You might say I came of age at the dawn of political correctness.
It was a generation ago. I was in college, back when Baby Boomer academics, those folks who opposed Vietnam and the draft, hit their career stride. They began questioning all that Dead White Male canon of Western thought. Back then, I was actually on board with conservative PC critics, the ones who called it illiberal and closed-minded. You can probably guess why.
For one thing, I counted myself in their political camp. And even though I wasn’t really all that conservative, part of what I bought about conservatism, in the Reagan-Bush days, was that gains made in past ages—those battles fought for rights and justice—were over and done for. Won and assumed. In the post-civil rights era, went the thinking, there’s absolutely no need to make a big hoo-ha about linguistic trifles. Women can work and vote, so no need to spell womyn with a y or call it herstory. All that’s just performative b.s. In fact, sayeth the conservative, then as now, the real thing to be worried about is the latter-day leftist Thought Police, those Feminazis enforcing codes of speech, keenly attuned to trigger warnings. Plus, what are we supposed to call our heroes? Superperson? Wonder Individual? Puh-lease.
But then, like Elpheba in Wicked, something changed within me. Actually, more like, I realized what was always there: my membership in LGBTQ nation. But, believe it or not, that didn’t change my stance on PC-ness just yet. I’d been so convinced of the illiberalism of the PC police that at first I thought they were the problem, the reason I didn’t figure myself out sooner.
What’s behind all that PC bashing?
These days, decades later, it’s not just conservatives who scoff at political correctness. This past summer a bunch of writers and artists, many on the progressive side of things, published a letter on Justice and Open Debate. In it, they warned against dogma and coercion, the inevitable by-products of PC thinking.
One area that’s always been a PC target is humor. By its very nature, comedy is supposed to poke fun at the absurd—and what better way to do so than to veer hard into things that ought not be said? What, say they, we can’t make jokes about gay hairdressers or lesbian truck drivers anymore? We’re not being bigoted or homophobic, say the comics. We’re making fun of those dolts who don’t get that it’s wrong.
That’s the big accusation from the anti-PC crowd: that there are no allowances for irony, parody, and satire, that PC thinking is too dense and dogmatic to comprehend motivation. Actually, here’s another place my past experience helps, as I think about my changing feelings on adult animated TV shows like The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy.
In my early, anti-PC days, I wasn’t a fan of these shows. They seemed like snarky liberal fare that simplistically pilloried complex ideas and institutions. The non-PC nature of them wasn’t an issue—in fact, it appeared like they were in fact defending the PC worldview by making parodies so obnoxious as to make political correctness seem, well, correct.
But there’s another way of looking at these shows, as well as some earlier TV comedy—All in the Family for example. The show looked like it had a super-progressive outlook, with Meathead giving it to Archie Bunker and his wacky-doodle conservatism. I’d heard it said that was part of the boomerang effect that explained the show’s huge success: lots of conservatives tuned in as well, because they liked Archie and his way of thinking. This is not unlike wannabe criminals watching gangster movies, or wannabe workplace bullies watching The Devil Wears Prada or Swimming With Sharks. Parodies often attract the unintentional approbation of those who are its targets.
The case for politically correct humor
I think about these shows now, years later, and my prior feelings about them now seem to make the case for political correctness rather than against it. If a show initially intended to appeal to critics of something ends up attracting people in favor of that something, has the message really gotten through? Sure, the show got (or gets) good ratings, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a great thing if it emboldens the wrong people.
There’s a way out of this. Decidedly non-PC comedians such as Sarah Silverman have acknowledged that their earlier work may have been insensitive, and have adapted and changed with the times. All culture operates within norms, and I think some of PC culture is simply nudging us to adjust our norms a little.
That’s where conservatives lost me a long time ago: they don’t seem to get that. They also fail to understand the PC agenda, which is that the very subtlety of those cultural norms is what makes them so powerful. In my own life, it took me years to stop dismissing the existence of stuff like heteronormativity, and to realize how real and pernicious it can be.
We tend to think of prejudice as something awful and overt, those scenes in somber Jim Crow-era period pieces where the white Southern sheriff liberally uses the n-word. Or reports of two straight guys from Laramie leaving a gay kid to die hanging on a fence. Sure, those things happened, and were indescribably awful. But it’s all too easy to be appalled by such events, and tut-tut that it’s nothing like who we are. By Star Wars-ifying reality, we feel good that we aren’t Darth Vader.
Except even Star Wars isn’t that simple. Neither is bigotry. Over the years, I‘ve begun to see subtle patterns of behavior, in myself and others: the way we might be a bit more short with a customer service agent of a visible minority. The way we talk about sketchy parts of town. And—yes—the way so many movies of the last century ended with the guy getting the girl, but never, never two girls or two guys getting each other.
Fragility and Cancel Culture
Clearly, then, prejudice and intolerance exists on a spectrum. It’s rarely as straightforward as bigoted/not bigoted. Attitudes and assumptions sometimes need to be questioned and rethought, to understand where things came from, and why they are the way they are. At its most thoughtful, political correctness is an evaluation, a means of recognizing why so many assumed ideas and words were built on foundations of injustice.
The pushback against this, as the book White Fragility suggests, primarily comes from privileged folks who previously never had to look this stuff squarely in the face. Most often, the defensive refrain goes: If I’m not offended, and I didn’t mean to offend, the offense doesn’t exist.
Ultimately, that’s what I think political correctness boils down to: do we hold people accountable for unintended consequences of what they said or did? Where do we draw the line at “free speech?” Maybe it’s hailing from a land with stronger anti-hate speech laws, but I’ve always felt there’s a place for decorum, for nuance, for placing a few—albeit not many—limits on the right to offend. If the offense carries forward odious traditions with deep-rooted significance…well, maybe that joke about gay hairdressers needs to be dropped.
That brings us to Cancel Culture, and the oft-stated notion that shunning or deplatforming someone violates our free speech principles. Actually, I’d rebut, it doesn’t. Even if somebody loses their Op-Ed column or Twitter account or TV show, they aren’t being silenced…they’re just being shown the door by a private corporation responding to market pressure. They’re still free to express their opinion elsewhere. This is where all the claims of illiberalism fall apart: I can’t think of anybody in the PC sphere who’s suggesting gulags or permanent exile for violators of norms. Everyone has the right to speak their mind—but if you perpetuate hate speech by belittling or mocking historically marginalized groups, your speech may find a more limited audience.
By that token, political correctness is something we’ve always practiced. And it’s certainly been misused—comedian Bill Maher’s 1990s-era show, itself called Politically Incorrect, was canceled after he made one offhand (and I happen to think, accurate) comment about the 9/11 hijackers. Maybe that’s instructive as well: the goal of PC thinking isn’t to be a blunt axe. Instead, it’s to be more nuanced and thoughtful—not less. It’s to keep the conversation going—not shut it down—about what it means to be both a free and a considerate society.
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