ENOUGH, ALREADY:
Bringing an End to Political Correctness
Ted Everett
Philosophy Department Colloquium
It is expensive raising teenaged children. My wife and I are lucky to have only one, a daughter almost sixteen. I suppose we spoil her a little. Last week, she told me that she wanted to sign up to be a foreign exchange student next year. I said okay, where do you want to be from?
[That was the introductory joke. Here comes the talk.]
Introduction.
Political correctness is like the weather. Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything. Well, I am not going to do anything, either, not tonight. Except that I want to take a discussion that tends to rely mainly on anecdotes, angry remarks, and vague defenses, and try to give it a foundation in serious analysis. I hope that by getting clear about political correctness – its nature, its sources, its connections with other features of political and intellectual life, its striking persistence and strength over the past few decades – some kind of groundwork can be laid for credible, pragmatic opposition to it.
I will begin with a few quick examples, just to fix the topic under investigation.
(1) At Harvard Divinity School in 1991, there was a system for sorting recycling paper by color, I guess because of the different chemicals involved. One recycling bin was marked "white paper only", and the other was marked "colored paper". Somebody crossed out "colored paper", and wrote in its place "paper of color". And somebody actually got offended by this mild joke and complained to the Harvard administration, with the result that the recycling bins were re-designated "bleached paper" and "dyed paper", making people have to think for a second before throwing anything away.
(2) In 2005, then Harvard President Lawrence Summers gave an off-campus talk to a conference about women in science, in which he broached the possibility that not all gender disparities in academic science are the result of discrimination. There might also be a factor, he argued, of innate differences between women and men in the distribution of various cognitive abilities; nothing of interest in an individual case, surely, but enough to show up in statistics. There is apparently some evidence for this sort of thing within psychology, and Summers raised it only as one possibility among many that deserve consideration. Nevertheless, there was an immediate, gigantic uproar on the Harvard campus, which led to four main results: a series of increasingly groveling apologies from Summers; a vote of no-confidence in Summers from the Harvard faculty of Arts and Sciences; a commitment authorized by Summers of $50 million to recruit more women scientists at Harvard; Summers's forced resignation.
(3) At Brandeis University last year, a leftist full professor of Political Science named Donald Hindley, after 46 years of teaching at Brandeis, was found guilty by the Provost's office of racial harassment, apparently for having said that Americans use the term "wetback" as a slur on Mexican immigrants to the United States. As far as is publicly known, no one accused him of calling Mexicans wetbacks himself, just for saying that we, the racist Americans, use that word. For this alleged act of harassment, Hindley's punishment included being required to attend anti-discrimination training, on pain of termination, and having an Associate Provost placed in his classroom as a monitor. It has not yet been firmly established what the exact pretext was, though, because the Brandeis administration has refused to inform Hindley of the actual complaint against him, on the grounds of protecting the complainant's confidentiality. Hindley has of course protested, backed by the vast majority of his students, the Brandeis Faculty Senate, and the Massachusetts ACLU. The Brandeis administration has recently withdrawn the classroom monitor, stating that the matter is now closed, but without the hearing or apology that Hindley and his backers have demanded.
(4) On NBC's comedy show Saturday Night Live, an actor named Fred Armisen has been performing as Barack Obama in weekly political skits. Fred Armisen is said to be of German, Japanese, and Venezuelan ancestry; Barack Obama is famously half white and half African. Armisen already looks a good deal like Obama, but his face is being slightly darkened for the sketches (along with a pair of big plastic ears being attached to his head). Some critics have condemned NBC for permitting the use of "blackface", a specific historical term that is lately coming into general use to describe any effort by non-blacks to appear as black for any reason. They argue that the only respectful way for a black person to be portrayed in public is by using a black actor. So far, despite the scattered complaints, SNL has continued with this popular series of sketches.
