight disorders” it will still point to their blindness, and possess the same meaning – the inability to see. By calling someone “African American” when they are not from Africa, you are trying not to say “black,” thus giving off the impression that you feel the word “black” is an insulting word worth avoiding, which in turn makes it insulting because you appear like you think it is (GeekoSystem). Thus, by this criteria, political correctness fails to prove its efficiency.

The inefficiency of political correctness becomes even more obvious when it comes to words and phrases which are assessed as potentially insulting. In 2012, the New York City Department of Education published a list of 50 words that can be considered insulting (CBS New York). It is not clear how such words and expressions as, for instance, dinosaur, birthday, divorce, computers in the home, homes with swimming pools, politics, religion , or television and video games can offend other people. If authorities think the word “divorce” insults a child whose parents had separated, than they should consider that the word “marriage” can be insulting for these children as well. According to this logic, too many potentially insulting phrases must be prohibited from use, which is far from rational.

Politically correct language limits communication and impoverishes language, as it is not natural. People constantly have to mind what they say in fear of getting sued or physically harmed, which leads to increasing stress. In its turn, stress causes people to become less aware and more irritated, which can result in an already calculated insult. People are responsible only for their own words and reactions; to some extent, we must be aware of what we say to others, but we must not predict and guess the reactions of our interlocutors to the words we use all the time. Therefore, it is natural when people use direct words instead of “politically correct” substitutes. One can never truly know when they insult another person; it is impossible to be nice and pleasant to everyone in respect to the words we employ; thus, trying to comfort everyone by intentionally substituting necessary and habitual words is a wasted labor.

Political correctness is an artificial concept of omitting potentially abusing words to comfort people who potentially could get insulted by them. In reality, the practice of political correctness does not prove itself to be efficient due to several factors. Politically correct words and phrases still describe the terms which are being omitted; besides, the fact of using politically correct formulations marks neutral concepts as such, which can be offending. For political correctness to achieve its goals, too many words have to be banned. Also, politically correct language is not natural for most individuals; it causes stress and irritation, and burdens people with the responsibility for the reactions and feelings of the people they communicate with.

References Plafke, James. “Why You Should Stop Worrying About Offending People.” GeekoSystem. N.p., 28 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 June 2013. <http://www.geekosystem.com/fallacy-political-correctness-trying-not-to-offend/>.

“War On Words: NYC Dept. Of Education Wants 50 ‘Forbidden’ Words Banned From Standardized Tests.” CBS New York. N.p., 26 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 June 2013. <http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/03/26/war-on-words-nyc-dept-of-education-wants-50-forbidden-words-removed-from-standardized-tests/>.

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Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture

Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either.

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “ Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape ,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.

Read: An optimist’s guide to political correctness

The study was written by More in Common, an organization founded in memory of Jo Cox, the British MP who was murdered in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. It is based on a nationally representative poll with 8,000 respondents, 30 one-hour interviews, and six focus groups conducted from December 2017 to September 2018.

If you look at what Americans have to say on issues such as immigration, the extent of white privilege, and the prevalence of sexual harassment, the authors argue, seven distinct clusters emerge: progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.

Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either.

Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. As one 40-year-old American Indian in Oklahoma said in his focus group, according to the report:

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. So political correctness in that sense is scary.

The one part of the standard narrative that the data partially affirm is that African Americans are most likely to support political correctness. But the difference between them and other groups is much smaller than generally supposed: Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem.

If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education.

While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.

Political tribe—as defined by the authors—is an even better predictor of views on political correctness. Among devoted conservatives, 97 percent believe that political correctness is a problem. Among traditional liberals, 61 percent do. Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.

Read: The threat of tribalism

So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

One obvious question is what people mean by “political correctness.” In the extended interviews and focus groups, participants made clear that they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them. But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind.

There is, however, plenty of additional support for the idea that the social views of most Americans are not nearly as neatly divided by age or race as is commonly believed. According to the Pew Research Center, for example, only 26 percent of black Americans consider themselves liberal . And in the More in Common study, nearly half of Latinos argued that “many people nowadays are too sensitive to how Muslims are treated,” while two in five African Americans agreed that “immigration nowadays is bad for America.”

