Yes, I am fed up with people using the term “Politically Correct” or “PC”.
Here’s an example:
“The term “world language” seems to be exceedingly PC and won great
acceptance over the last decade or so,:
acceptance over the last decade or so,:
Just what do people like this mean by pc? We’ve seen discussion of this before on various listservs and the conservatives invariably point out that it is a term originating in the Communist infighting in the first part of the 20th century, as if that matters.
Most of us, and I’m almost 70 years old, remember a time when no one outside a few intellectuals would have recognized this term. It came in – and I think this is indicative of the mind-set of those using the term p.c. as a criticism of those saying something they disapprove of. In the case cited above, the writer does not like the term World Language Department, preferring Foreign Language Department, so he labels the form “P.C.”
The way this term came into popular parlance bears some thought. In many universities, minorities were beginning to attend in larger numbers years ago. One teacher on a listserv said he had never heard a professor use derogatory language toward minorities and this teacher is ten years older than I am. He’s full of it. Of course he has; it just didn’t bother him. It was common to use racial slurs on campuses and eventually minority students began to complain. In places, it was bad enough that students would stand outside classroom doors and tell entering minorities that they didn’t belong, that they were ———, take your pick of slurs.
Now I’m not talking about the well publicized racial clashes of the 60s; these situations arose across the country as Whites tried to maintain their monopoly on higher education. They highly resented minorities on campus in any numbers and let it be known. The resulting clashes got so bad that, with legal action pending, universities and colleges began laying down some rules of civility. The reaction to that was to label it “politically correct”.
Years ago, Bill Maher had a popular program by that title and I never watched it b/c I figured he was one of those people who saw “nothing wrong” with calling Hispanics and Blacks derogatory names. When he got fired for saying the 9/11 highjackers, whatever horrible things they were, were not cowards, he thought, “Oh, this guy, unlike most of our leaders, has a brain.” So I began listening to him when he brought out Real Time.
We can say it’s complicated. Obviously, Bill Maher, who tends to date Black women primarily, is not a darling of the reactionary Whites as found in the Tea Party and the GOP. But somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten the initial problem. This won’t go away b/c we won’t deal with it. Recently an edition of Huckleberry Finn was introduced with the N- word replaced by ’slave’, an utterly stupid thing to do. An editorial comment in the NYT about the issue recommended leaving the book out of the high school curriculum and waiting till college to introduce it. What bs. This illustrates the immaturity of this country as much as anything.