(5) Another so-called blackface situation occurred last year at Geneseo. Details are sketchy in a lot of people's minds, including mine, but this much seems pretty clear. A group of three white students went out last Halloween from their fraternity dressed up as black rap stars, and their costumes included dark make-up on their faces. Anticipating something like this happening, a campus racial activist group called FARI (Fighting Against Racial Injustice) went out with cameras looking for it, found it, immediately brought in the Rochester news media, and staged some protests on campus. There was also a photograph taken of somebody wearing actual blackface, but nobody seems to know who that was or where they came from. One of the protest signs had a picture of Geneseo president Christopher Dahl with a white moustache painted on his face, under the caption, "Got Racism?". The three rap-star students were dragged through a great public, televised humiliation, but not officially suspended or expelled, the President explaining with apparent regret that there is only so much that a state college can do legally to punish such offenses. I am told that one of the three students, a senior, subsequently dropped out of school. There was also a momentary backlash, with an anonymous circular put out by students calling themselves SAFARI (Students Against FARI), but I am aware of no further efforts to defend the rap-star students, or to criticize FARI or their faculty advisors. This so-called blackface incident has been deployed in several ways at Geneseo since then. It became the centerpiece for a gargantuan administrative teach-in on blackface and related issues that took place a couple of weeks ago, and that was already being heavily planned before last Halloween. It has also been brought into our ongoing discussions of curriculum reform under the Provost’s Curriculum Task Force, in support of a pair of proposals. One is to replace our Western Humanities program with a less "discriminatory" Global Humanities program, and the other is to require race, class, and gender content in every course at the college.
These few examples (they could be multiplied a hundred times) show something of the range of what is called political correctness, from complaints and actions that strike most objectors as just silly, to what seem to be quite serious threats to academic freedom. Let me try to describe what these examples have in common, by way of addressing my three main questions here. What is political correctness? What is wrong with political correctness? And what might reasonably be done to stop political correctness?
Part 1. What is political correctness?
First, a few words about the term. "Politically correct" is an inherently negative term, connoting excess. Excess of what? “Sensitivity" is probably the best word, in its current sense denoting a concern for avoiding racial, ethnic, sexual, and other types of offensiveness to groups. Nobody wants to be called politically correct, in the same way that we don't like to be called excessive about anything. So, even the most politically correct people will say: "I don't like political correctness," or "I don't want to be politically correct, but we have to be sensitive". The hard work comes in determining how much is too much. Assuming sensitivity of some sort at some level is a good thing, at what point does increased sensitivity become a bad thing, i.e. political correctness? In principle, the dispute over political correctness could be resolved if people could simply agree on some reasonable standard of sensitivity: let's all agree to be sensitive to this extent; thereafter, we won't worry about it. But this is not an easy thing to do, any more than it is easy to agree on what constitutes a military action's being too aggressive, say, or a welfare policy too generous. It is not just that people have different opinions at the outset. Our views on what constitutes political correctness and what is merely appropriate sensitivity depend largely on ideology, not just diverse perceptions of the ordinary sort.
Moreover, political correctness is not just a type or collection of particular instances of (possibly excessive) sensitivity, but also a whole sensibility, a general way of looking at the world and reacting to it, plus a broad pattern of official behavior that has developed out of this sensibility, and that reinforces it. Political correctness has a social and historical context, evolving over the past thirty years or so out of the post-sixties civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, and pervading certain institutions, particularly schools and colleges, with a cloud of rules and expectations governing speech and behavior. In this sense, PC is just a name for this historical and cultural phenomenon. In fact, although the use of the term "politically correct" is mostly associated with conservatives these days (those are the people who have come to use the term most often), it arose initially, during the 1970s, from the left, as the revolutionary anti-Vietnam-war generation found itself being pushed aside after the war was over by people, feminists especially, who opposed the tone of masculine rowdiness and radical personal freedom that had characterized the Sixties movement. Gradually, mostly over the 1980s, the old New Left made its peace with feminism, as well as middle age and tenure and professional success, and gave up pot and sex and freakishness for racket-ball and wine and fancy cooking. The term political correctness still means the same thing as it did in the 70s when it was a leftist epithet for other leftists, but it has a different edge these days when coming mainly from the right. I will regretfully continue to use the term political correctness for the thing I want to talk about despite its automatic negativity and somewhat neoconservative tang; feel free to substitute the more neutral (though less crisply referential) term "political sensitivity" in what follows. What matters to my argument, in any case, is that this stuff is wrong, not that it has a bad-sounding name.
It is worth noting that political correctness itself is, despite its origins, not exclusively a problem on the left. I think the political right has done a pretty good job lately of appropriating the style and technique of PC for its own ends. Conservative Christians, in particular, have shown a willingness to gripe and censor equal to that of the left-wing identity groups. To some extent, they are now able to hitch-hike on the post-9/11 sensitivity to Islam, in claiming protected status as another religious minority. So, for example, the student newspaper at the University of Virginia recently ran a couple of outrageous cartoons about Christianity, one depicting God and the Virgin Mary as…sexual partners. I won't call the cartoons anti-Christian: they were funny, which to my mind is always a sufficient motivation for a joke. But some Christian students took offense at them and protested, and were able to extract a standard, rather bored PC apology from the paper's editors. We also have a few political authorities like Candace de Russy occasionally trying to impose something like patriotic content on the SUNY curriculum, and anti-American leftists like Ward Churchill sometimes get into trouble for offending people about 9/11. So, there is right-wing political correctness, too, though I think it is derivative and still very weak compared to the main stream that comes from the identity-group left.