In the days before “Hidden Tribes” was published, I ran a little experiment on Twitter , asking my followers to guess what percentage of Americans believe that political correctness is a problem in this country. The results were striking: Nearly all of my followers underestimated the extent to which most Americans reject political correctness. Only 6 percent gave the right answer. (When I asked them how people of color regard political correctness, their guesses were, unsurprisingly, even more wildly off .)

Obviously, my followers on Twitter are not a representative sample of America. But as their largely supportive feelings about political correctness indicate , they are probably a decent approximation for a particular intellectual milieu to which I also belong: politically engaged, highly educated, left-leaning Americans—the kinds of people, in other words, who are in charge of universities, edit the nation’s most important newspapers and magazines, and advise Democratic political candidates on their campaigns.

So the fact that we are so widely off the mark in our perception of how most people feel about political correctness should probably also make us rethink some of our other basic assumptions about the country.

It is obvious that certain elements on the right mock instances in which political correctness goes awry in order to win the license to spew outright racial hatred. And it is understandable that, in the eyes of some progressives, this makes anybody who dares to criticize political correctness a witting tool of—or a useful idiot for—the right. But that’s not fair to the Americans who feel deeply alienated by woke culture. Indeed, while 80 percent of Americans believe that political correctness has become a problem in the country, even more, 82 percent, believe that hate speech is also a problem.

It turns out that while progressive activists tend to think that only hate speech is a problem, and devoted conservatives tend to think that only political correctness is a problem, a clear majority of all Americans holds a more nuanced point of view: They abhor racism. But they don’t think that the way we now practice political correctness represents a promising way to overcome racial injustice.

The study should also make progressives more self-critical about the way in which speech norms serve as a marker of social distinction. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affluent and highly educated people who call others out if they use “problematic” terms or perpetrate an act of “cultural appropriation.” But what the vast majority of Americans seem to see—at least according to the research conducted for “Hidden Tribes”—is not so much genuine concern for social justice as the preening display of cultural superiority.

David Frum: Every culture appropriates

For the millions upon millions of Americans of all ages and all races who do not follow politics with rapt attention, and who are much more worried about paying their rent than about debating the prom dress worn by a teenager in Utah, contemporary callout culture merely looks like an excuse to mock the values or ignorance of others. As one 57- year-old woman in Mississippi fretted:

The way you have to term everything just right. And if you don’t term it right you discriminate them. It’s like everybody is going to be in the know of what people call themselves now and some of us just don’t know. But if you don’t know then there is something seriously wrong with you.

The gap between the progressive perception and the reality of public views on this issue could do damage to the institutions that the woke elite collectively run. A publication whose editors think they represent the views of a majority of Americans when they actually speak to a small minority of the country may eventually see its influence wane and its readership decline. And a political candidate who believes she is speaking for half of the population when she is actually voicing the opinions of one-fifth is likely to lose the next election.

In a democracy, it is difficult to win fellow citizens over to your own side, or to build public support to remedy injustices that remain all too real, when you fundamentally misunderstand how they see the world.

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What Is Political Correctness? Definition, Pros, and Cons

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“Political correctness” is the process of speaking without offending anyone. Love it or hate it, what was once considered simple “good manners,” has become far more involved, and frankly, controversial. Exactly what is political correctness, where did it come from, and why do we love to argue about it?

Key Takeaways: Political Correctness

• Political correctness (PC) refers to language that avoids offending persons of various genders, races, sexual orientations, cultures, or social conditions.
• One of the most commonly stated goals of political correctness is the elimination of verbal discrimination and negative stereotyping.
• The demand for political correctness is often controversial and becomes the source of criticism and satire.
• Critics argue that political correctness cannot change the underlying feelings that lead to discrimination and social marginalization.
• Political correctness is now a common weapon in the cultural and political war between American conservatives and liberals.

Political Correctness Definition

The term political correctness describes written or spoken language that's intentionally phrased to avoid offending or marginalizing groups identified by certain social characteristics, such as race, gender , sexual orientation , or ability. Beyond the obvious avoidance of overt slurs, political correctness also includes the avoidance of terms that reinforce preconceived negative stereotypes. The elimination of verbal discrimination is often considered one of the main goals of political correctness.

Since the 1980s, the increasing demand for political correctness has been alternately praised, criticized, and satirized by commentators from all corners of the political spectrum . The term is sometimes applied derisively in order to ridicule the idea that language is capable of change—or that the public’s perceptions and prejudices against certain groups can change through language.

