Category Archives: Political Correctness

Washington Post

Spicer says 'political correctness' infringes on 'freedom of religion' Washington Post February 2, 2017 3:14 PM EST - White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Feb. 2 said that Americans who wish to express their religious views sometimes tend to be prevented from doing it in the name of political correctness. (Reuters) ...

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Spicer says 'political correctness' infringes on 'freedom of religion' - Washington Post

There has been a great uproar in this country over the use of political correctness. I feel that this is part of the reason that Mr. Trump was elected; because many Americans feel that "he speaks his mind" or "says the harsh truths." While one may agree or disagree with those statements, I speak with confidence when I say that Mr. Trump is far from politically correct. But those of us who choose to believe that the actions of a few do not speak for the actions of the many and fight for equal rights and protections for our Muslim brothers and sisters, we are not simply being politically correct. When we refuse to refer to the self-proclaimed "Islamic State" as such and when we refuse to follow the racially and ethnically divisive lead of Mr. Trump, we are not just being politically correct. By taking these, albeit small, steps we are saying that truth matters. Principles matter. Justice matters.

If any of the terms or descriptions that Mr. Trump used accurately conveyed the truth of the situation, even if it was unpleasant, I would use those terms. But this is not the case. The so-called "radical Islam," as Mr. Trump refers to it, is as much related to Islam as the Charleston, S.C., church shooter Dylann Roof is to Christianity. The term "radical Islam" is vague, contradictory, confusing and divisive. It clarifies nothing about this supposed threat to the United States and instead conveys only stereotypes and prejudice to further divide an already divided nation. Mr. Trump has an expansive vocabulary to choose from now that he has access to the greatest minds in the nation and 140 characters to tweet them in. He should not have all that much trouble finding some other words that clarify the reality of our complex world.

So I have taken the liberty of creating a brief list of terminologies that would be better suited than "radical Islam" to describe the self-proclaimed "Islamic State": terrorists; a group of actors using violence and fear against civilian and government targets for political gain; a violent group who use the banner of Islam falsely to create chaos and distrust among people.

When given a choice between words that express the truth clearly and precisely and words that convey "alternative facts" with vague and divisive tones, we should always choose the former over the latter.

Sadie Allgeier

Westminster

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Letter: A guide to political correctness - Carroll County Times

Americas escape into sports is increasingly an escape from political correctness. The contrast between the objectivity of the one and the subjectivity of the other could not be clearer or more welcome to ever-growing crowds. Sport has always been a retreat from lifes drudgery, and that drudgery has never been more comprised of self-conscious societal censorship than it is today.

The Super Bowl is closing its two-week reign as Americas undisputed sovereign of spectacle. Nothing comes close. Other television broadcasts cannot rival it, and have not for years. Yet in its ascendancy, it is easy to overlook that while the Super Bowl is king, there is a large aristocracy of athletics surrounding it.

Americans have a seemingly insatiable desire to watch sports. Professional or amateur, it differs only by degrees, but the trend is the same: More. It dominates television with more channels than most thumbs can endure clicking through. It is the same on radio and in print. The internet offers only more opportunities for America to partake.

So great is demand that America races to repackage it into even more exciting offerings. We slice and dice the old sports, adding fantasy leagues and Nobel-level statistical analysis, to wring more enjoyment from them. And we add new ones MMA and made-to-order individual competitions. America always wants more.

How can demand still rise? It does because the need is growing. No society is as pretzeled by political correctness as America. And no escape from political correctness is as quick or complete as sports.

Sport demands objectivity. It yields a definitive outcome, and does so in a manner all participant and spectator accept and understand. Political correctness is subjectivity itself. Having a goal of no winners or losers only victims its rules are ever-changing and written by an elite who do not play by them.

Sport is clear-cut. Its outcomes are immediately known. A stadium instantly groans over a bad play by their team even as they wish it otherwise because they know and implicitly accept the consequences. Political correctness is only relative. What is permissible in one circumstance is not in another, for one group but not another, in one moment but not the next. Tomorrow its rules will be rewritten.

Sport is ever the unknown. Sports biggest story is the upset. It proves that, however much we think we know, we dont its why they play the game and on any given Sunday. Because it aint over til its over.

Political correctness is predetermined. We know the accepted answer even as we know its wrong before the question is asked. And that answer will eventually be extracted by hook or crook. It is not about discovering how events will turn out, but about arranging them as to how they should turn out.

Sport is about proper process. As much as it may be hated, a loss is accepted so long as the game was fair. And in their depths, no one wants to win by a bad call and even less by cheating. Political correctness is about proper outcomes. Only the accepted outcome will be allowed. However much the process must be manipulated to attain it is acceptable. Its only rules are the moments means that ensure it happens.

Little wonder Americans love sports they are called fans, short for fanatics, for a reason. They increasingly yearn for a clear-cut outcome with which they agree. There is a winner and a loser they can tell which is which, and celebrate a contest by which it is fairly, quickly, and clearly determined. And no, they do not abandon the losers at least half of every sporting event is comprised of them but continue cheering for them and eagerly await the next event.

Of course some will argue that there is political correctness in sports. Yes, it intrudes, but it remains the exception. It is the awkward interruption of the reason Americans flock to sports. There is a get it over with quality when it interlopes.

To appreciate sports attitude toward political correctness, compare it to the arts. There social commentarys absence is the exception. Almost every performance is a Wheres Waldo exercise to find it and you do not have to look hard, because it amounts to one of Waldos weakest efforts. No, avoiding it is the difficult part. Little wonder so many Americans do.

The comparison between sports and the arts could not be starker. While the arts go hat-in-hand in search of public support to fund themselves, sports are actually supported by the public. American sports do not need its performances subsidized by patrons or have government dollars channeled to the media to get themselves broadcast.

Nor do sports then turn back on those who foot its bills and insult them and their preferences. When Meryl Streep recently turned her broadside on Trump and threw down the threat So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick em all out, youll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts it was an empty one to most. Not watching the arts is the choice Americans overwhelmingly make and in large part because of such performances as Streeps emoting.

Americans instead hunger for objective excellence, not political correctness subjective substitute. Innately, Americans do not care who produces excellence. They simply love it being clearly determined, and they find those qualities less and less reflected in a society ruled by remote elites.

In a society increasingly being pushed toward becoming one without winners and losers, Americans are desperate to seek asylum in a sanctuary where there is nothing else.

Continued here:

Sports: America's Great Escape from Political Correctness - American Spectator

February 5, 2000, Bill Lind, 282 Comments

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind

Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University

Where does all this stuff that youve heard about this morning the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it Political Correctness. The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, its deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted victims groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges some star-chamber proceeding and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, Wait a minute. This isnt true. I can see it isnt true, the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be victims, and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isnt as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies dont get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, its Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, its deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that all history is about which groups have power over which other groups. So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that were familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.

Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments the bourgeois governments because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didnt happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldnt be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didnt spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didnt support them.

So the Marxists had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, Who will save us from Western Civilization? He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the latest thing.

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he says, What we need is a think-tank. Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out its a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1917, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism. Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology. Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed. The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimers views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. Theyre still very much Marxist in their thinking, but theyre effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, Hey, this isnt us, and were not going to bless this.

Horkheimers initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois societys socio-economic sub-structure, and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, Im not reading from a critic here in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.

The stuff weve been hearing about this morning the radical feminism, the womens studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because youre tempted to ask, What is the theory? The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it cant be done, that we cant imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as were living under repression the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression we cant even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and thats the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of polymorphous perversity, that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromms view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of essential sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined. Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature. That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. The theme of mans domination of nature, according to Jay, was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years. Horkheimers antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (heres were theyre obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness. In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture. And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his protestagainst asceticism in the name of a higher morality.

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldnt just get out there and say, Hell no we wont go, they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there when the student rebels come into Adornos classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.

One of Marcuses books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of polymorphous perversity, in which you can do you own thing. And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! Theyre students, theyre baby-boomers, and theyve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesnt require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, Do your own thing, If it feels good do it, and You never have to go to work. By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, Make love, not war. Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines liberating tolerance as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In hate crimes we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. Its exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now its coming here. And we dont recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that its not funny, its here, its growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

Go here to read the rest:

The Origins of Political Correctness - academia.org

That is so offensive! Don't you know that only the Northern Hemisphere has Winter in December! note (they also forgot that some religions DO celebrate the Winter Solstice as such, as well as forgetting that Christmas takes place a few days AFTER the Winter Solstice) "And in a gutless act of political correctness, 'Pizza Day' will now be known as 'Italian-American Sauced Bread Day.'" This title, taken from an infamous Catch Phrase of the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, can refer to one of two things. In some cases, this might be literally about political correctness taken too far, presented through a Granola Girl or Soapbox Sadie who embodies the negative aspects of the PC movement. It may also involve Moral Guardians attempting to Bowdlerize a work in order to remove anything, no matter how trivial, that might be considered "offensive". However, in other cases, the accusations of political correctness are baseless. Along the same lines, a governmental authority (often a local council or Media Watchdog) is accused of being over-zealous to the point of parody in trying to avoid offense to minority groups - not unlike the Culture Police but in the other direction. Certain words or phrases are said to have been "banned", as if, say, Chipping Sodbury Borough Council has any effective power over the English language or, indeed, anything. Often, the body in question are not only being overly cautious, they're actually oppressing the group that is the target of their actions, and are shocked should their targets explain that a patronizing, paternalistic attitude can be just as offensive as the perceived slight. On the other hand, since this is often a satire we're dealing with, it's just as likely that the mere hint of the word "offense" will indeed result in the offending work being Banned In Chipping Sodbury. Politically Correct History is a specific variant where Common Knowledge historical accounts are treated as Fanon to avoid Unfortunate Implications such as Values Dissonance or having to explain Aluminum Christmas Trees. Usually, a range of urban myths are presented as examples of Political Correctness Gone Mad, such as ...

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"I know what youre thinking now. Youre thinking 'Oh my god, thats treating other people with respect gone mad!'"

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Political Correctness Gone Mad - TV Tropes

Three weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength. Donald Trump had run as a candidate whose primary qualification was that he was not a politician. Depicting yourself as a maverick or an outsider crusading against a corrupt Washington establishment is the oldest trick in American politics but Trump took things further. He broke countless unspoken rules regarding what public figures can or cannot do and say.

Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trumps was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems. The special interests, the arrogant media, and the political insiders, dont want me to talk about the crime that is happening in our country, Trump said in one late September speech. They want me to just go along with the same failed policies that have caused so much needless suffering.

Trump claimed that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were willing to let ordinary Americans suffer because their first priority was political correctness. They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else, Trump declared after a Muslim gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. I refuse to be politically correct. What liberals might have seen as language changing to reflect an increasingly diverse society in which citizens attempt to avoid giving needless offence to one another Trump saw a conspiracy.

Throughout an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political correctness, blaming it for an extraordinary range of ills and using the phrase to deflect any and every criticism. During the first debate of the Republican primaries, Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Trump how he would answer the charge that he was part of the war on women.

Youve called women you dont like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, Kelly pointed out. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct, Trump answered, to audience applause. Ive been challenged by so many people, I dont frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesnt have time either.

Trump used the same defence when critics raised questions about his statements on immigration. In June 2015, after Trump referred to Mexicans as rapists, NBC, the network that aired his reality show The Apprentice, announced that it was ending its relationship with him. Trumps team retorted that, NBC is weak, and like everybody else is trying to be politically correct.

In August 2016, after saying that the US district judge Gonzalo Curiel of San Diego was unfit to preside over the lawsuit against Trump Universities because he was Mexican American and therefore likely to be biased against him, Trump told CBS News that this was common sense. He continued: We have to stop being so politically correct in this country. During the second presidential debate, Trump answered a question about his proposed ban on Muslims by stating: We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem.