Political correctness, as a living institution, has a very particular character. Let me describe it briefly.
Political correctness is solemn. Whether or not a joke is actually funny seems to have no bearing on whether it should be permitted. "Paper of color" is a fine example of a good little joke graffito that simply had to be erased, because somebody took offense.
Political correctness is repressive. It is essential that some things that people are going to say or do, left to their own devices, have to be stopped. Intolerance …cannot be tolerated.
Political correctness is authoritarian. It used to be, when PC was just getting started in the 70s, that it took ordinary individuals with a little courage to stand up to other people and refuse to tolerate whatever they were seeing as offensive behavior. Your friends and colleagues would leave the room, or stop talking to you, or start yelling at you, if you said or did something incorrect, like using the word "chick". But quickly, especially over the 1980s, this became a matter of people bringing their complaints automatically to authorities, and having the authorities employ coercive measures like harassment policies to suppress insensitive behavior.
Political correctness is anti-intellectual and anti-scientific. This doesn't mean that scientists and other intellectuals can't be invested in political correctness. In fact, it's "intellectuals" in some broad sense who have deliberately created the whole business, starting with Marcuse if not Marx. But to the extent that this is what they are doing, suppressing open expression and free inquiry, they are willfully retarding intellectual progress overall, for the sake what they see as legitimate political goals.
Political correctness is perfectionistic. Nobody on the side of sensitivity ever seems to say that any level of PC is good enough, that we don’t need to sweat the details. Instead, the focus of PC seems usually to be placed at the edges, rather than the middle, of the targeted speech and behavior. The biggest uproars aren't over people physically attacking people of a different race, or people using traditional racial slurs, and so on, for things like that don't really happen very much. It is rather over people making jokes or statements or engaging in ambiguous symbolism, like using the word "lynch", the discriminatory content of which often needs to be explained to us by experts.
Political correctness is vague. If we look at campus rules against harassment; they will include not just what everybody thinks of as harassment, for example, calling people faggots to their faces, but also a chain of behaviors that might be taken to indicate an insensitive frame of mind. Here is how SUNY Geneseo defines "bias-related incidents", in its brochure, "procedures for students to report bias related incidents". There are three levels, hate crimes, bias-related incidents, and "chilly climate behaviors". Here are the definitions:
A hate crime is a
criminal offense, committed against a person or property which is motivated, in
whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against the actual or perceived race,
color, religion, religious practices, national origin, ancestry, sexual
orientation, age, gender or disability of the targeted person or group.
A bias-related incident or
bias incident is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against
the actual or perceived race, color, religion, religious practices, national
origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, age, gender or disability of the targeted
person or group, but does not rise to the level of a criminal offense.
Chilly climate behaviors are
those which contribute to an environment that is not open and welcoming to a
person or group, based on their race, color, religion, religious practices,
national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, age, gender or disability.
Offenders often remain anonymous.
According to these definitions, virtually anything could be taken as grounds for a complaint of bias. (I'm not saying that it will, just that it could be, because the definitions are so vague).
Political correctness is evolutionary. The demands of sensitivity change over time, and except for legal rulings from outside of the sensitivity establishment, they tend to change in one direction only, to become more exacting. It constitutes progress within the sensitivity movement to find another word to censor, another behavior to take offense at and suppress. Thus, one doesn't really know in one year what might be taken as harassment or discrimination in the next. When the rules of sensitivity change, when the institution of political correctness expands, this is ordinarily in response to some new public charge or incident of discrimination. In quite a few cases, twenty or so that have received public attention over the past ten years, incidents such as racial assaults have turned out to be wholly fabricated. In many others, complex or ambiguous situations, or ones that had previously been considered tolerable, for example students going out for Halloween as rap stars, have become the focus of big public protests. It is such protests that work to produce a heightened institutional sensitivity in stricter harassment policies, as well as other benefits for the complaining political groups. Pretext, protest, apology, rewards. That is the dynamic.
Part 2. What is
wrong with political correctness?