Among the more subtle forms of political correctness is the avoidance of the use of microaggressions —brief off-hand comments or actions that either intentionally or unintentionally express negative prejudicial slights toward any marginalized or minority group. For example, telling an Asian-American student, “You people always get good grades,” while possibly meant as a compliment, may be taken as a microaggressive slur.

A relatively new form of being politically correct is to avoid “mansplaining.” A combination of “man” and “explaining,” mansplaining is a form of political incorrectness in which men marginalize women by attempting to explain something to them—often unnecessarily—in a condescending, oversimplified, or childlike manner.

History of Political Correctness

In the United States, the term “politically correct” first appeared in 1793, when it was used in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Chisholm v. Georgia dealing with the rights of state citizens to sue state governments in U.S. federal courts. During the 1920s, the term was used in political discussions between American communists and socialists to refer to a strict, almost dogmatic, adherence to the Soviet Union’s Communist Party doctrine, which socialists considered to be the “correct” position in all political issues.

The term was first used sarcastically during the late 1970s and early 1980s by moderate-to-liberal politicians to refer to the stance of extreme left-wing liberals on some issues considered by the moderates to be frivolous or of little actual importance to their causes. In the early 1990s, conservatives had begun using “political correctness” in a pejorative manner criticizing the teaching and advocacy of what they considered left-wing liberal ideology “gone wild” in U.S. colleges, universities, and liberal-leaning media.

In May 1991, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush used the term when he told the graduating class of the University of Michigan that, “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, and even certain gestures off-limits.”

Today, PC culture—a theoretical purely politically correct society—is most commonly associated with movements such as gender-based bias, gay rights, and ethnic minority advocacy. For example, the PC culture prefers that the terms “spokesman” or “spokeswoman,” be replaced by the gender-neutral term “spokesperson.” However, the PC culture is not limited to social or political causes. To promote religious tolerance, “Merry Christmas” becomes “Happy Holidays,” and a demand for simple empathy asks that “mental retardation” be replaced with “intellectual disability.”

In December 1990, Newsweek magazine summarized conservatives’ concerns by equating the PC culture to a sort of a modern Orwellian “thought police” in an article asking, “Is This the New Enlightenment or the New McCarthyism?” However, it was Dinesh D'Souza's 1998 book “Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus” that first caused the general public to question the benefits, motives, and sociological effects of the political correctness movement.

Pros and Cons

Advocates of the process of political correctness argue that our perception of other people is greatly influenced by the language we hear used about them. Language, therefore, when used carelessly or maliciously, can reveal and promote our biases against various identity groups. In this manner, the strict use of politically correct language helps to prevent the marginalization and social exclusion of those groups.

Persons opposed to political correctness regard it as a form of censorship that quashes freedom of speech and dangerously restricts public debate on important social issues. They further accuse advocates of an extreme PC culture of creating offensive language where none had existed before. Others argue that the very term “political correctness” can be used in ways that can actually hinder attempts to stop hate and discriminatory speech.

Opponents point to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey which showed that 59 percent of Americans felt “too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use.” According to Pew, while most people naturally try to avoid using language that offends others, extreme examples of politically correct terms tend to devalue the English language and lead to confusion.

Finally, those opposed to political correctness argue that telling people that it is socially wrong for them to express their feelings and beliefs in certain ways will not make those feelings and beliefs go away. Sexism, for example, will not end by simply referring to salesmen and saleswomen as “salespersons.” Similarly, referring to the homeless as “temporarily displaced” will not create jobs or wipe out poverty.

While some people might swallow their politically incorrect words, they will not abandon the feelings that motivated them. Instead, they will hold those feelings inside to fester and become even more toxic and harmful.

• Alder, Jerry; Starr, Mark. “Taking Offense: Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism?” Newsweek (December 1990)
• Gibson, Caitlin. “ How ‘politically correct’ went from compliment to insult .” Washington Post. (January 13, 2016)
• U.S. President George H.W. Bush. Remarks at the University of Michigan Commencement Ceremony in Ann Arbor, 4 May 1991 George Bush Presidential Library
• D'Souza, Dinesh. “Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.” Free Press; (October 1, 1998). ISBN-10: 9780684863849
• Chow, Kat. "Politically Correct': The Phrase Has Gone From Wisdom to Weapon." NPR (December 14, 2016)
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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Political Correctness — The Impact Of Political Correctness On Our Everyday Lives

The Impact of Political Correctness on Our Everyday Lives

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Political correctness essay.