Trump and his followers never defined 'political correctness, or specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to

Every time Trump said something outrageous commentators suggested he had finally crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But time and again, Trump supporters made it clear that they liked him because he wasnt afraid to say what he thought. Fans praised the way Trump talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not politically correct.

Trump and his followers never defined political correctness, or specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to. The phrase conjured powerful forces determined to suppress inconvenient truths by policing language.

There is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining at length, to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, that you are being silenced. But this idea that there is a set of powerful, unnamed actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to the words you use is trending globally right now. Britains rightwing tabloids issue frequent denunciations of political correctness gone mad and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the metropolitan elite. In Germany, conservative journalists and politicians are making similar complaints: after the assaults on women in Cologne last New Years Eve, for instance, the chief of police Rainer Wendt said that leftists pressuring officers to be politisch korrekt had prevented them from doing their jobs. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National has condemned more traditional conservatives as paralysed by their fear of confronting political correctness.

Trumps incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the election to argue that the secret to his victory was a backlash against excessive political correctness. Some have argued that Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close relative of political correctness, identity politics. But upon closer examination, political correctness becomes an impossibly slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would have called an exonym: a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as politically correct. The phrase is only ever an accusation.

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong the adverb before correct implies a but. However, to say that a statement is politically correct hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say that someone is being politically correct discredits them twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

If you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that there is no neat history of political correctness. There have only been campaigns against something called political correctness. For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right. Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly effective form of crypto-politics. It transforms the political landscape by acting as if it is not political at all. Trump is the deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.

Most Americans had never heard the phrase politically correct before 1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines. One of the first and most influential was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who warned under the headline The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct that the countrys universities were threatened by a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform.

Bernstein had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on student activism. He wrote that there was an unofficial ideology of the university, according to which a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines a kind of correct attitude toward the problems of the world. For instance, Biodegradable garbage bags get the PC seal of approval. Exxon does not.

Bernsteins alarming dispatch in Americas paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the brave new world of ideological zealotry at American universities. In December, the cover of Newsweek with a circulation of more than 3 million featured the headline THOUGHT POLICE and yet another ominous warning: Theres a politically correct way to talk about race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment or the New McCarthyism? A similar story graced the cover of New York magazine in January 1991 inside, the magazine proclaimed that The New Fascists were taking over universities. In April, Time magazine reported on a new intolerance that was on the rise across campuses nationwide.

If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase politically correct rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the thought police spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, Hitler Youth, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. The New York magazine cover story opened with an account of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being attacked by overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive: Whenever he walked through the campus that spring, down Harvards brick paths, under the arched gates, past the fluttering elms, he found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers. Racist. There goes the racist. It was hellish, this persecution.

In an interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom said the harassment described in the New York article had never happened. There had been one editorial in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of his harried state was pure artistic licence. No matter: the image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck. When Richard Bernstein published a book based on his New York Times reporting on political correctness, he called it Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for Americas Future a title alluding to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the book he compared American college campuses to France during the Reign of Terror, during which tens of thousands of people were executed within months.

None of the stories that introduced the menace of political correctness could pinpoint where or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when they explained the origins of the phrase itself. Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets Bernstein observed that the phrase smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy but there is no exact equivalent in Russian. (The closest would be ideinost, which translates as ideological correctness. But that word has nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The intellectual historian LD Burnett has found scattered examples of doctrines or people being described as politically correct in American communist publications from the 1930s usually, she says, in a tone of mockery.

The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that was translated into English with the title On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.

Until the late 1980s, 'political correctness' was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically

Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective correct there. But they didnt use it in the way Mao did. Politically correct became a kind of in-joke among American leftists something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous. The term was always used ironically, Perry says, always calling attention to possible dogmatism.

In 1970, the African-American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara, used the phrase in an essay about strains on gender relations within her community. No matter how politically correct her male friends thought they were being, she wrote many of them were failing to recognise the plight of black women.

Until the late 1980s, political correctness was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy. In fact, some of the first people to organise against political correctness were a group of feminists who called themselves the Lesbian Sex Mafia. In 1982, they held a Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex at a theatre in New Yorks East Village a rally against fellow feminists who had condemned pornography and BDSM. Over 400 women attended, many of them wearing leather and collars, brandishing nipple clamps and dildos. The writer and activist Mirtha Quintanales summed up the mood when she told the audience, We need to have dialogues about S&M issues, not about what is politically correct, politically incorrect.

By the end of the 1980s, Jeff Chang, the journalist and hip-hop critic, who has written extensively on race and social justice, recalls that the activists he knew then in the Bay Area used the phrase in a jokey way a way for one sectarian to dismiss another sectarians line.

But soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its meaning inside out. All of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within their movement, political correctness became a talking point for neoconservatives. They said that PC constituted a leftwing political programme that was seizing control of American universities and cultural institutions and they were determined to stop it.

The right had been waging a campaign against liberal academics for more than a decade. Starting in the mid-1970s, a handful of conservative donors had funded the creation of dozens of new thinktanks and training institutes offering programmes in everything from leadership to broadcast journalism to direct-mail fundraising. They had endowed fellowships for conservative graduate students, postdoctoral positions and professorships at prestigious universities. Their stated goal was to challenge what they saw as the dominance of liberalism and attack left-leaning tendencies within the academy.

Starting in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a shallow cultural relativism and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired numerous imitations.

In April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The New Criterion, published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. Like Bloom, Kimball argued that an assault on the canon was taking place and that a politics of victimhood had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the existence of departments such as African American studies and womens studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of papers he had heard at academic conferences, such as Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl or The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?

In June 1991, the young Dinesh DSouza followed Bloom and Kimball with Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Whereas Bloom had bemoaned the rise of relativism and Kimball had attacked what he called liberal fascism, and what he considered frivolous lines of scholarly inquiry, DSouza argued that admissions policies that took race into consideration were producing a new segregation on campus and an attack on academic standards. The Atlantic printed a 12,000 word excerpt as its June cover story. To coincide with the release, Forbes ran another article by DSouza with the title: Visigoths in Tweed.

These books did not emphasise the phrase political correctness, and only DSouza used the phrase directly. But all three came to be regularly cited in the flood of anti-PC articles that appeared in venues such as the New York Times and Newsweek. When they did, the authors were cited as neutral authorities. Countless articles uncritically repeated their arguments.

In some respects, these books and articles were responding to genuine changes taking place within academia. It is true that scholars had become increasingly sceptical about whether it was possible to talk about timeless, universal truths that lay beyond language and representation. European theorists who became influential in US humanities departments during the 1970s and 1980s argued that individual experience was shaped by systems of which the individual might not be aware and particularly by language. Michel Foucault, for instance, argued that all knowledge expressed historically specific forms of power. Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of conservative critics, practised what he called deconstruction, rereading the classics of philosophy in order to show that even the most seemingly innocent and straightforward categories were riven with internal contradictions. The value of ideals such as humanity or liberty could not be taken for granted.

It was also true that many universities were creating new studies departments, which interrogated the experiences, and emphasised the cultural contributions of groups that had previously been excluded from the academy and from the canon: queer people, people of colour and women. This was not so strange. These departments reflected new social realities. The demographics of college students were changing, because the demographics of the United States were changing. By 1990, only two-thirds of Americans under 18 were white. In California, the freshman classes at many public universities were majority minority, or more than 50% non-white. Changes to undergraduate curriculums reflected changes in the student population.

The responses that the conservative bestsellers offered to the changes they described were disproportionate and often misleading. For instance, Bloom complained at length about the militancy of African American students at Cornell University, where he had taught in the 1960s. He never mentioned what students demanding the creation of African American studies were responding to: the biggest protest at Cornell took place in 1969 after a cross burning on campus, an open KKK threat. (An arsonist burned down the Africana Studies Center, founded in response to these protests, in 1970.)

More than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading aspect of these books was the way they claimed that only their adversaries were political. Bloom, Kimball, and DSouza claimed that they wanted to preserve the humanistic tradition, as if their academic foes were vandalising a canon that had been enshrined since time immemorial. But canons and curriculums have always been in flux; even in white Anglo-America there has never been any one stable tradition. Moby Dick was dismissed as Herman Melvilles worst book until the mid-1920s. Many universities had only begun offering literature courses in living languages a decade or so before that.

In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and DSouza were funded by networks of conservative donors particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new counter-intelligentsia. (The New Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and Scaife Foundations.) In his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals who shared their views: They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.

These skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme and they became instrumental to forging a new alliance for conservative politics in America, between white working-class voters and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas that held very little benefit for those people.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered incomprehensible (The Lesbian Phallus), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation the force that was taking away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people attacking it allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign others.

PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them. Political correctness became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the ordinary people and the liberal elite, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.

Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major danger to America. Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, Bush said. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land, but, he warned, In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity.

After 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final years of the Obama presidency, political correctness made a comeback. Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.

As Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained strength, a spate of thinkpieces attacked the participants in these movements, criticising and trivialising them by saying that they were obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than difference and multiculturalism, Americans in 2012 and 2013 started hearing about trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, privilege and cultural appropriation.

This time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first round of anti-political-correctness evoked the spectres of totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed to the commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to prevent anyone expressing opinions that they happen to find offensive.

In January 2015, the writer Jonathan Chait published one of the first new, high-profile anti-PC thinkpieces in New York magazine. Not a Very PC Thing to Say followed the blueprint provided by the anti-PC thinkpieces that the New York Times, Newsweek, and indeed New York magazine had published in the early 1990s. Like the New York article from 1991, it began with an anecdote set on campus that supposedly demonstrated that political correctness had run amok, and then extrapolated from this incident to a broad generalisation. In 1991, John Taylor wrote: The new fundamentalism has concocted a rationale for dismissing all dissent. In 2015, Jonathan Chait claimed that there were once again angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas.

Chait warned that the dangers of PC had become greater than ever before. Political correctness was no longer confined to universities now, he argued, it had taken over social media and thus attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old. (As evidence of the hegemonic influence enjoyed by unnamed actors on the left, Chait cited two female journalists saying that they had been criticised by leftists on Twitter.)

Chaits article launched a spate of replies about campus and social media cry bullies. On the cover of their September 2015 issue, the Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. The title, The Coddling Of the American Mind, nodded to the godfather of anti-PC, Allan Bloom. (Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, another organisation funded by the Olin and Scaife families.) In the name of emotional wellbeing, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they dont like, the article announced. It was shared over 500,000 times.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness stories to spread

These pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors from the 1990s had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the subjects of their criticism. They complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness) stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the 1990s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report. They are also perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others.

Meanwhile, a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow liberals decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his followers were doing the same thing. Chait said that leftists were perverting liberalism and appointed himself the defender of a liberal centre; Trump said that liberal media had the system rigged.

The anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for months they gravely underestimated the seriousness of the real threat to liberal discourse. It was not coming from women, people of colour, or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or elsewhere. It was coming from @realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and far-right websites such as Breitbart.

The original critics of PC were academics or shadow-academics, Ivy League graduates who went around in bow ties quoting Plato and Matthew Arnold. It is hard to imagine Trump quoting Plato or Matthew Arnold, much less carping about the titles of conference papers by literature academics. During his campaign, the network of donors who funded decades of anti-PC activity the Kochs, the Olins, the Scaifes shunned Trump, citing concerns about the populist promises he was making. Trump came from a different milieu: not Yale or the University of Chicago, but reality television. And he was picking different fights, targeting the media and political establishment, rather than academia.

As a candidate, Trump inaugurated a new phase of anti-political-correctness. What was remarkable was just how many different ways Trump deployed this tactic to his advantage, both exploiting the tried-and-tested methods of the early 1990s and adding his own innovations.

First, by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established the myth that he had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to prevent him from taking on the difficult challenges facing the nation. By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trumps swagger promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great and would be great again.

Second, Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but Trumps mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage.