I haven't actually said yet why I think all this stuff is such a bad thing. PC is aimed essentially toward greater and greater sensitivity, so the question seems to be, when does this good thing become bad? I want to argue that sensitivity is in itself, inherently, at least a very questionable thing. I don't mean being considerate towards people's feelings, which is an obviously good thing, but the sensitivity that we are talking about means worrying about offending people – not about harming them, or even insulting them, but just about offending them. And why should we worry, ever, about merely offending anybody? If we are virtuous in our own hearts, and do no actual harm to anybody, why should we concern ourselves with whether other people take offense at anything we do or say? Of course, we might get into trouble by offending people, but this is only a self-centered, prudential sort of worry. What I am claiming is that I don't see anything immoral about offending people per se. To harm someone is substantive – it makes them worse off, but merely offending them does not. Insulting people is also a different thing. It requires an intention on the part of the insulter to get somebody upset. But merely offending people is different. You can only offend somebody who chooses to take offense at what you do. The essential action is in them, not in you. So, if I draw a funny picture of Jesus, or Mohammed, Martin Luther King, with no actual intention of insulting anybody, and somebody sees it and flips out about it, that's their problem. I'm not hurting anybody, or intending to, so I have nothing to apologize about.
Even if sensitivity were sometimes a good thing, the regime of sensitivity that we call political correctness has too many things that make it bad.
I have said that it is solemn. But jokes are good things, especially on serious topics. They helps us keep things in proportion. Solemnity, by contrast, and this plainly true for PC solemnity, is all about surfaces, not depths. You can be pious, but I don't think that you can be a truly serious person if you lack the mental flexibility and multiperspectivity that results in the best, which often means least socially appropriate, humor.
I have said that political correctness is repressive and authoritarian. I am not going to argue here at length that repression and authoritarianism are bad things. Maybe that's really what is needed here, but it would make the talk too long. So, I'm just going to take it for granted that most of you agree that it is usually better to minimize the use of force in our lives, and that it is usually better for people to develop their thoughts and express themselves and form their friendships unhindered by the hands of authority. Not that repression is never required – some evils do have to be dealt with harshly – just that it is in itself not a nice thing. And not that centralized control is never the best way of repressing evil – again, sometimes it may be required to do a necessary job – just that it's usually better to let people work out their own problems locally, without always bringing in the cops.
I have said that political correctness is perfectionistic, and I think that this is a bad thing in itself, too. Voltaire says that the perfect is the enemy of the good, one of my favorite statements. A lot of things can be good only up to a certain natural point, after which efforts to improve them only make things worse. Imagine three colleges. In the first, somebody calls somebody else a racial slur about once a day (that's what it was like on a good day when I went to college in the 60s and 70s at Indiana). In the second, someone gets called a racial slur about once a year (which is perhaps about where we are now, at Geneseo). In the third, nobody ever uses any racial slurs at all, even in jest, even in philosophical examples. Now, we know what it’s like to go from the first college to the second, because that what has happened in America over the last several decades, particularly the 60s and 70s. But what do you suppose it takes to get from good to perfect, from the second to the third, from one racial slur every once in a long while, to absolutely never. My own guess is that it simply cannot be done, not in a college, not with teenagers, not with alcohol around, and that it wouldn't be worth the trouble it if it could be done.
Here political correctness seems to overlap with the broader political phenomenon of "zero tolerance", where children are being suspended from school for being found with nail clippers, or drawing a cowboy with a gun, or carrying a couple of Midol tablets. This seems to be based on the idea that a little bit of something will always lead to a lot if it is not harshly repressed, that all slopes are slippery. And this is simply not true. Consider speed limits. Almost everybody always breaks the laws on speeding, but most people only do it by a little bit, and the police don't care within a range of about 10 miles an hour. Imagine what it would be like if they tried to enforce the speed limits perfectly. That's what PC is like.
I have said that political correctness evolves, and that its position and trajectory depends not on any stable understanding of what's right and wrong, but on a type of political development that has become almost a ritual over the last few decades. Somebody at some institution does something that provides a pretext of apparent discrimination, an identity group protests in front of cameras, embarrassing and threatening the institution, the relevant authorities instantly cave in and apologize and thank the protestors, and they negotiate some kind of privilege for the protesting group, typically making it even easier for future protests to succeed. This almost always works. And I think it is a bad thing, because it has its own power momentum which is increasingly independent of genuinely moral considerations. Protests are always rewarded; everybody fears the protestors. And the underlying moral discourse is, I think, deeply corrupted by the fact that the protesting groups have succeeded in negotiating their own control over the subsequent public discussion, as we saw, for example, at the exquisitely "facilitated" teach-in earlier this month.