Early twentieth-century Marxists pioneered the concept of political correctness, or PC, using it literally and positively to denote the single correct stance, or line of action, on a specific political issue under prevailing conditions. A seminal example is Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse-Tung’s 1927 speech “On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party,” which begins by criticizing “various non-proletarian ideas which greatly hinder the carrying out of the Party’s correct line.”

In the 1980s, conservatives in the United States, Europe, and Latin America appropriated the term from the Marxists in an ironic critique of dogmatic tendencies of liberal and leftist groups. Purporting to be open-minded and tolerant, conservatives came to satirizing these groups for claiming to have discovered the single correct view on a wide range of controversial issues, including affirmative action, crime, parenting, multiculturalism, hate speech, feminism, welfare, economic regulation, and environmental protection.

The Essence Of Political Correctness

Conservatives thus deflected longstanding criticism of themselves as rigid and intolerant, invading the traditional liberal turf of reasonableness, flexibility, and tolerance. However, despite its leftish connotations, political correctness is best conceived as an ideological narrowing, intolerance, and silencing of dissent all across the political spectrum. Although conservatives have succeeded in exposing small-mindedness among “progressives,” the latter have countered that conservatives exhibit their own PC.

A telling sign of all PC is its tendency, especially among activists and ideologues, to discourage rather than engage diverse opinions and to proscribe offending topics as off-limits for open and frank discussion. A common example of leftwing PC is depicting critics of affirmative action as necessarily racist or sexist. On the right-wing side, after the 9/11 attacks, PC conservatives portrayed critics of U.S. foreign policy as unpatriotic and even treasonous. Similarly, PC centrists often depict any views that stray from the middle of the road as inherently flawed and “extremist.” In a sense, PC is a thoroughly democratic tool available all across the ideological spectrum, as anyone can use it—or derision of it—to pummel adversaries without requiring any special authorization.

Problems Of Political Correctness

In the 1970s, a smattering of the new left self-critically referred to their own politically correct tendencies—a critique of the left virtually taken over by conservatives a decade later. By the late 1990s, an increasing number of progressives were expressing renewed doubts about left-wing PC among their peers. An awareness grew that PC, while providing clarity and comfort for the like-minded and according respect to the marginalized, could also undermine one’s own cause by limiting one’s field of vision and discouraging self-correction.

For instance, after Republican president Richard Nixon used the racial preferences of the 1969 Philadelphia Plan for affirmative action to divide and conquer the Democrats’s two main allies—labor unions and civil rights groups— liberals’ increasing support for affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s may have unwittingly promoted the conservative agenda. By stifling dissent about group preferences and their divisive effects, liberal PC possibly played into the hands of supporters of the socioeconomic status quo.

Similarly, conservative PC within George W. Bush’s administration arguably damaged the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party by silencing internal critics of the Iraq War (2003–) and of deregulative, supply-side economics, leading to the Republican electoral catastrophe of 2008. More generally, the ideological blinders of PC narrow the alternatives and possibilities under consideration by whoever uses PC to stifle debate and promote political uniformity. This pattern suggests a self-defeating cognitive and behavioral process reflecting Harold Lass well’s psychological formula for political activism: unresolved personal conflicts displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of the public good.

This analysis, if accurate, suggests the counterintuitive inference that political groups might do well to tolerate or even encourage the PC proclivities of their opponents while striving to reduce their own. Ironically, Mao’s iconic speech promoting PC within the Communist Party of China offers, perhaps unwittingly, a corrective to the excesses of PC. While anchored in Marxist scientism alleging a single correct conclusion, Mao also criticized dogmatism and urged his comrades to engage in open and vigorous debate within the party—to be followed by strict party discipline in enforcing the view that ultimately prevailed. He explicitly discouraged the currying of favor with one’s political associates by politely taking safe positions in public.