This willingness to be more outrageous than any previous candidate ensured non-stop media coverage, which in turn helped Trump attract supporters who agreed with what he was saying. We should not underestimate how many Trump supporters held views that were sexist, racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and were thrilled to feel that he had given them permission to say so. Its an old trick: the powerful encourage the less powerful to vent their rage against those who might have been their allies, and to delude themselves into thinking that they have been liberated. It costs the powerful nothing; it pays frightful dividends.

Trump drew upon a classic element of anti-political-correctness by implying that while his opponents were operating according to a political agenda, he simply wanted to do what was sensible. He made numerous controversial policy proposals: deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, introducing stop-and-frisk policies that have been ruled unconstitutional. But by responding to critics with the accusation that they were simply being politically correct, Trump attempted to place these proposals beyond the realm of politics altogether. Something political is something that reasonable people might disagree about. By using the adjective as a put-down, Trump pretended that he was acting on truths so obvious that they lay beyond dispute. Thats just common sense.

The most alarming part of this approach is what it implies about Trumps attitude to politics more broadly. His contempt for political correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics itself. He does not talk about diplomacy; he talks about deals. Debate and disagreement are central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that he has no time for these distractions. To play the anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question about policy is to shut down discussion in much the same way that opponents of political correctness have long accused liberals and leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring that the topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it is pointless to discuss it. The impulse is authoritarian. And by presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives himself permission to bypass politics altogether.

Now that he is president-elect, it is unclear whether Trump meant many of the things he said during his campaign. But, so far, he is fulfilling his pledge to fight political correctness. Last week, he told the New York Times that he was trying to build an administration filled with the best people, though Not necessarily people that will be the most politically correct people, because that hasnt been working.

Trump has also continued to cry PC in response to criticism. When an interviewer from Politico asked a Trump transition team member why Trump was appointing so many lobbyists and political insiders, despite having pledged to drain the swamp of them, the source said that one of the most refreshing parts of the whole Trump style is that he does not care about political correctness. Apparently it would have been politically correct to hold him to his campaign promises.

As Trump prepares to enter the White House, many pundits have concluded that political correctness fuelled the populist backlash sweeping Europe and the US. The leaders of that backlash may say so. But the truth is the opposite: those leaders understood the power that anti-political-correctness has to rally a class of voters, largely white, who are disaffected with the status quo and resentful of shifting cultural and social norms. They were not reacting to the tyranny of political correctness, nor were they returning America to a previous phase of its history. They were not taking anything back. They were wielding anti-political-correctness as a weapon, using it to forge a new political landscape and a frightening future.

The opponents of political correctness always said they were crusaders against authoritarianism. In fact, anti-PC has paved the way for the populist authoritarianism now spreading everywhere. Trump is anti-political correctness gone mad.

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Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom ...

The subtext here is that male ballet dancers are frequently homosexual -- and a mother is entitled to discourage her son from such an unhealthy and unhappy lifestyle. Just for starters, there is a very high incidence of spousal abuse among homosexual couples

It may have once been traditional for boys to play football and girls to do ballet but nowadays many children feel free to take up activities regardless of gender.

However, one pushy parent took to Mumsnet to ask for advice on how to discourage her son from taking ballet lessons.

The woman said her son is an aspiring model and explained that she doesn't think the extra-curricular activity 'is going to fit in'.

In her post, Mumsnet user Ironriver said: 'How do I put my son off wanting to do ballet? I'm showing him how cool football, rugby and karate are but he's having none of it. 'He does modelling and I don't think ballet is going to fit in. Lots of the boys do football and other sports so I would like him to do that. Any ideas?'

Many commenters were outraged at the mother's behaviour and suggested she should let her son pursue his own interests.

Concerned commenter OohhThatsMe said: 'Your poor child, having such a sexist mother.'

Shocked reader coolaschmoola added: 'Stop being so bloody sexist and let him do the thing he is interested in and actually wants to do.

'It's 2016! Boys don't just play football. Just like not all girls do ballet.'

Other commenters were surprised that the woman had already decided her should would become a model.

Dodobookends said: 'He's nine and you have already chosen his career for him? Absurd.'

Some even suggested that taking up ballet would be beneficial to any future modelling aspirations.

OlennasWimple said: 'Ballet would give him excellent posture, teach him to move well and have a better idea how to use his body effectively. 'And less chance he'll break his nose or get a cauliflower ear.'

OohhThatsMe added: 'Actually ballet would REALLY help a modelling career. In what way would football do that?

'Look at the girls doing modelling - most will have studied ballet.'

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Israeli Bill to Hush Mosque Call to Prayer Stokes Controversy Among Muslims--Others Too

Proposed legislation in Israels parliament to prohibit the use of loudspeakers to transmit the five-times daily Muslim call to prayer is causing dismay among adherents of more than one religious group.

A preliminary vote on the so-called muezzin bill (a muezzin is the mosque official who recites the call to prayer) is scheduled for early next week.

It is not clear how the legislation, if adopted, would impact numerous areas of Israel and the West Bank that are under complex jurisdictional ruling and home to a mixture of religions.

In Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout the country, the three monotheistic faiths contribute to the cacophony of sounds at various times and on different days of the week.

The daily Muslim calls to prayer begin at about 4 a.m. and can be heard to differing degrees, depending on where you are. Where mosques are in close proximity to one another, there is a lot of overlap and duplication.

In Jerusalem, the Jewish shabbat alarm, which is essentially an air-raid siren, sounds every Friday at sundown to tell residents the sabbath has begun. Church bells ring on Sunday and important holidays.

Yaakov Litzman, Israels ultra-Orthodox deputy health minister, initially blocked the bill over concerns that it could be extended to include the shabbat alarm. Last week, Litzman withdrew his opposition after a loophole was added for the alarm, Haaretz reported.

In Bethlehem, which is heavily dependent on Christian pilgrims for tourism at several points during the year, the towns main tourist center is home to a mosque with a loudspeaker set at a very high volume. The mosque towers over Manger Square, and faces the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

The towns Christmas tree stands right in front of the church and numerous Christmas holiday traditions take place in or near the square.

Local business owners, many of whom are Arab Christians, dont seem to mind the blend of sounds, though.

Im not against it, for sure, said Sami Khouri, general manager of the Visit Palestine visitor center and gift shop-cafe a few hundred feet from Manger Square. Turning down the volume is somewhat okay, but preventing them from doing it isnt right.

Khouri, who also runs a tourism company and lives in Jerusalem, says its just part of life in the region.

Even where I live in Jerusalem, there are two mosques [making the call to prayer] nearby, five times a day. I just think this is co-existence, he said. The mosque has been there for who knows how long and we also ring the church bells. For tourists, its part of the flavor. For me its part of the sounds of Jerusalem, the ambience.

However, Khouri and others do suggest that if multiple mosques are situated in a given area they could possibly coordinate their broadcasts. The caveat is popular sentiment, but is not part of the bill before the Israeli parliament.

Some areas in the West Bank technically under full Palestinian Authority control have protested by staging multifaith demonstrations, with hundreds of Muslims, Christians, and Jewish Samaritans singing the call to prayer together.

Nablus is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank and home to hundreds of mosques, which together produce a wall of uncoordinated sound.

The ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is almost evenly divided on the issue, according to a poll on one of the communitys websites, Kikar HaShabat (Sabbath Corner). The poll found that 42 percent of respondents were against the bill.

There are also individuals working together behind the scenes, with unlikely, discreet alliances between some Arab and ultra-Orthodox lawmakers, according to a report in Al-Monitor.

Disputes over mosque calls to prayer are not uncommon, both in Western and Muslim countries. In 2004, some of the 23,000 residents of the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, Michigan were at odds over mosque loudspeakers, with some telling local media they were simply too loud.

In Dubai in 2011, the volume of a mosque was checked twice for decibel level after residents complained about crying children being woken up at 4 a.m.

An online Indonesian housing forum for expats recommends visiting a potential new home to make sure you can handle the disruption to the peace and quiet of your home during the call to prayer.

SOURCE

The left is creating a new kind of apartheid

The student union at Kings College London will field a team in University Challenge that contains at least 50 per cent self-defining women, trans or non-binary students. The only bad thing Ken Livingstone could bring himself to say about the brutal dictator Fidel Castro was that initially he wasnt very good on lesbian and gay rights. The first page of Hillary Clintons campaign website (still up) has links to African Americans for Hillary, Latinos for Hillary, Asian Americans and Pacific islanders for Hillary, Women for Hillary, Millennials for Hillary, but none to men for Hillary, let alone white people for Hillary.

Since when did the left insist on judging people by to paraphrase Martin Luther King the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character? The left once admirably championed the right of black people, women and gays to be treated the same as white, straight men. With only slightly less justification, it then moved on to pushing affirmative action to redress past prejudice. Now it has gone further, insisting everybody is defined by his or her identity and certain victim identities must be favoured.

Given the history of such stereotyping, it is baffling that politicians on the left cannot see where this leads. The prime exponents of identity politics in the past were the advocates of apartheid, of antisemitism, and of treating women as the legal chattels of men. We are sleepwalking our way to segregation, Trevor Phillips says.

Identity politics is thus very old-fashioned. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism, says equality feminism fair treatment, respect and dignity is being eclipsed in universities by a Victorian fainting couch feminism, which views women as fragile flowers who require safe spaces, trigger warnings and special protection from micro-invalidations. Sure enough, when she said this at Oberlin College, Ohio, 35 students and a therapy dog sought refuge in a safe room.

It is just bad biology to focus on race, sex or sexual orientation as if they mattered most about people. Weve known for decades and Marxist biologists such as Dick Lewontin used to insist on this point that the genetic differences between two human beings of the same race are maybe ten times as great as the average genetic difference between two races. Race really is skin deep. Sex goes deeper, for sure, because of developmental pathways, but still the individual differences between men and men, or women and women, or gays and gays, are far more salient than any similarities.

The Republican sweep in the American election cannot be blamed solely on the culture wars, but they surely played a part. Take the bathroom wars that broke out during the early stages of the campaign. North Carolinas legislature heavy-handedly required citizens to use toilets that corresponded to their birth gender. The Obama administration heavy-handedly reacted by insisting that every school district in the country should do no such thing or lose its federal funding. This was a gift to conservatives: Should a grown man pretending to be a woman be allowed to use . . . the same restroom used by your daughter? Your wife?, asked Senator Ted Cruz.

White men played the identity card at the American ballot box There is little doubt that to some extent white men played the identity card at the ballot box in reaction to the identity politics of the left. In a much-discussed essay for The New York Times after the election, Mark Lilla of Columbia University mused that Hillary Clintons tendency to slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop was a mistake: If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them.

He argues that the fixation on diversity in our schools and the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life . . . By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. As many students woke up to discover on November 9, identity politics is expressive, not persuasive.

Last week, in an unbearably symbolic move, Hampshire College in Massachusetts removed the American flag a symbol of unity if ever there was one from campus in order to make students feel safer. The university president said the removal would enable us to instead focus our efforts on racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviours. There are such attitudes in America, for sure, but I am willing to bet they are not at their worst at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.

The one group that is increasingly excluded from campuses, with never a peep of complaint from activists, is conservatives. Data from the Higher Education Research Institute show the ratio of left-wing professors to right-wing professors went from 2:1 in 1995 to 6:1 today. The 1 is usually in something such as engineering and keeps his or her head down. Fashionable joke: whats the opposite of diversity? University.

This is not a smug, anti-American argument. British universities are hurtling down the same divisive path. Feminists including Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel and Kate Smurthwaite have been no-platformed at British universities, along with speakers for Ukip and Israel, but not Islamic State. Universities are becoming like Victorian aunts, brooking no criticism of religion, treating women as delicate flowers and turning up their noses at Jews.