I have said that political correctness is vague, and I think that this is a bad thing too. People should know, whenever there is any chance of their being punished for something, exactly what the rules are. Then they can go about their business unmolested and secure, whether they like the rules or not. But nobody is secure when nobody knows exactly what the rules are. The more vague and indeterminate rules become, in fact, the less they are really rules, and the more they become mere opportunities for the exercise of power. This is what "hostile environment" and "chilly climate" policies are like; they are basically ex post facto pretexts for arbitrarily punishing individuals who generate complaints. Is this whole talk, perhaps, an instance of "chilly climate behavior"? I don't know. How could I know? I am incompetent to know. Because it would depend not on the actual value of anything I say, but only on whether somebody chooses to complain that my remarks make them feel unwelcome, or whether someone in the administration might accept that stated feeling as sufficient for some kind of discipline, or public renunciation. It has happened before, to speakers with more charm than me. This sort of vagueness puts the accused in a position that we would all consider unfair in any analogous situation. All power goes to the plaintiff and the prosecution, and no presumption of innocence is left for the accused. At Brandeis, the complainant is so powerfully shielded, that this guy Hindley was prevented from facing not just his accuser, but even his accusation. During the Spanish Inquisition there were more rights for the accused. Contemporary PC is milder, but only in that its victims aren't actually being burned or disemboweled, just humiliated and harassed.
I am sometimes reminded of an episode of Twilight Zone that I saw when I was little, and that continues to creep me out to this day. It was called (I've looked it up) "It’s a Good Life". What happens is that there's this little boy named Anthony in this small town who was born with the arbitrary power to hurt other people just by wishing. If people upset Anthony, for any reason, he "wishes them into the cornfield". So, of course, the whole life of the town revolves around trying to keep this kid satisfied, because nobody wants to be wished into the cornfield. The kid himself becomes totally crazed by this power, in the way that Plato tells us any tyrant ultimately goes crazy, and a lot of people end up in the cornfield for no crime they could have anticipated. The adults, if they could somehow get their act together, could easily overpower this kid, but each of them is too frightened of what will happen to him individually, and nothing gets done, even when one guy finally takes a stand, and says: okay, now, let's get him! At the end of the program, the camera pans out past the cornfields, and we see in silhouette what has actually happened to the latest victim. It's his head…swaying back and forth…on a long spring…The little boy has transformed him…into a Jack-in-the-box.
So, a few complaints about political correctness. It has its faults. But none of these bad things, even taken together, prove that PC is a bad thing overall in its full moral context. That depends on whether a sufficiently important purpose is being well-enough served by PC to justify all the intolerance, intimidation, and deathly solemnity that it entails. There are cases where this kind of thing is justified. For example, criminal law is also solemn, repressive, and authoritarian, and we all think that this is a generally a good thing, because crime is really bad, and it has to be suppressed coercively. Patriotism also is often repressive and anti-intellectual and vague and all of that, but some people think we need in a time of war, when the nation itself is under siege. So, is there a counter-argument to all of my complaints about political correctness? Is there an account of PC as something our society really needs, in the way that we need to have criminal law, or maybe patriotic repression during war?
Well, of course there is. The theory is familiar: there is an ongoing crisis of discrimination (or, some people like to say "hate") in the United States, and colleges and schools must take extraordinary measures to contain this crisis, in the name of providing ultimate justice to minorities. It's not enough just to be fair, in the ordinary sense of having fair admissions policies and grading policies and so on, treating everybody as an individual. Our responsibility extends to creating a warm, welcoming environment for the relevant minorities, which supposedly entails protecting them at almost any cost from being offended, including verbally or symbolically offended. If they don't feel good about being here, that is our fault and our students' fault, and it is a matter of great seriousness. For only if we provide the correct, rigorous moral (including anti-racist, anti-sexist, and so on) education to our white students, male students, and so on, can we ever hope to build a fair society, so pernicious is the ingrained racism, sexism, and so on of the background culture from which our students spring. A good society, a fair society, has to begin, then, as a sensitive society – at least in America, given our horrible history of racism, sexism, "homophobia", and so on. This theory is, as far as I can tell, the central justification for political correctness.