The Price Of Challenging And Enforcing Political Correctness

Throughout history, the politically incorrect have paid a heavy price for their deviation from accepted norms. Socrates, for instance, paid with his life for encouraging Athenian youths to think for themselves in opposition to the thinking of powerful individuals and groups within their society. Since the 1980s, conservative organizations such as Accuracy in Academia have targeted numerous examples of political discrimination against conservatives who spoke or acted “incorrectly.” In 2002, Bill Maher’s network television show Politically Incorrect was canceled after Maher denied on air that group behind the 2001 attacks were cowards. In 2008, Christopher Buckley was fired from the conservative magazine National Review, founded by his father, William F. Buckley, for crossing party lines to endorse liberal Barack Obama for president.

Less often noted is the price paid by those who enforce PC, a point stressed by John Stuart Mill in his 1859 classic, On Liberty. Opinions are seldom completely right or wrong, Mill argued, and open discussion is the only way for partially correct opinions to come nearer to the truth. Even if a particular view happens to be correct, he went on, “if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.” It is the group, or the entire society, that suffers most by shielding itself from a wide and potentially enriching diversity of “correct” and “incorrect” views.

Political Correctness And Related Phenomena

It may be helpful to connect, yet distinguish, political correctness and four related phenomena. First, PC is a historically situated special case of political dogmatism. Second, the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries exhibit a good deal of PC from both the right and the left, but conservative defense of traditional values, like progressive promotion of multicultural ones, can be conducted in either an intolerant and dogmatic, PC, or open-minded and tolerant, non-PC, way. Third, PC constitutes a form of censorship, but unlike official or legal censorship, it works in mostly informal and even unconscious ways, as Lass well, Eric Hoffer, and others have implied in hypothesizing neurotic bases of political zealotry. Finally, many laypersons think of PC as a form of politeness, either appropriate or excessive, that militates against using offensive language or derogatory names, especially regarding groups with history of discrimination against them.

Political Correctness: Thriving But Challenged

As the first decade of the twenty-first century gave way to the second, references to political correctness continued to abound in the mass media. A 2009 Google search yielded millions of current or recent references to political correctness. The most widely read satirical periodical in the United States, The Onion, returned to Mao’s legacy by devoting an entire issue to contemporary Communist Chinese political correctness. The lead article, “China Strong,” reads satirically:

According to all sources, the People’s Republic of China is strong. The nation is united, the military unmatched, the economy vibrant, and the people ever joyful. Similarly correct sources verified that China has always been triumphant. In other news, the Chinese government is fair, all-knowing, and wise, propelled by the strength of two billion loyal hands, all pulling together as one under the Great Celestial Bureaucracy high above. Experts all agreed that there can be no question of this claim, as this claim is the truth.

Despite the partial accuracy of this mock claim, twenty-first–century Communist Chinese authorities have in fact been facing tens of thousands of grassroots rebellions annually all across the country—a warning, perhaps, of the costs of substituting political correctness for political correction.

Bibliography:

• Cummings, Michael S. Beyond Political Correctness. London: Lynne Rienner, 2001.
• Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer. New York: Perennial Library, 1951.
• Lasswell, Harold. Psychopathology and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.
• Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York:W.W. Norton, 1975.
• Skrentny, John. The Ironies of Affirmative Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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Political Correctness (PC) Gone Mad (Upper-Intermediate Lesson Plan)

ESL Level : Upper-Intermediate

Lesson Topic : Political Correctness (PC)

Skill Focus : Reading, Vocabulary, Speaking

Lesson Plan Download: political-correctness-upper-intermediate-24082019.docx

Approximate Class Time : Two hours

(Lesson plan written by Alistair Lee (copyright), guest contributor to Englishcurrent.com)

Political Correctness ESL Lesson Plan: Warm-Up

• What does political correctness (PC) mean?
• Are there examples of PC in your society?

ESL Lesson Plan: Vocabulary Matching

rogue = A man who is.. / makeover = completely changing... / catapult = a forked stick... / sphere = a round solid figure / reliable = consistently good.... / fondly = a likeable way / celery = a cultivated plant

Can you match the PC expressions on the left with their transactions on the right?