The government is conducting an independent review into Britains sharia courts, which effectively allow women to be treated differently if they are Muslim. The review is chaired by a Muslim and advised by two imams. And far too many government forms still insist on knowing whether the applicant is (I have taken the list from the Office for National Statistics guidance): Gypsy or Irish Traveller, White and Black Caribbean, White and Black African, White and Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, African, Caribbean, Arab, or any other ethnic group. So bleeding what?

The left has vacated the moral high ground on which it won so many fine battles to treat human beings equally. The right must occupy that ground and stand for universal human values and equal treatment for all.

SOURCE

Fake news and posttruth: the handmaidens of Western relativism

It isnt Macedonian teens who killed truth and objectivity

Internet-savvy 16-year-old boys in Macedonia are undermining Western journalism and democracy. Have you ever encountered a faker news story than that? This is the great irony of the fake-news panic that has swept the Western media in recent days, with observers now claiming that the promotion of made-up news on Facebook may have swung the election for Donald Trump and done GBH to the Western ideals of objectivity and reason: it is underpinned by illusions of its own; by a refusal to grapple with hard truths about the Wests own jettisoning of those values; and by an urge to invent bogeymen that is every bit as dislocated from reality as are those myth-peddling kids in the East.

Still reeling from the failure of their idol Hillary Clinton to get to the White House, mainstream observers and politicians this week came up with another thing to blame: BS news. They claim the spread of stories like The pope loves Trump and Hillary is a paedophile, many of which originate on phoney-news websites in Eastern Europe and get loads of likes among Westerners on Facebook, is a threat to truth and to the very practice of democracy. Angela Merkel bemoaned the fake sites, bots, trolls which manipulate public opinion and make politics and democracy harder. President Obama slammed this active misinformation, arguing that if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we lose so much of what weve gained in terms of democratic freedoms.

Liberal columnists, wounded that so much of the public ignored their overtures first on Brexit and then on Trump, claim good, decent, supposedly elitist journalism must now assert itself. Our role in seeking the truth must be harnessed with steely determination, says one. CNNs Christiane Amanpour says the tsunami of fake-news sites is an affront to journalism and the thing that journalism helps to facilitate: democracy. We must now fight hard for the truth in this world where the Oxford English Dictionary just announced that its word of 2016 [is] post-truth, she says. Numerous hacks have been despatched to Macedonia and Russia to confront the fresh-faced youths who run these fake-news sites for cash. How teens in the Balkans are duping Trump supporters, says one headline. Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, says another. The image were left with is of dastardly Easterners suckering stupid Westerners and undermining the democratic tradition, and now pain-faced, well-minded columnists must stand up to this foreign threat to reason.

Its the fakest news story of the week. It might not be as utterly invented as the one about Hillarys people abusing children in a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC. But it involves a profounder avoidance of truth, a deeper unwillingness to face up to facts. In particular the fact that the rise of fake news, alternative news and conspiracy theories speaks not to the wicked interventions of myth-spreaders from without, but to the corrosion of reason within, right here in the West. It speaks to the declining moral and cultural authority of our own political and media class. It is the Western worlds own abandonment of objectivity, and loss of legitimacy in the eyes of its populace, that has nurtured something of a free-for-all on the facts and news front. Those Macedonian kids arent denting democracy or damaging objectivity theyre merely milking a Western crisis of objectivity that began long before they were born.

The first striking thing about the fake-news panic is its naked paternalism. The suggestion is that voters, especially those of a low-information, redneck variety, were hoodwinked into voting Trump by outlandish stories about how evil Hillary is. Fake news whacks people who could not recognise [or] fact-check, says Amanpour. Its a post-truth era where you can play [people] like a fiddle, says a liberal writer in the US. A Guardian columnist says people easily believe lies that play to their prejudices and then pass them on thoughtlessly. Were given the impression that masses of people are incapable of deciphering fact from fiction. They cast their votes on the basis of a daft pizza-paedo link they saw on Facebook. With a loud sneer, observers write off the general publics capacity for reason and willingness to engage seriously with democratic decisions. Ironically, this demeaning of the demos, this calling into question of the very idea that underpins modern politics that the public is reasoned and must be allowed to steer the fate of their nation does far greater damage to the value and standing of democracy than any spotty Macedonian with a laptop could ever do.

Then came the paternalistic solutions. We need new gatekeepers, columnists claim: professionals who have the resources and brains to work out whats true and whats a lie and ensure that people see more of the former. Obama and others suggest Facebook must get better at curating news, sorting truth from falsehood on behalf of its suggestible users. The suggestion is that the internet, having thrown open the world of reportage and commentary to everyone, having enabled anyone with a computer or phone to say their piece, has disoriented truth and democracy and now must be tamed, or at least better managed.

This echoes the elite fears that greeted the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Then, the religious authorities the gatekeepers of their day worried that all sorts of heresy might now find its way into the publics minds and hearts, unfiltered by their wise, godly counsel. Todays aspiring gatekeepers panic that fake news will get into and warp the minds of the little people in this era when knowledge filtering has been stripped back even further, so that increasingly the citizen stands alone before the claims and counter-claims of those who publish. And apparently this fake news often contains heresies of its own. In his interview with the New Yorker, Obama strikingly bemoaned the fake news of climate-change scepticism, where an explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers payroll. This cuts to the 15th-century-echoing fear that motors the panic over fake news: the belief that it will allow not only outright lies, but new heresies, new blasphemies, different ways of thinking, to make an appeal to peoples beliefs and convictions. The call to filter social media is a paternalistic call to protect the public from bad or mad or dangerous thoughts, in a similar way that early clampdowns on the printing press were designed to keep evil from the swarm.

What this censorious, anti-demos view overlooks is the positive side to todays unprecedented throwing-open of debate and news and politics: the fact that it implicitly calls on the citizen to use his own mental and moral muscles, to confront the numerous different versions of the world offered to him and decide which one sounds most right. Surely the internets downside of fake news is more than outweighed by its invitation to us to negotiate the rapids of public debate for ourselves and make up our own minds? Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is a consequence of man-made behaviour, because thats what 99 per cent of scientists tell us, said Obama in his handwringing over fake news. No. The ideal thing in a democracy isnt that we believe something because scientists, or politicians, or priests, have told us its true; its that we believe something because we have considered it, thought about it, weighed it up against other things, and then deployed our own judgement. Believing something because others tell you its true isnt democracy its oligarchy.

Even the extent to which fake news is a bad thing and of course it can be its rise is not a result of wicked foreign poking into Western politics and debate. Rather, it speaks to the hollowing-out of the whole idea of truth in the West, to the march of the relativistic notion that objectivity is not only difficult but undesirable. The image of the old gatekeepers of knowledge, or just news, being elbowed aside either by new technologies or by interfering Easterners is wrong; it is more accurate to say that these gatekeepers gave up, and abandoned their posts, on the basis that it is arrogant to assume that any one way of seeing or reporting the world is better than another.

For the past two decades, Western news reporting has openly called into question its own definitiveness. It has thrown open news items to ceaseless commenting below the line, on the basis that news coverage is a partnership, as the BBCs Richard Sandbrook said in 2005. It celebrated citizen journalism as a realer, less top-down form of newsgathering. And it has jettisoned the very thing that distinguished it from other, more opinionated views on world events: its objectivity. From the rise of the journalism of attachment in the 1990s, in which journalists eschewed the apparently cold, forensic habit of objectivity and took sides with the most victimised groups in certain conflicts and situations, to the medias embrace of data journalism in the 2000s, where churning through thousands of leaked documents took the place of discovering stories and faithfully reporting them, Western journalism has redefined its mission from one of objectively discovering truth to simply offering its increasingly technical or emotional take on what might, or might not, have happened.

Journalists have explicitly disavowed objectivity, and with it their gatekeeping role. It is time to toss out objectivity as a goal, said Harvard journalism expert Dan Gilmor in 2005. By 2010, even Time magazine, self-styled epitome of the Western journalistic style, was celebrating The End of Objectivity. The new-media openness [has] upended the old medias poker-faced stoicism and its about time, it said. The Western media started to replace the ideal of objectivity with values such as fairness, transparency and balance. And as one European observer pointed out, these are very different to objectivity: where objectivity points to the active quest for truth, these newer, more technical values reduce the news media to just another voice among the many voices in a pluralistic world. When someone like Amanpour says Western journalism and democracy are in mortal peril, largely thanks to foreign powers like Russia paying to churn out false news, she overlooks journalisms weakening of its own ideals and authority, including by her and others in the 1990s when they ditched objectivity in preference for taking sides in conflicts like the one in Bosnia. She conspiratorially displaces on to Russia a crisis of objectivity that has its origins in the newsrooms and academies and political chambers of the West.

The abandonment of objectivity in journalism did not happen in a vacuum. It sprung from, and in turn intensified, a rejection of reason in the West, a disavowal of the idea of truth, and its replacement either by the far more technical ambition of being evidence-based or by highly emotional responses to world events. Indeed, the greatest irony in the fake-news panic, and in the whole post-Brexit, post-Trump talk of a new post-truth era, is that it was the very guardians of Western culture and knowledge, the very establishment now horrified by how the little people think and vote, who made us post-truth; who oversaw the turn against Enlightenment in the academy, the calling into question of male science, the throttling of the idea of any one, clear morality to which people might subscribe, and the rubbishing of the entire project of objectivity, even of news as we understood it. When Obama says we live in an era where everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, he isnt wrong. Only that refusal to distinguish, to judge, to elevate truer things over questionable things, is not down to Facebook or Macedonians or allegedly dumb Trump voters it is an accomplishment of the very post-Enlightenment, self-doubting, technocratic elites Obama is part of.

And what happens when you give up your conviction that truth can be discovered, and instead promote the idea that all ways of looking at the world, and interpreting the world, and feeling the world, have validity? You disorientate public discussion. You slay your own cultural authority. You create a situation where people doubt you, often with good reason, and go looking for other sources of information. You create the space for other claims of truth, some of them good and exciting, some of them mad and fake. Dont blame Russia, or us, for the crisis of journalism and democracy or for our so-called post-truth times. You did this. You, the gatekeepers. Well be our own gatekeepers now, thanks.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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Read more:

Political Correctness Watch

The term political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct, commonly abbreviated to PC;[1] also abbreviated as P.C. and p.c.) in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended primarily not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. In the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

The term had only scattered usage before the early 1990s, usually as an ironic self-description, but entered more mainstream usage in the United States when it was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times.[9][10][11][12][13][14] The phrase was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind,[4][6][15][16] and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[4][6][17][18] and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization, multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curricula.[4][5][17][19]

Commentators on the left have said that conservatives pushed the term in order to divert attention from more substantive matters of discrimination and as part of a broader culture war against liberalism.[17][20][21] They also argue that conservatives have their own forms of political correctness, which are generally ignored by conservative commenters.[22][23][24]

The term "politically correct" was used infrequently until the latter part of the 20th century. This earlier use did not communicate the social disapproval usually implied in more recent usage. In 1793, the term "politically correct" appeared in a U.S. Supreme Court judgment of a political lawsuit.[25] The term also had occasional use in other English-speaking countries.[26][27]William Safire states that the first recorded use of the term in the typical modern sense is by Toni Cade Bambara in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman.[28][clarification needed] The term probably entered use in the United Kingdom around 1975.[8][clarification needed]

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase "politically correct" was associated with the dogmatic application of Stalinist doctrine, debated between Communist Party members and American Socialists. This usage referred to the Communist party line, which provided "correct" positions on many political matters. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

In March 1968, the French philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted as saying: "a political thought can be politically correct ('politiquement correcte') only if it is scientifically painstaking", referring to leftist intellectuals attempting to make Marxism scientifically rigorous rather than relying on orthodoxy.[29]

In the 1970s, the American New Left began using the term "politically correct".[30] In the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Toni Cade Bambara said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist, too." Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts."[4][30][31] As such, PC is a popular usage in the comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, which then was followed by the term ideologically sound, in the comic strips of Bart Dickon.[30][32] In her essay "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality'."[33]

Stuart Hall suggests one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one:

According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', Comrade!"[34]

Critics, including Camille Paglia[35] and James Atlas,[36][37] have pointed to Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind[15] as the likely beginning of the modern debate about what was soon named "political correctness" in American higher education.[4][6][16][38] Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams wrote that the "assault on...political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestsellerdom with Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." [39] According to Z.F. Gamson, "Bloom's Closing of the American Mind...attacked the faculty for 'political correctness'."[40] Prof. of Social Work at CSU Tony Platt goes further and says the "campaign against 'political correctness'" was launched by the book in 1987.[41]

A word search of six "regionally representative Canadian metropolitan newspapers", found only 153 articles in which the terms "politically correct" or "political correctness" appeared between 1 January 1987 and 27 October 1990.[12]

An October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein is credited with popularizing the term.[11][13][14][42][43] At this time, the term was mainly being used within academia: "Across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities".[9]Nexis citations in "arcnews/curnews" reveal only seventy total citations in articles to "political correctness" for 1990; but one year later, Nexis records 1532 citations, with a steady increase to more than 7000 citations by 1994.[42][44] In May 1991 The New York Times had a follow-up article, according to which the term was increasingly being used in a wider public arena:

What has come to be called "political correctness," a term that began to gain currency at the start of the academic year last fall, has spread in recent months and has become the focus of an angry national debate, mainly on campuses, but also in the larger arenas of American life.

The previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S.[5][45] Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as being the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as "politically correct".[17] In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush used the term in his speech: "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, even certain gestures off-limits."[46][47][48]

After 1991, its use as a pejorative phrase became widespread amongst conservatives in the US.[5] It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in culture and political debate more broadly, as well as in academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination."[5][clarification needed] Similar critical terminology was used by D'Souza for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as "canon busting").[5][49][not in citation given] These trends were at least in part a response to multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics, with movements such as feminism, gay rights movements and ethnic minority movements. That response received funding from conservative foundations and think tanks such as the John M. Olin Foundation, which funded several books such as D'Souza's.[4][17]

Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic."[3]

During the 1990s, conservative and right-wing politicians, think-tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies especially in the context of the Culture Wars about language and the content of public-school curricula. Roger Kimball, in Tenured Radicals, endorsed Frederick Crews's view that PC is best described as "Left Eclecticism", a term defined by Kimball as "any of a wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought from structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, and Lacanian analyst to feminist, homosexual, black, and other patently political forms of criticism."[18][39]Jan Narveson wrote that "that phrase was born to live between scare-quotes: it suggests that the operative considerations in the area so called are merely political, steamrolling the genuine reasons of principle for which we ought to be acting..."[2]

In the American Speech journal article "Cultural Sensitivity and Political Correctness: The Linguistic Problem of Naming" (1996), Edna Andrews said that the usage of culturally inclusive and gender-neutral language is based upon the concept that "language represents thought, and may even control thought".[50] Andrews' proposition is conceptually derived from the SapirWhorf Hypothesis, which proposes that the grammatical categories of a language shape the ideas, thoughts, and actions of the speaker. Moreover, Andrews said that politically moderate conceptions of the languagethought relationship suffice to support the "reasonable deduction ... [of] cultural change via linguistic change" reported in the Sex Roles journal article "Development and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Attitudes Toward Sexist/Nonsexist Language" (2000), by Janet B. Parks and Mary Ann Robinson.[citation needed]

Liberal commentators have argued that the conservatives and reactionaries who used the term did so in effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination such as racial, social class, gender, and legal inequality against people whom the right-wing do not consider part of the social mainstream.[4][20][51][52][53][54][55] Commenting in 2001, one such British journalist,[56][57]Polly Toynbee, said "the phrase is an empty, right-wing smear, designed only to elevate its user", and, in 2010 "...the phrase "political correctness" was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer..."[56][57][58][59] Another British journalist, Will Hutton,[60][61][62][63] wrote in 2001:

Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid1980s, as part of its demolition of American liberalism.... What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism by levelling the charge of "political correctness" against its exponents they could discredit the whole political project.

Glenn Loury described the situation in 1994 as such:

To address the subject of "political correctness," when power and authority within the academic community is being contested by parties on either side of that issue, is to invite scrutiny of one's arguments by would-be "friends" and "enemies." Combatants from the left and the right will try to assess whether a writer is "for them" or "against them."

In the US, the term has been widely used in the intellectual media, but in Britain, usage has been confined mainly to the popular press.[65] Many such authors and popular-media figures, particularly on the right, have used the term to criticize what they see as bias in the media.[2][17] William McGowan argues that journalists get stories wrong or ignore stories worthy of coverage, because of what McGowan perceives to be their liberal ideologies and their fear of offending minority groups.[66] Robert Novak, in his essay "Political Correctness Has No Place in the Newsroom", used the term to blame newspapers for adopting language use policies that he thinks tend to excessively avoid the appearance of bias. He argued that political correctness in language not only destroys meaning but also demeans the people who are meant to be protected.[67][68][69] Authors David Sloan and Emily Hoff claim that in the US, journalists shrug off concerns about political correctness in the newsroom, equating the political correctness criticisms with the old "liberal media bias" label.[70]

Jessica Pinta and Joy Yakubu caution against political incorrectness in media and other uses, writing in the Journal of Educational and Social Research: "...linguistic constructs influence our way of thinking negatively, peaceful coexistence is threatened and social stability is jeopardized." What may result, they add as example "the effect of political incorrect use of language" in some historical occurrences:

Conflicts were recorded in Northern Nigeria as a result of insensitive use of language. In Kaduna for instance violence broke out on the 16th November 2002 following an article credited to one Daniel Isioma which was published in This Day Newspaper, where the writer carelessly made a remark about the Prophet Mohammed and the beauty queens of the Miss World Beauty Pageant that was to be hosted in the Country that year (Terwase n.d). In this crisis, He reported that over 250 people were killed and churches destroyed. In the same vein, crisis erupted on 18th February 2006 in Borno because of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed in Iyllands-posten Newspaper (Terwase n.d). Here over 50 people were killed and 30 churches burnt.

Much of the modern debate on the term was sparked by conservative critiques of liberal bias in academia and education,[4] and conservatives have used it as a major line of attack since.[5] University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate connect speech codes in US universities to philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They claim that speech codes create a "climate of repression", arguing that they are based on "Marcusean logic".[relevant? discuss] The speech codes, "mandate a redefined notion of "freedom", based on the belief that the imposition of a moral agenda on a community is justified", a view which, "requires less emphasis on individual rights and more on assuring "historically oppressed" persons the means of achieving equal rights." They claim:

Our colleges and universities do not offer the protection of fair rules, equal justice, and consistent standards to the generation that finds itself on our campuses. They encourage students to bring charges of harassment against those whose opinions or expressions "offend" them. At almost every college and university, students deemed members of "historically oppressed groups" above all, women, blacks, gays, and Hispanics are informed during orientation that their campuses are teeming with illegal or intolerable violations of their "right" not to be offended. Judging from these warnings, there is a racial or sexual bigot, to borrow the mocking phrase of McCarthy's critics, "under every bed."[72][relevant? discuss]

Kors and Silverglate later established the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which campaigns against infringement of rights of due process, rights of religion and speech, in particular "speech codes".[73] Similarly, a common conservative criticism of higher education in the United States is that the political views of the faculty are much more liberal than the general population, and that this situation contributes to an atmosphere of political correctness.[74]

Jessica Pinta and Joy Yakubu write that political correctness is useful in education, in the Journal of Educational and Social Research:

Political correctness is a useful area of consideration when using English language particularly in second language situations. This is because both social and cultural contexts of language are taken into consideration. Zabotkina (1989) says political correctness is not only an essential, but an interesting area of study in English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This is because it presents language as used in carrying out different speech acts which provoke reactions as it can persuade, incite, complain, condemn, and disapprove. Language is used for communication and creating social linkages, as such must be used communicatively. Using language communicatively involves the ability to use language at the grammatical level, sociolinguistic level, discourse and strategic levels (Canale & Swain 1980). Understanding language use at these levels center around the fact that differences exist among people, who must communicate with one another, and the differences could be religious, cultural, social, racial, gender or even ideological. Therefore, using language to suit the appropriate culture and context is of great significance.

Groups who oppose certain generally accepted scientific views about evolution, second-hand tobacco smoke, AIDS, global warming, race, and other politically contentious scientific matters have said that PC liberal orthodoxy of academia is the reason why their perspectives of those matters have been rejected by the scientific community.[75] For example, in Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm (1999), Prof. Edward J. Steele said:

We now stand on the threshold of what could be an exciting new era of genetic research.... However, the 'politically correct' thought agendas of the neoDarwinists of the 1990s are ideologically opposed to the idea of 'Lamarckian Feedback', just as the Church was opposed to the idea of evolution based on natural selection in the 1850s![76]

Zoologists Robert Pitman and Susan Chivers complained about popular and media negativity towards their discovery of two different types of killer whales, a "docile" type and a "wilder" type that ravages sperm whales by hunting in packs: "The forces of political correctness and media marketing seem bent on projecting an image of a more benign form (the Free Willy or Shamu model), and some people urge exclusive use of the name 'orca' for the species, instead of what is perceived as the more sinister label of "killer whale."[77]

Stephen Morris, an economist and a game theorist, built a game model on the concept of political correctness, where "a speaker (advisor) communicates with the objective of conveying information, but the listener (decision maker) is initially unsure if the speaker is biased. There were three main insights from that model. First, in any informative equilibrium, certain statements will lower the reputation of the speaker, independent of whether they turn out to be true. Second, if reputational concerns are sufficiently important, no information is conveyed in equilibrium. Third, while instrumental reputational concerns might arise for many reasons, a sufficient reason is that speakers wish to be listened to."[78][79][80][81]The Economist writes that "Mr Morris's model suggests that the incentive to be politically correct fades as society's population of racists, to take his example, falls."[79] He credits Glenn Loury with the basis of his work.[78][relevant? discuss]

"Political correctness" is a label typically used for left-wing terms and actions, but not for equivalent attempts to mold language and behavior on the right. However, the term "right-wing political correctness" is sometimes applied by commentators drawing parallels: in 1995, one author used the term "conservative correctness" arguing, in relation to higher education, that "critics of political correctness show a curious blindness when it comes to examples of conservative correctness. Most often, the case is entirely ignored or censorship of the Left is justified as a positive virtue. [...] A balanced perspective was lost, and everyone missed the fact that people on all sides were sometimes censored."[22][82][83][84]

In 2003, Dixie Chicks, a U.S. country music group, criticized the then U.S. President George W. Bush for launching the war against Iraq.[85] They were criticized[86] and labeled "treasonous" by some U.S. right-wing commentators (including Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly).[23] Three years later, claiming that at the time "a virulent strain of right wing political correctness [had] all but shut down debate about the war in Iraq," journalist Don Williams wrote that "[the ongoing] campaign against the Chicks represents political correctness run amok" and observed, "the ugliest form of political correctness occurs whenever there's a war on."[23]

In 2003, French fries and French toast were renamed "Freedom fries" and "Freedom toast"[87] in three U.S. House of Representatives cafeterias in response to France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. This was described as "polluting the already confused concept of political correctness."[88] In 2004, then Australian Labor leader Mark Latham described conservative calls for "civility" in politics as "the new political correctness."[89]

In 2012, Paul Krugman wrote that "the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which unlike the liberal version has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order."[24]

In a 2015 Harris poll it was found that "Republicans are almost twice as likely 42 percent vs. 23percent as Democrats to say that there are any books that should be banned completely....Republicans were also more likely to say that some video games, movies and television programs should be banned."[90][91]

In 2015 and 2016, leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election, Republican candidate Donald Trump used political correctness as common target in his rhetoric.[90][92][93][94] Eric Mink in a column for the Huffington Post describes in disagreeing voice Trump's concept of "political correctness":

political correctness is a controversial social force in a nation with a constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression, and it raises legitimate issues well worth discussing and debating.