I am sorry, but I just don't believe this theory. And even if I did, I still don't think I'd be in favor of political correctness, because it does so much damage to other things that we value. But it isn't true, we don't need repressive sensitivity to produce a fair, friendly community. It doesn't work. In fact, it works the other way, creating more and more resentment on all sides rather than mutual respect and friendship. Let's just use common sense – what is it like in ordinary life when you have to be nice to somebody? What is it like when they have to be nice to you? It isn’t good.
Here's Billy, playing in the sandbox with his trucks. And here come the parents, along with Billy's little cousin Suzie, who is here for a visit:
Parents: Hi, Billy, this is your cousin Suzie.
Billy: Okay.
Parents: She's going to play here in the sandbox with you.
Billy: Okay.
Parents: And if we hear her crying, you're going to be severely punished.
Billy: What?
This story doesn't make any sense. The only way it makes sense is if Billy has a history of making other children cry, or perhaps if Suzie is …disabled, or has some other kind of special vulnerability. Otherwise, if Billy is not a known bully, there is no earthly reason to be threatening him, or placing the burden of Suzie's immediate happiness on his shoulders. It is certainly not going to encourage friendship. The best thing to do, if they are both relatively normal kids, is just leave them alone. It will be awkward at first, no doubt, and Billy will just want to focus on his little trucks, and Suzie will probably feel a little bit left out, but an hour later, they'll be friends, or close enough. They'll work it out for themselves. Short of preventing violence, adults only make things like this harder when they interfere.
I don't see any essential difference with the issue of campus diversity, I really don't. I see no reason to abandon commonsense principles in dealing with the problems of diversity on campus. The white students at Geneseo are not bullies, and the black students are not disabled. They are all nice, smart kids, and if we leave them alone, in particular if we stop threatening the white students, and stop telling the black students how vulnerable they are to being victimized by the white ones, they’ll probably work things out for themselves, and end up as friends. At Geneseo, we say that we value "community". But what kind of community is it going to be, if most of its members are terrified of offending all the rest? Not of harming them, of insulting them, which are things that each of us can control for ourselves, but of offending them, which is a matter under their control. Real community requires friendship, or at least the possibility of friendship. And friendship requires trust. I know it's awkward, and I feel for the students who come here and don't automatically fit in, including minorities, but also including all the sad, weird, unripe non-minority teenagers who make up much of every freshman class.
If things are different for the minority students, especially the black ones, this may be largely due to what is probably the elephant in the room for this entire topic, namely affirmative action. I am afraid that affirmative action, as we practice it, tends to produce a kind of mutual resentment among students that is hard for them to work through in a completely friendly way. I don't mean affirmative action understood as merely helping minority students who already want to come here get in, essentially by lowering the ordinary admissions standards for minorities a little bit. This is something that most people approve of, within reason, as long as it does not create a class system of groups with noticeably different talent or preparation levels. What I am talking about is the intense awkwardness of the contemporary affirmative action environment under its diversity justification, and the special stress that black students in particular (and some other minorities, but this has always been mainly about black students) experience when placed in a college environment by way of separate processes, and given different expectations and responsibilities from all the other students. The white students at Geneseo come here just to go to college – they applied here on their own initiative, and they got in (in almost every case) simply because of their outstanding academic records. The black students here have a rather different role, we are constantly reminded: along with being students themselves, they are invited and admitted here in order to provide the white students with a "diverse learning environment". They are expected to be moral teachers and facilitators and exemplars, not just people, and they are also recruited into campus identity groups like the Black Student Union, and expected to show ethnic identity and loyalty in everything they do. One of my students told me earlier this week – she’s from Kenya, where she went to a mixed-race high school – that she never knew that she was “black” until she came here.
I think this is an extraordinary imposition for us to make on eighteen-year-old human beings, and I am not at all surprised if some students show a little bitterness at having to carry all this weight, and blame the institution for making their lives here so awkward. At its best, political correctness is an effort to make people comfortable who have been deliberately placed into this kind of uncomfortable situation. But it relies on blaming the allegedly racist (or merely "ignorant") mainstream students (and sometimes faculty) for what are only the natural results of a deliberate administrative policy. Our students are generally nice, smart, good-natured, open-minded young people, and we slander them the call them racists, or racially ignorant, and so on. They are not to blame for the discomfort of minorities at Geneseo, and I think the same is true for students at most other colleges. Michelle Obama has written and frequently spoken in passing about the resentment that she felt, and evidently still feels, toward Princeton University for precisely this reason. She says she always felt like the white students were looking at her differently, or avoiding looking at her, and not fundamentally because she had a black face, but because she had a genuinely separate status as a student there, with separate, noticeably lower admissions standards (she keeps saying in public that she didn’t meet the ordinary Princeton admissions standards), and separate orientation procedures, and so on. Some conservative writers have attacked her lately, claiming that she has a big chip on her shoulder, and that she ought to be grateful for the extra privileges she’s had, and all the money she now makes, and so on. But it is not clear to me that she is really better off, with so many people thinking her success is illegitimate, than if she’d been allowed to flourish simply on her strengths and talents as an individual.
