A Comment On "Political Correctness"

I've been a fly on the wall of a discussion taking place elsewhere, somewhere I am not welcome to contribute but which I still observe in an interested way. It is a discussion of the legacies of slavery, the genocidal dislocation of Native Americans, Jim Crow, Washington Consensus foreign policy, and ongoing institutional racism shaping aspirations for and distributing the effects of technoscientific changes in the present day.

I was hardly surprised when the discussion bodied forth the usual anguished cry of "political correctness" from some of the Very Serious White Guys of "The Future" who gathered there, some of whom go on predictably to make Very Serious supposedly hardboiled realistic comments about how colonial violence is a "done deal" and how there is no point in crying over spilled milk (or blood) and so on.

Of course, legacies of patriarchy, racism, slavery, colonialism, segregation, exploitation, heteronormativity, and naturalized violence continue to stratify the distribution of resources, capacities, recourse to law, access to opportunity here and now. This is not a "done deal" but, rather, very much still being dealt and being done. Either one attributes these stratifications to innate differences -- which is always bigotry, plain and simple -- or one attributes them to ongoing injustices -- which in turn either compels one to organize to redress them or one is indifferent to -- which is always bigotry again, again plain and simple.

Read that paragraph again. It is very important and I don't think it is that hard to understand, frankly.

Presumably, recognizing such facts is being annoyingly "PC" now, it is to unfairly and aggressively demand "political correctness" now on poor put-upon people just trying to have a good-humored good-faith discussions?

It's funny. I remember so vividly the intense discussions among academics and activists in the 80s and early 90s about canons and interlocking oppressions, in which the term "PC" was used to describe a form of attention to the actual impossibility of any clean escape from the complex con-fusing co-constructing co-facilitating legacies of past violations that meant good faith political discussions in the service of equity-in-diversity had to be especially sensitive and especially imaginative. I remember these discussions so vividly, I suppose, because these were the discussion in which I came into political consciousness as an earnest ignoramus in Atlanta in my early twenties, and which continue to shape me to this day, probably more than anything else.

It is simply weird to me how this kind of fraught sensitivity to difficulty was transformed in the popular imagination into the unilateral imposition of some harshly censorious code from a position of supposed know-it-alls. That a "PC"-sensitivity originated instead from a recognition of inevitably inadequate knowledge and the demand for compensatory sensitivity makes the popular understanding of "PC" that much more misplaced and ironic.

Of course, I assume any request for any kind of effort at all looks like unreasonable demands and cramped moralizing to privileged assholes who take their parochial assumptions and constituted authority as a natural given beyond question. No doubt from such a position of naturalized righteousness even the old-fashioned common sense idea of taking pains to be polite when one is in unfamiliar company feels like some kind of fascist conspiracy.

The thing is, plain and simple... it's not.