But thats not what Trump is doing. Hes not a rebel speaking unpopular truths to power. Hes not standing up for honest discussions of deeply contentious issues. Hes not out there defying rules handed down by elites to control what we say.

All Trumps defying is common decency.[93]

Columnists Blatt and Young of the The Federalist agree, with Blatt stating that "Trump is being rude, not politically incorrect" and that "PC is about preventing debate, not protecting rudeness".[95][96]

In light of the sexual assault scandals and the criticism the victims faced from Trump supporters, Vox (website) notes that after railing so much against political correctness they simply practice a different kind of repression and shaming: "If the prepolitical correctness era was really so open, why is it only now that these women are speaking out?"[94]

Some right-wing commentators in the West argue that "political correctness" and multiculturalism are part of a conspiracy with the ultimate goal of undermining Judeo-Christian values. This theory, which holds that political correctness originates from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as part of a conspiracy that its proponents call "Cultural Marxism", is generally known as the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory by academics.[97][98] The theory originated with Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in a Lyndon LaRouche movement journal.[99] In 2001, conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan wrote in The Death of the West that "political correctness is cultural Marxism", and that "its trademark is intolerance".[100]

In the United States, left forces of "political correctness" have been blamed for censorship, with Time citing campaigns against violence on network television as contributing to a "mainstream culture [which] has become cautious, sanitized, scared of its own shadow" because of "the watchful eye of the p.c. police", even though in John Wilson's view protests and advertiser boycotts targeting TV shows are generally organized by right-wing religious groups campaigning against violence, sex, and depictions of homosexuality on television.[101]

In the United Kingdom, some newspapers reported that a nursery school had altered the nursery rhyme "Baa Baa Black Sheep" to read "Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep" and had banned the original.[102] But it was later reported that in fact the Parents and Children Together (PACT) nursery had the children "turn the song into an action rhyme.... They sing happy, sad, bouncing, hopping, pink, blue, black and white sheep etc."[103] This story was widely circulated and later extended to suggest that other language bans applied to the terms "black coffee" and "blackboard".[104]Private Eye magazine reported that similar stories had been published in the British press since The Sun first ran them in 1986.[105]

Political correctness is often satirized, for example in The PC Manifesto (1992) by Saul Jerushalmy and Rens Zbignieuw X,[106] and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (1994) by James Finn Garner, which presents fairy tales re-written from an exaggerated politically correct perspective. In 1994, the comedy film PCU took a look at political correctness on a college campus.

Other examples include the television program Politically Incorrect, George Carlins "Euphemisms" routine, and The Politically Correct Scrapbook.[107] The popularity of the South Park cartoon program led to the creation of the term "South Park Republican" by Andrew Sullivan, and later the book South Park Conservatives by Brian C. Anderson.[108] In its Season 19, South Park has constantly been poking fun at the principle of political correctness, embodied in the show's new character, PC Principal.[109][110][111]

The Colbert Report's host Stephen Colbert often talked, satirically, about the "PC Police".[112][113]

Graham Good, an academic at the University of British Columbia, wrote that the term was widely used in debates on university education in Canada. Writing about a 1995 report on the Political Science department at his university, he concluded: "Political correctness" has become a popular phrase because it catches a certain kind of self-righteous and judgmental tone in some and a pervasive anxiety in others who, fearing that they may do something wrong, adjust their facial expressions, and pause in their speech to make sure they are not doing or saying anything inappropriate. The climate this has created on campuses is at least as bad in Canada as in the United States.[114]

In Hong Kong, as the 1997 handover drew nearer, greater control over the press was exercised by both owners and the Chinese state. This had a direct impact on news coverage of relatively sensitive political issues. The Chinese authorities exerted pressure on individual newspapers to take pro-Beijing stances on controversial issues.[115][116][117]Tung Chee-hwa's policy advisers and senior bureaucrats increasingly linked their actions and remarks to "political correctness." Zhaojia Liu and Siu-kai Lau, writing in The first Tung Chee-hwa administration: the first five years of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said that "Hong Kong has traditionally been characterized as having freedom of speech and freedom of press, but that an unintended consequence of emphasizing political 'correctness' is to limit the space for such freedom of expression."[118]

In New Zealand, controversies over PC surfaced during the 1990s regarding the social studies school curriculum.[119][120]

According to ThinkProgress, the "ongoing conversation about P.C. often relies on anecdotal evidence rather than data".[121] In 2014, researchers at Cornell University reported that political correctness increased creativity in mixed-sex work teams,[122] saying "the effort to be P.C. can be justified not merely on moral grounds but also by the practical and potentially profitable consequences."[121][clarification needed]

The term "politically correct", with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But, across the country the term "P.C.", as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities.

More:

Political correctness - Wikipedia

CREDIT: DYLAN PETROHILOS/THINKPROGRESS

By Erica Hellerstein and Judd Legum

In 1991, New York Magazine published an influential cover story, titled Are You Politically Correct? The headline was splashed across the glossys front page in bold red and white letters, followed by a list of supposed politically correct questions:

The article opened with what appeared to be a heated exchange between students and a Harvard professor, Stephan Thernstrom, as he made his way through campus. As John Taylor, the author of the piece told it, Thernstrom was anonymously criticized by students in the Harvard Crimson for racial insensitivity in an introductory history course he taught on race relations in America. As word of the criticism spread throughout campus, Thernstrom quickly found himself embroiled in controversyand the target of an angry group of students. The first paragraph describes Thernstroms reaction in vivid detail:

Taylors opening certainly painted a dramatic picture. But there was only one problemit wasnt exactly true. In a 1991 interview with The Nation, Thernstrom himself told reporter Jon Weiner that he was appalled when he first saw the passage. Nothing like that ever happened, he quipped, describing the authors excerpt as artistic license. What eventually happened was perhaps unsurprising: Thernstrom decided not to offer the controversial course again. Although it was a voluntary decision, the professors story soon turned into a famous example of the tyranny of political correctness. The New Republic declared that the professor had been savaged for political correctness in the classroom; the New York Review of Books described his case an illustration of the attack on freedom led by minorities.

These claims ultimately proved to be greatly exaggerated. Weiner tracked down one of the students who complained about Thernstrom; she explained that their goals werent to prevent him from offering the class, but to point out inaccuracies in his lecture. To me, its a big overreaction for him to decide not to teach the course again because of that, she said. A professor of government at Harvard went a step further, concluding that there is no Thernstrom case. Instead, a few student complaints were exaggerated and translated into an attack on freedom of speech by black students. The professor called the episode a marvelous example of the skill of the neocons at taking small events and translating them into weapons against the pluralistic thrust on American campuses.

Back in the 90s, the conversation around political correctness was largely driven by anecdote that could easily be distorted to support a particular point of view. Last year, the same magazine that published Taylors 1991 story returned to the topic, this time publishing a treatise on political correctness by Jonathan Chait. The piece, Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, describes a resurgence of the P.C. culture that flourished on college campuses in the 90s, even more ubiquitous now thanks to the rise of Twitter and social media. This new movement of political correctness, Chait argues, has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. He describes it as: a system of left-wing ideological repression that is antithetical to liberalism itself. P.C. ideology can be seductive to some liberals who can be misled into thinking that this is liberalism, Chait told ThinkProgress. And I think we need to understand that its not.

Its a depiction thats made its way outside of coastal media commentary to rhetoric on the campaign trail. Criticism of the illiberal strain of political correctness has found an eager audience among a range of GOP presidential hopefuls, many of whom readily invoke P.C. as a leftist bogeyman. At a recent Republican Jewish Coalition Conference, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) declared that the politically correct doublespeak from this administration has gone beyond ridiculous.

Cruzs proclamations coincide with a string of recent student protests denouncing institutional racism on college campuses throughout the country. At Yale and Georgetown, students have asked that buildings named after white supremacists and slaveowners be renamed. At Claremont-McKenna College in California, the dean of students resigned after students criticized her response to complaints of racism on campus, and at the University of Missouri, the president resigned from his position after failing to respond to several racist acts against students, including an incident where a student drew a swastika with feces in a university bathroom.

There have also been recent student protests at Amherst, Brandeis, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Ithaca College, among others.

The protests have earned plaudits and harsh condemnation. The Atlantic denounced The New Intolerance of Student Activism. On Fox News, Alan Dershowitz claimed that a fog of fascism is descending quickly over many American universities It is the worst kind of hypocrisy. The National Review argued that the notion that students need a safe space is a lie. They arent weak. They dont need protection Why would they debate when theyve proven they can dictate terms? Pathetic.

Others, meanwhile, are quick to point out that these angry responses often come from people who hold more institutional power than the students they critique. Marilyn Edelstein, a professor of English at Santa Clara University who wrote about political correctness in the 90s, said shes been troubled by commentators impulse to dismiss important ideas and and perspectives as simply politically correct.

I think whats going on today is a resurgence of the same kind of fear by privileged white men that other people might have different experiences and legitimate grievances about the way theyre often treated, she explained. A lot of the commentators who are crying, oh political correctness now again are not at risk of actually losing any power. Conservatives are controlling the Congress and Senate and a lot of state houses, and yet they want to mock 18 to 22 year-olds for caring about things like their own experiences of being excluded or made to feel like less-than-welcome members of a college community.

If theres one thing these two camps can agree on, its that censorship does exist on college campuses. But according to those who track incidents of censorship most closely, its impacting students and faculty across the ideological spectrum. Acknowledging the true nature of repression on college campuses is complex and does not neatly fit the narrative of P.C.s detractors, but it shouldnt be ignored. Absent a discussion rooted in reality, we appear condemned to repeat fruitless debate of the 90s.

In The Coddling of the American Mind, a cover story published last year in The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examine the climate of censorship and political correctness on college campuses. Something strange is happening at Americas colleges and universities, they begin ominously. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.

Lukianoff and Haidt describe a number of incidents intended to demonstrate the surge of censorship on college campus. They distinguish the climate on campuses today from that of the 90s, arguing that the current movement is centered around emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.

The authors cite real examples of suppression on campuses, but they blame the rush to censor on students apparent aversion to uncomfortable words and ideas. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into safe spaces where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable, they conclude. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

This narrative positions censorship as the product of students who seek comfort, coddling, and refuge from challenging ideas. But John K. Wilson, an editor at The Academe Blog and author of the book The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, says that a significant portion of the criticism aimed at students is misguided. Commentators focus on student calls for censorship often ignores the growth of the administrative class, which can have just as profound consequences on speech.

I think that where there is a lot of efforts of repression going on its coming mostly from the administration, Wilson explained. One of the changes that has come about in the structure of higher education in recent decades is you have a dramatic growth in administration. And so you have more and more people whose sort of job is to work for the administration and in many cases suppress controversial activity.

Wilsons point is backed up by the data. The New England Center for Investigative Reporting found that the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the past 25 years. Moreover, the expansion of the administrative class comes as colleges and universities cut full-time tenured faculty positions. According to an in-depth article by Benjamin Ginsberg in the Washington Monthly, between 1998 and 2008, private colleges increased spending on instruction by 22 percent, but hiked spending on administrative and staff support by 36 percent.

Will Creeley, the vice president of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), explained that the growth of college administration has resulted in the creation of new fiefdoms for administrators that previously did not exist. In order to justify their existence, those administrators will occasionally make themselves known by investigating and punishing speech that at public universities is protected by the first amendment or at private universities should be protected by the promises that the university makes about free speech.

As the campus administration expands, there is no doubt that some conservative-leaning voices on university campuses have been censored. Earlier this year, a libertarian student group at Dixie University was blocked from putting up flyers on campus that mocked President Obama, Che Guevara, and former President George W. Bush. At Saint Louis University in 2013, a group of College Republicans was barred from inviting former senator Scott Brown (R-MA) to speak at a campus event over concerns it would jeopardize the schools tax-exempt status. In 2014, the Young Americans for Liberty student group at Boise State University was charged nearly $500 in security fees for a gun-rights event featuring Dick Heller of the Supreme Court guns-rights case D.C. v. Heller.