I don't claim to know how to solve the basic, background problem of affirmative-action awkwardness. One obvious way would be to end affirmative action altogether, or to shift from race-based to strictly class-based or economic affirmative action – but I am not arguing for any of these changes (in fact, I have defended race-based affirmative action in principle in an earlier talk to this club). I am just saying that the awkwardness problem is not going to be fixed by terrifying students and faculty into vapid inoffensiveness toward blacks and other minorities. It doesn't work; it's not sincere; it's not convincing. It didn't work on Michelle Obama at Princeton, it just made her angry, and it is not going to work on anybody else who has an ounce of pride.
Part 3. What can
be done to stop political correctness?
I am feeling optimistic lately that PC is starting to run out of time, despite its continued, deepening organizational entrenchment. Students are sick of it, a lot of faculty have had about enough, the culture in general is weary of piety, and identity politics, and more and more routine, boring, phony-seeming protests. People get tired of being called names all the time, even the name racist. Clearly, something of Barack Obama's recent appeal as a candidate depends on his vague promises to somehow move the country beyond all this unbearably tedious race-consciousness. At some of his rallies, people actually chant, "Race doesn't matter. Race doesn't matter. Race doesn't matter." And it is so nice to hear that.
There are also some signs that contemporary culture, especially youth culture, may be turning on political correctness with a vengeance. It is not just shock-jocks on the radio. If you look at how the most popular comedy shows on TV now deal with race, gender, and so on, it's getting pretty wild out there. South Park, Family Guy, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, the Whitest Kids You Know, especially Dave Chapelle: one racial or sexual outrage after another, and I am not even going to say what they do. Watch them yourself. Even adult drama shows on network TV are getting a lot more daring. In the hit medical show House, the hero, Dr. House, is represented as a mean, crabby bastard genius with a well-hidden heart of gold, who holds onto his job only because he saves so many lives. What gives the show so much appeal is not the life-saving stuff, it's watching the hero go around offending everybody, including dying patients and their relatives, but especially his female boss and his black and female subordinates. The guy is stunningly insensitive, but he's lovable, because, in a main subtext of the whole series, polite, inclusive, sensitive language doesn't really matter. Symbolism doesn't matter. What matters is what we actually do. And this is from Hollywood, and there is a lot more stuff like this besides. Somehow, colleges are going to have to adjust to this onrush of anti-PC, anti-sensitivity material. We can't keep developments in the general culture off campus forever, no matter how repressive we are willing to get.
It helps that there has been a string of really disgusting overreaches, including a long line of campus harassment and assault frauds that have served to make reasonable people suspicious about all new such claims. This fraud technique, by the way, was recently copied by a conservative student at Princeton, who turned out to have faked a serious beating that got him a lot of publicity for a short time, and embarrassed his defenders for a long time. The worst, most despicable example I can think of is last year's Duke Lacrosse Team case, where a crazed, racially exploitative and ultimately disbarred prosecutor ruthlessly attacked a group of white, privileged, reputedly arrogant, but factually innocent athletes, charging them with the multiple rape of a hired stripper on the basis of pretty obviously manufactured evidence. The Duke administration and much of the faculty immediately sided with the prosecutor, shut down the lacrosse team, fired the coach, suspended the students, and maintained this posture well past the point where any unbiased observer had concluded the whole thing was a reckless fraud. It's not yet clear how much money Duke is going to have to pay for its participation in this sorry incident – the students are naturally suing – but it's certainly going to be many millions, and perhaps they'll learn a lesson about actual tolerance and fairness. More importantly, I think a decent, national opposition to political correctness builds from horror story cases like this, as the Hindley case seems to be really changing people's views about such things at Brandeis.
And there is always the possibility of a prominent college administration deciding to take a firm, principled stand against political correctness, just because it is the right thing to do. Larry Summers at Harvard had a great chance, an almost perfect opportunity to turn a typically unfair accusation into a "teaching moment" for the whole country, and a lot of people were counting on him to stick up for himself and his college, but he absolutely blew it, in the most craven possible way, and got brought down ugly anyway – a real setback to the cause of academic freedom. But sooner or later, another president at Harvard or Yale or some other fancy school, someone with national visibility, may decide that enough is enough. And then, who knows? Maybe the whole, rotten system will collapse.