Exercise 2: A-boring, B-disorganized, C-old, D-ugly, E-bald, F-tall, G-stupid

Reading: 11 Examples of Political Correctness Gone Mad

• The BBC has dropped the use of the terms Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD) on one of their programmes and decided that the terms 'Before Common Era' / 'Common Era' are more appropriate.
• The European Parliament introduced proposals to outlaw titles stating marital status such as 'Miss' and 'Mrs.' so as not to cause offence. It also meant that 'Madame' and 'Mademoiselle', 'Frau' and 'Fraulein' and 'Senora' and 'Senorita' would be banned.
• Throughout several US councils and organisations, any terms using the word 'man' as a prefix or suffix have been ruled as not being politically correct. 'Manhole' is now referred to as a 'utility' or 'maintenance' hole.
• Loveable cartoon rogue Dennis the Menace has been given a politically correct makeover . BBC chiefs decided to take away his edge in the remake. Gone are his bombs, catapult , water pistol and pea-shooter - and in their place is a simple boyish grin.
• Spotted Dick - a classic English dessert has been renamed to avoid embarrassment. The traditional pud Spotted Dick has been given the title Spotted Richard , after UK council bosses feared the original name might cause offence.
• A school in Seattle renamed its Easter eggs 'spring spheres ' to avoid causing offence to people who did not celebrate Easter.
• A UK council has banned the term 'brainstorming' — and replaced it with 'thought showers', as local lawmakers thought the term may offend epileptics.
• A UK recruiter was stunned when her job advert for ' reliable ' and 'hard-working' applicants was rejected by the job centre as it could be offensive to unreliable and lazy people.
• Gillingham fans had begun to fondly offer celery to their goalkeeper, `Big Fat' Jim Stannard. The club, however, decided that celery could result in health and safety issues inside the ground. As a result, fans were subjected to celery searches with the ultimate sanction for possession of celery allegedly being a life ban.
• In 2007, Santa Clauses in Sydney, Australia, were banned from saying 'Ho Ho Ho'. Their employer, the recruitment firm Westaff (that supplies hundreds of Santas across Australia), allegedly told all trainees that 'ho ho ho' could frighten children, and be derogatory to women. Why? Because 'Ho Ho Ho' is too close to the American (not Australian, mind you) slang for prostitute.
• Some US schools now have a 'holiday tree' every Christmas, rather than a Christmas tree.

ESL Lesson Plan on Political Correctness: Post-Reading Questions

• Do you agree that these are examples of P.C. gone mad?
• Do any of them actually make sense?
• Can you think of any examples of PC in any of the countries which you've visited?

Some expressions introduced for PC reasons have become part of standard English now. Which do you think is the more PC expression in each case?

• An unmarried mother or single parent
• Children with special needs or educationally subnormal children
• A housewife or a homemaker
• Third-world countries or developing countries
• A refuse collector or a dustman
• A fireman or a firefighter
• African-American or Black American
• Hearing-impaired or deaf
• Slum or substandard housing
• An unmarried mother or single parent.
• Children with special needs or educationally subnormal children.
• A housewife or a homemaker .
• Third World countries or developing countries.
• A refuse collector or a dustman.
• A fireman or a firefighter.
• African-American or Black American.
• Hearing-impaired or deaf.
• Slum or substandard housing.

ESL Lesson Plan on Political Correctness: Discussion Questions

• Are the differences between people a reason to celebrate or a source of problems?
• Despite the differences, are people basically the same?
• Have you been the victim of discrimination? What kind of discrimination?
• Do people you know use racial slurs to refer to different groups of people? Or do they use more politically correct language?
• What are traditional male and female social roles and responsibilities? Are you a traditional person?
• Do you trust men or women more in any particular profession? How do you feel about male nurses? How about a female president?
• If someone tells a racist or sexist joke, how do you react? If you laugh, does that mean you are racist or sexist?
• Do you know any homosexual people? What kind of discrimination do they face?
• Who suffers more discrimination on the basis of age? Old people or young people?
• Are you a member of a religion? How does your religion treat members of other religions?
• Which types of people suffer the least discrimination? Are you one of them? If not, do you envy them?
• Is the level of discrimination in the world rising or dropping? What makes you think so?

-- Lesson plan written by Alistair Lee (copyright), guest contributor to Englishcurrent.com

4 comments on “ Political Correctness (PC) Gone Mad (Upper-Intermediate Lesson Plan) ”

Thanks for good ideas! I’ll add this video t complete the lesson https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=saved&v=3809573315795181

Thanks for this great lesson. It was really useful for my advanced class especially in conjunction with the video posted by Olga which gave a lighter feel and lots of opportunities for speaking. Great lesson! Thanks to both of you!

this did not help at allllllll ???!!!?!

it was rly helpful. thank you!

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