Then there are examples of suppressed speech deemed hateful or offensive, such as the University of South Carolinas suspension of a student who used a racial slur and the suspension of a student at Texas Christian University for tweets about hoodrat criminals in Baltimore. These instances are where questions involving censorship become more nuanced. For many, the line of acceptable, or even free speech, ends where hate speech begins. The definition of silencing, after all, depends on who you ask. To some, censorship comes in the form of tearing down a xenophobic poster; to others, its the impulse to equate student activism with the desire to be coddled.

But how do you define hate speech? Free speech absolutists say censorship is never the answer to constitutionally protected hate speech, no matter how offensive it may be. There is no legal definition of hate speech that will withstand constitutional scrutiny, Creeley pointed out. The Supreme Court has been clear on this for decades. And that is because of the inherently fluid, subjective boundaries of what would or would not constitute hate speech. One persons hate speech is another persons manifesto. Any attempt to define hate speech will find itself punishing those with minority viewpoints.

Liberals can, and have, gone too far in their calls for suppressing hateful speech. But the excesses of whats been deemed political correctness are not representative of the culture writ large, nor do they signify a broad leftist conspiracy to silence any and all dissenting voices. The reality of censorship on college campuses is more complicatedand less useful to the most vocal critics of political correctness. Left-leaning voices are censored, toothey just rarely seem to provoke the same amount of public outrage and hand-wringing.

When it comes to repression on college campuses, theres really no evidence that theres some left-wing, politically correct attack on freedom of speech, Wilson said. In fact, there are many examples of efforts to repress left-wing speakers and left-wing faculty. Most of the attacks on academic freedom, he explained, especially the effective attacks, come from the right.

You dont have to look far to find examples. Just last week, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois was fired for claiming that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Last month, George Washington University barred a student from hanging a Palestinian flag outside his bedroom window. In November, the Huffington Post reported that Missouri state Sen. Kurt Schaefer (R-Columbia) attempted to block a graduate student at the University of Missouri from performing research on the impact of abortion restrictions. At the University of South Carolina in 2014, a performance called How to Become a Lesbian in 10 Days was canceled after state legislators expressed concern that it would promote perversion. A professor at the University of Kansas was suspended in 2013 for anti-NRA comments. At the University of Arizona, a professor was fired for conducting research on the effects of marijuana for veterans with PTSD. In 2015, a vegan rights activist at California State Polytechnic University was prevented from handing out flyers about animal abuse on campus. In 2014, campus police blocked students at the University of Toledo from peacefully protesting a lecture by Karl Rove. The same year, adjunct faculty members at St. Charles Community College in St. Louis attempting to unionize were prohibited from gathering petition signatures.

Still, these cases havent really become widely cited or popular talking points. Wilson says thats because conservatives have been more effective at advancing their narrative. The left isnt really organized to tell the stories of oppression on campus and to try to defend students and faculty who face these kind of attacks, he explained. They need the institutional structure out there, organizations that are going to talk about the issues that will counter this media narrative of political correctness thats been around for 25 years now.

Hundreds of years before political correctness made its debut in thinkpieces or the fiery rhetoric of presidential candidates, it appeared in an opinion written by Justice James Wilson in the 1793 Supreme Court case, Chisholm v. Virginia, which upheld the rights of people to sue states. Arguing that people, rather than states, hold the most authority in the country, Wilson claimed that a toast given to the United States was not politically correct. The Justice used the term literally in this context; he felt it was more accurate to use People of the United States.

The Chisholm decision was ultimately overturned and Justice Wilsons phrase slipped into obscurity. Its hard to pinpoint exactly when the expression made a comeback, but, as John K. Wilson outlines in his book, The Myth of Political Correctness, it was mainly used jokingly among liberals in the twentieth century to criticize the excesses and dogma of their own belief system. Professor Roger Geiger wrote that it was a sarcastic reference to adherence to the party line by American communists in the 1930s. Conservatives began to subvert that framing in the 1980s and use it for their own political gain, eventually transforming the term politically correct to political correctness. The latter phrase was used to describe not just a few radical individuals, as politically correct was, but an entire conspiracy of leftists infiltrating the higher education system.

This narrative gained mainstream visibility in the 1990s, but it hadnt come out of the blue. Fears about the radicalization of American universities had been brewing for years. The attacks on colleges and universities that propelled it had been organizing for more than a decade, Wilson wrote. For the conservatives, the 1960s were a frightening period on American campuses; students occupied buildings, faculty mixed radical politics into their classes, administrators acquiesced to their standards, and academic standards fell by the wayside. Conservatives convinced themselves that the 1960s had never ended and that academia was being corrupted by a new generation of tenured radicals.

These concerns eventually found a home in the conservative commentary of the 1980s, of which Wilson provides several examples: A 1983 article in Conservative Digest claiming a Marxist network doling out the heaviest dose of Marxist and leftist propaganda to students had over 13,000 faculty members, a Marxist press that is selling record numbers of radical textbooks and supplementary materials, and a system of helping other Marxist professors receive tenure; philosopher Sidney Hooks proclamation in 1987 that there is less freedom of speech on American campuses today, measured by the tolerance of dissenting views on controversial political issues, than at any other recent period in peacetime in American history; and Secretary of Education William Bennetts assertion in 1988 that some places on campus are becoming increasingly insular and in certain instances even repressive of the spirit of the free marketplace of ideas.

The media soon latched onto this narrative. Many of the articles published were almost uniformly critical of the Left and accepted the conservatives attacks without questioning their accuracy or motives, Wilson wrote. By using a few anecdotes about a few elite universities, conservatives created political correctness in the eyes of the media, and in herdlike fashion journalists raced to condemn the politically correct mob they had discovered in American universities.

Fast-forward 25 years and not much has changed. Back in the 90s, the P.C. buzzwords were speech codes and multiculturalism; now, theyre trigger warnings and microaggressions. Whether or not you agree with microaggressions and trigger warnings, they dont constitute an existential threat to free speech. Just because a person finds them frivolous or unnecessary doesnt mean theyre censorious.

The term microaggression, for example, is often used to highlight subtle biases and prejudices. The point is to open up a dialogue, not to censor students. Nevertheless, microaggressions and trigger warnings are often used as examples of campus illiberalism. Chait wrote that these newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first P.C. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.

But is there any evidence that the P.C. movement on campuses has gotten worse, or even exists at all? We asked Chait how and why he determined that political correctness, once again, was an issue worthy of exploration. He didnt offer any concrete examples. The idea for the story came from my editors, who noticed it, he replied. When I started to research the issue thats when I started to see something happening on campus that at the time wasnt getting that much attention. Now, in the months since, people are starting to pay attention. But I think its happening much more often.

Wilson offered a different take. I dont think theres really a crisis of any kind like this. Things are not that much different than they have been in the past. You have professors who get fired for expressing controversial views on Twitter, you dont have professors getting fired for microaggressions or for failing to give a trigger warning, he said, referring to the Steven Salaita casea professor at the University of Illinois who lost a promised tenured position over tweets that were critical of Israels invasion of Gaza in 2014.

Creeley did say that FIRE has seen an increase in case submissions, but he noted that isnt necessarily an accurate gauge of how much censorship is occurring on campus. He did point out that calls for speech limitations appear to be coming increasingly from students, a trend he described as new and worrying. He added that there seem to be a worrying number of instances where students are asking the authorities to sanction or punish speech that they disagree with, or to implement some kind of training on folks to change viewpoints they disagree with.

But if people who criticize these efforts are genuinely concerned about censorship, they should also worry when it comes from other sides of the political aislenot just when it neatly fits into a caricature of campus liberalism run amok. Creeley said that FIRE was disappointed to find that the case of Hayden Barnes, an environmentalist who was expelled from college for posting a collage against a proposed parking garage online, didnt take off in the media the way that other explicitly partisan cases did. It did not capture the sense of where those kinds of efforts to censor those types of students came from, he said. Its disappointing to me to see free speech be cast in partisan terms because I think that it turns the issue into a much more binary, much less nuanced, and much less thoughtful discussion.

The Missouri state senators proposal to block a students dissertation on the impact of abortion restrictions, for example, would appear to be just the kind of case that raises the ire of free speech proponents. But it doesnt appear to have gained much attention beyond coverage from a few predictably left-leaning sites. Furthermore, neither Chaits nor Haidt and Lukianoffs pieces mention the Salaita case, despite evidence suggesting punitive measures, including administrative sanctions and censorship, have been taken against Palestinian rights activists. A recent report from Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights detailed more than 150 incidents of censorship and suppression of Palestinian advocacy in 2014 alone; 89 percent of which targeted students and facultycausing speculation about a Palestine exception to the free speech debate.

ThinkProgress asked Chait about how censorship driven from the right fits into his analysis of political correctness as the province of progressives. I think thats a separate issue than the phenomenon Im describing, he answered. If you look at my original piece, very few of the examples are formal censorship. I think youve got something much deeper which is a bigger problem for people on the left, which is a broken way of arising at truth on race and gender issues. That can happen and does happen in non-censorship ways.

It doesnt take a thorough examination of the medias framing of political correctness to realize that the conversation is fraught and prone to exaggeration. Thats partially due to a lack of research on the topic. Because theres not much data available, anecdotes are often elevated as evidence; people choose the sides that best confirm their preexisting political biases and worldviews. So how does political correctness actually impact creativity? A team of researchers decided to put this question to the test with hundreds of college students.

The researchers randomly divided students in groups of three and asked them to brainstorm ideas for new businesses that could go into a vacant restaurant space on campus. Groups were either all men, all women, or mixed. The control was allowed to start brainstorming ideas immediately, but the test group was asked to take ten minutes to think of examples of political correctness on the college campus. Cornells Jack Goncalo, one of the studys researchers, told ThinkProgress that the primer was their way of making P.C. salient to students in the test group. The control group wasnt asked to talk about P.C., so it wasnt on their minds.

Researchers wanted to challenge the assumption that an anarchy approach to creativity is sort of the only way to go or even the best way to go, Goncalo said. Our argument was that although P.C. is dismissed as being overly controlling and sort of the conservative view is that P.C. is a threat to free speech, we actually predicted that P.C. would provide a framework that would help people understand what the expectations are in a mixed-sex group and would reduce uncertainty. And by reducing uncertainty it would actually make people more comfortable to share a wide range of ideas.

Indeed, the researchers found that the mixed-sex groups instructed to think about political correctness generated more ideas and were more creative than the diverse groups that hadnt received the P.C. primer. But that didnt hold true for the same-sex groups. Groups of all men or all women that were told to think about political correctness ended up being less creative than the control group.

Goncalo said those results suggested that talking about political correctness actually reduced uncertainty among mixed-sex groups, making it easier for men and women to speak up and share their ideas. For diverse groups, P.C. can be a creativity booster.

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

Unfortunately, there arent many scientific papers on the topic of political correctness. The researchers study appears to be the only one that looks specifically at political correctness, creativity, and group activity. And even then, it wasnt easy to get their research published.

It was an uphill battle, Goncalo said. A lot of academics see the whole term political correctness as a colloquial non-scientific, non-academic thing. We had to push really hard to say this is a legitimate thing. It took the team nine years to publish the reportand when it eventually came out, there was push-back. I got emails from angry people who were really pissed off and actually hadnt read the paper or understood what we did or what found, Goncalo remarked. Just knee-jerk reactions to the whole thing. So it was polarizing as you might expect.

To be sure, their paper is just one study on a topic with limited scientific research. But its conclusions shouldnt be ignored; it raises worthwhile points about the impact of speech constraints and communication among diverse groups. After all, the ongoing conversation about P.C. often relies on anecdotal evidence rather than data. This is part of the reason its subject to such vigorous debatepeople like to tailor the evidence to their worldview, not vice versa.