In the meantime, here are a few modest suggestions for people like us, the ordinary faculty and students, on how to combat political correctness here at Geneseo.
(1) Let us determine not to be intimidated intellectually into seeing the political correctness issue as a simple matter of whether we side with or against historically oppressed minorities. It is a lie to say that we either accept political correctness or we tolerate racism. There is, in fact, a great range of different views that decent people take about how to deal with problems of race and sex and all these other things. You can be perfectly progressive (that is, you can take social equality as your primary political goal) and oppose political correctness. No one was ever less politically correct than the radical Left of the Sixties. You can also certainly be liberal (that is, you can take individual freedom as your primary political goal) and oppose political correctness. In my view, to be a true liberal and to oppose political correctness are almost the same thing. And you can also be a perfectly decent conservative (that is, you can take respect for tradition as your primary political goal) and oppose political correctness, including the suppression of supposedly offensive statements about Christianity or the United States. It is really only a very specific type of anti-liberal progressive that necessarily supports PC. And these people don't own the issue of race-relations, though they may act as if they do. Why don't the rest of us, the great majority, put up a fight?
(2) Let us organize a little bit, or at least be prepared to organize, if things get any worse. If we are to oppose political correctness successfully, I think the lead has to be taken by tenured faculty, especially established figures like the DTPs. Administrators, even sympathetic ones, will never take the lead on this. They don't have tenure. We do. They have to worry about placating destructive protestors. We don't. So, let's see – let's talk about this – whether Geneseo could benefit from the existence of some kind of free speech movement, or association, or t-shirts, or something.
(3) Let us demand precision and transparency in the college’s rules. We don’t have to accept nebulous notions like "chilly climate behaviors" as excuses for administrative fiat. I myself would set a very low standard of required sensitivity, as I have explained. But whatever it is, let us have it all spelled out so that we can be secure in our classrooms and offices, however constrained, and so that we have a clear ground for resistance, should we ever need one.
(4) We are
constantly being asked to "celebrate diversity", where that means
racial, ethnic, and other identity-group representation. Let us celebrate intellectual
diversity as another primary institutional value. Let us promote the view (the fact)
that real advances in knowledge come from fearless consideration of the
broadest possible range of alternative perspectives. And that means fearless, and that means
broadest possible. Let us take inspiration from the struggles of evolutionary
biology to be accepted apolitically as science, first against conservative
creationism, then against the PC ideology that is currently deployed in losing
battles against evolutionary psychology.
Science will ultimately win these arguments, I have no doubt, and
somehow, people will adjust to whatever the true theories turn out to be about
race, gender, sexual orientation, and everything else.
(5) Let us also celebrate pure freedom, academic and otherwise, as a primary institutional value. Some campuses have free speech zones, little pieces of pavement where students can stand when they want to say something politically controversial. Geneseo has so far avoided such nonsense, much to its credit. Let our entire campus be a free speech zone, including each of our classrooms. We strive, officially, to make Geneseo into the premier public liberal arts college in the nation. How about striving officially to make Geneseo the premier free speech campus in the nation?
(6) And let us celebrate – can we not sometimes celebrate – the very anarchy of youth? Let us recognize that people, particularly young ones, sometimes need to be "bad", especially when they are being pressed all the time to be perfect. And that the more we press them, the more likely they are to rebel, if they have any spirit, if they have any guts. With sex, with drunkenness, with vomiting around the IB and outside of Mia’s, we already understand that bottles and rules and young hearts are sometimes going to be broken. Let us show the same wisdom and moderation about speech.
(7) Finally, and most importantly, let us each be prepared, at some point, not to apologize for a perceived act of insensitivity. Let us each think about where we would draw the sensitivity line for ourselves, so that if somebody chooses to complain about something we say or do, we won't just be shocked into begging for forgiveness. We also have to be prepared to stand up for our students and colleagues who draw their lines a little differently, because it's going to take some solidarity among the people who see political correctness as a problem, if we are ever going to fix it. My friend said such-and-such in class. I wouldn't have said that thing myself, or if I had, I might well have retracted it when someone took offense. But my colleague or my student has chosen to stand his ground against political correctness there. And I am going to stand with him, because from now on, none of us goes to the cornfield.