Goncalo also came to an interesting conclusion about the value assigned to political correctness throughout the course of the study, which took nine years to publish. Were exactly where we were in the 80s and 90s, he noted. And I think what that says is that the word is still meaningful and people are still using it in the same way.

For all of the commentary about campus activism and political correctness, theres one group we rarely hear from: actual college students. ThinkProgress visited students at American University to learn about their impressions of the political correctness conversation taking place. Although the responses were from just a sampling of college students, they were telling.

Students at American University overwhelmingly told ThinkProgress they didnt find political correctness to be a pressing campus problem. Only one student we spoke to equated P.C. with censorship, while the rest of the students we spoke with seemed more concerned about hate speech and racist comments posted in online forums. The students quoted below preferred to be identified by their first names.

Azza, a senior at American University, said that much of the commentary aimed at critiquing political correctness fails to understand the experience of being a minority student on campus. Students of minority backgrounds deal with certain issues, they face certain issues, there are things that affect them differently, and when you enter a learning environment that is hostile towards you, you cant learn, she explained. People who are saying that this is suppressing free speech or that people want to be coddled are actually not at all concerned about free speech. The vast majority of people are concerned with a particular type of discourse being fostered on American universities that reflects their particular understanding of American life and society and values.

Azza used the suppression of Palestinian activism on campuses as an example: No one in these groups who are so supposedly concerned with free speech has said anything about that, because they dont actually care about free speech, she remarked. If they did, theyd be speaking on behalf of Palestinian students. What they care about is just not letting minority voices dominate the discourse by trying to get university administrators to create an environment thats safer.

Mackenzie, a senior at AU who was sitting near Azza in a student cafe, added: Just because [the conversation] is different from when [critics] were in college doesnt mean its wrong and that were being babied. We dont want to be babied, its not that. Were fighting for something that is right.

Other students told ThinkProgress they were unsatisfied with the administrations response to offensive messages posted on Yik Yak, an online platform where students have been known to anonymously post racist content. One of the biggest things thats been going around is the racist speech on Yik Yak, and how as an anonymous platform to spread information about other people its been used to threaten and scare students and make certain students feel unsafe, another student, who did not share her name, explained. Hate speech is not free speech. Once that the language that you use infringes on another students ability to feel safe on campus and to feel that theyre allowed to come to class without feeling threatened, that isnt free speech because youre taking someone elses rights away.

Marlise, a junior at AU, said she has encountered students who abuse the system. They use the trigger warnings if they dont want to hear the other side of things, or if they dont agree with something. I think that people on the outside appear to stand in solidarity with Mizzou but theres always going to be those people that say I dont want to hear the other side. Still, she agreed that the content posted on Yik Yak is a big issue.

Students also said that criticisms of political correctness are often underpinned by racial insensitivities on campus. Jendelly, a sophomore at AU of Dominican descent, said she feels as though there is a racially divided hierarchy on campus. My dad works for the county and he works alongside the mayor, she said. And a lot of people who hold those high positions in our town are white. But theyve never made us feel like were second to them or were three-quarters of a person. Coming here, in this school, I do feel like were placed in a hierarchy. And I feel like when I see a white person its like, oh I have to step up my game to reach their level. And I shouldnt have to feel like that.

Its unclear what the multi-decade debate over political correctness has accomplished in aggregate. But there is one group of people who find it incredibly useful: Republican politicians.

The use of the term political correctness, particularly in the Republican presidential primary, does not have a specific definition. Rather it functions like a swiss army knifeit is the answer to every kind of issue that a candidate might confront. Its a get out of jail free card for bigotry, sexism and lying.

When Fox News Megyn Kelly confronted Donald Trump in an August GOP debate with a litany of sexist attacks he made against women, he had a ready answer. I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. Ive been challenged by so many people, and I dont frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesnt have time either, Trump said. The audience applauded.

Trump loves to rail against political correctness on Twitter. He argues that our country has become so politically correct that it has lost all sense of direction or purpose. For example, he is not able to use the word thug without criticism.

Ted Cruz goes a step further. Political correctness is killing us, he argued during a Republican debate in December. On his website, Cruz blames political correctness for 9/11.

Cruz also finds political correctness useful for collecting email addresses.

Ben Carson tweeted that we should #StoPP funding political correctness and PlannedParenthood. What does funding for Planned Parenthood have to do with political correctness? He doesnt really explain, except to say that political correctness is making us amoral.

Carson also uses political correctness to justify his opposition to Obamacare and accepting Syrian refugees.

Confronted with criticism for saying that a Muslim should not be presidenta religious test that would violate the constitutionCarson replied that political correctness is ruining our country.

Why are these candidates so quick to point out instances of political correctness? Like a lot of things politicians talk about, it polls very well. A recent poll found that 68 percent of Americans, and 81 percent of Republicans agreed that A big problem this country has is being politically correct. Even among Democrats, 62 percent agreed.

Poll numbers like these have a snowball effect. The more popular the message, the more politicians will talk about it or use it as a way to divert the conversation away from more troublesome topics. The more politicians talk about political correctness, the more Americans will believe its a big problem. Rinse and repeat.

Is Chait, a liberal who regularly blasts Republican candidates as extreme and incompetent, concerned that political correctness has been co-opted to justify the ugliest aspects of American political life? Not really.

I think its always been misused by conservatives [liberals should] ignore the way that conservatives talk about this phenomenon, completely. And lets just have a debate among people who are left of center Conservatives are trying to interject themselves into it, Chait said.

This might be what Chait prefers but, on a practical level, the far-right has captured the bulk of the conversation about political correctness. Articles by Chait, while purportedly for the left, are promoted voraciously by the right to bolster the argument about political correctness on their terms, not his.

While the exploitation of the term political correctness by Republicans is, on the surface, problematic for liberals, it also serves an important function. Many people on the left prefer to think of themselves as open-minded and not captured by a particular political party or ideology. But over the past several years, the Republican party has tacked hard right. The policies embraced by Republicansincluding a harsh crackdown on immigrants, massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the destruction of critical environmental protectionshave left little substantive common ground with liberals.

By embracing criticisms of political correctness, liberal commentators are able to do something that is somewhat ideologically unexpected, while avoiding embracing substantive policies they might find intensely destructive. Its a painless way to demonstrate intellectual independence.

Bill Maher, a self-described liberal firebrand with his own show on HBO, has touted himself as politically incorrect for years. It makes his show more appealing to a broader audience and allows him an easy way to respond to charges of racism, sexism and other controversies that have plagued his career.

Concluding his piece in New York Magazine, Chait claims that the P.C. style of politics has one serious, fatal drawback: It is exhausting. There is certainly some truth to this. But the debate about political correctness is just as exhausting: Thirty years later, weve broken no new ground.

At its core, the P.C. debate is about something meaningful. It is a discussion about how people should treat each other. The language we use to define it may change, but the conversation will keep going. Still, after more than three decades of repeating the same arguments, perhaps its time to recognize that the current iteration of this discussion has run its course.

A new debate could rely less on anecdote and more on actual data. It could be less about protecting rhetorical preferences and more about prohibiting actual censorship. It could dispense with political grandstanding and become more grounded in reality, without the apocalyptic and shallow narratives.

The end of the phony debate about political correctness will not be the end of the debate about political correctness. But it could be the beginning of something better.

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The Phony Debate About Political Correctness - ThinkProgress

Avoid, if you can, giving gratuitous offence (see Euphemisms): you risk losing your readers, or at least their goodwill, and therefore your arguments. But pandering to every plea for politically correct terminology may make your prose unreadable, and therefore also unread.

So strike a balance. If you judge that a group wishes to be known by a particular term, that the term is widely understood and that using any other would seem odd, old-fashioned or offensive, then use it. Context may be important: Coloured is a common term in South Africa for people of mixed race; it is not considered derogatory. Elsewhere it may be. Remember that both times and terms change: expressions that were in common use a few decades ago are now odious. Nothing is to be gained by casually insulting your readers.

On the other hand, do not labour to avoid imaginary insults, especially if the effort does violence to the language. Some people, such as the members of the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, believe that ghetto-blaster is offensive as a stereotype of African-American culture, that it is invidious to speak of a normal child, that massacre should not be used to refer to a successful American Indian raid or battle victory against white colonisers and invaders, and that the use of the term cretin is distressing. They want, they say, to avoid victimisation and to get the person before the disability. The intent may be admirable, but they are unduly sensitive, often inventing slights where none exists.

An example is given by Denis Dutton in his review of the editors' advice (What Are Editors For?, Philosophy and Literature 20, 1996). Mr Dutton points out that the origins of the word cretin lie in the Latin word for Christian. The term, he says, came into use as a way of acknowledging the essential humanity of a physically deformed or intellectually subnormal person. It is now used for a definable medical condition. The editors' aversion to cretin presumably arises from its slight similarity to cripple, a plain word now almost universally discarded in favour of the euphemistic physically handicapped or disabled.

As Mr Dutton points out, Thomas Bowdler provides a cautionary example. His version of Shakespeare, produced in 1818 using judicious paraphrase and expurgation, was designed to be read by men to their families with no one offended or embarrassed. In doing so, he gave his name to an insidious form of censorship.

Some people believe the possibility of giving offence, causing embarrassment, lowering self-esteem, reinforcing stereotypes, perpetuating prejudice, victimising, marginalising or discriminating to be more important than stating the truth, never mind the chance of doing so with any verve or panache. They are wrong. Do not bowdlerise your own prose. You may be neither Galileo nor Salman Rushdie, but you too may sometimes be right to cause offence. Your first duty is to the truth.

HE, SHE, THEY You also have a duty to grammar. The struggle to be gender-neutral rests on a misconception about Gender, a grammatical convention to make words masculine, feminine or neuter. Since English is unusual in assigning few genders to nouns other than those relating to people (ships and countries are exceptions), feminists have come to argue that language should be gender-neutral.

This would be a forlorn undertaking in most tongues, and even in English it presents difficulties. It may be no tragedy that policemen are now almost always police officers and firemen firefighters, but to call chairmen chairs serves chiefly to remind everyone that the world of committees and those who make it go round are largely devoid of humour. Avoid also chairpersons (chairwoman is permissible), humankind and the person in the streetugly expressions all.

It is no more demeaning to women to use the words actress, ballerina or seamstress than goddess, princess or queen. (Similarly, you should feel as free to separate Siamese twins or welsh on debtsat your own riskas you would to go on a Dutch treat, pass through french windows, or play Russian roulette. Note, though, that you risk being dogged by catty language police.)

If you believe it is exclusionary or insulting to women to use he in a general sense, you can rephrase some sentences in the plural. Thus Instruct the reader without lecturing him may be put as Instruct readers without lecturing them. But some sentences resist this treatment: Find a good teacher and take his advice is not easily rendered gender-neutral. So do not be ashamed of sometimes using man to include women, or making he do for she.

And, so long as you are not insensitive in other ways, few women will be offended if you restrain yourself from putting or she after every he.

He or she which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him or her depart; his or her passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his or her purse: We would not die in that person's company That fears his or her fellowship to die with us.

In some contexts, though, she can be a substitute for he:

That ever was thrall, now is he free; That ever was small, now great is she; Now shall God deem both thee and me Unto His bliss if we do well.

(15th-century carol)

Avoid, above all, the sort of scrambled syntax that people adopt because they cannot bring themselves to use a singular pronoun: We can't afford to squander anyone's talents, whatever colour their skin is. Or When someone takes their own life, they leave their loved ones with an agonising legacy of guilt. Or There's a child somewhere in Birmingham and all across the country and needs somebody to put their arm around them and to say: I love you; you're a part of America. (George Bush)

See also Ethnic groups, Gender, Tribe.

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Political correctness | The Economist