The Veracity of Political Correctness

Scott Hardie | June 16, 2017
Watching a TV drama the other day, I was struck by a line of dialogue that I've heard said by various people over the last couple of years, since Trump's campaign first picked up steam and dredged up all kinds of racist comments in public:

"It's like everybody now feels allowed to say the awful things they've been thinking all along."

This is usually said by a liberal who's watching in horror at racial slurs and bigotry being slung around freely and openly.

I know I'm pretty naive about race, as I've said elsewhere recently, but this still sounds incorrect to me.

I thought the point of us as a society not saying ugly racist things any more was because we collectively accepted that those things were genuinely wrong to think and say, not because we were simply "not allowed" by the PC police. Obviously there have been notable exceptions, a minority of people who still very much continue to hold those racist beliefs, but I thought as a society that a significant majority of us had sincerely accepted that racism was wrong, and that this wasn't just pretending. Only members of that minority felt "not allowed" to say racist things; to the rest of us, turning the page was real.

Trump's campaign did change things. But I thought the effect of Trump's racial animus was to make racist beliefs seem valid and true again, not just "acceptable to say" again. It's a small but important distinction.

Perhaps most surprising to me is that it's liberals expressing this belief: "People feel like they're allowed to be racists again!" It never should have been, and I thought never truly was, about controlling people's speech (ignoring shit like this at the far liberal fringes). I remember when political correctness as a concept first became a culture-war flash point in the early nineties; I thought the impetus behind it was not just to scrub bad words from speech arbitrarily, but to recognize the real consequences of certain words and to stop using them for reasons that most people accepted as good and useful. A liberal true to the cause, real or fictional on a TV show, shouldn't and wouldn't think of it merely in terms of what someone is "allowed" to say.

So here's another case of scales falling from my eyes. I came of age in a deeply PC era. My high school and college years ingrained in me a sense that it was genuinely wrong to think of someone primarily in terms of their race, genuinely wrong to call someone a racial slur (not necessarily to use the word academically which is a different discussion), and genuinely wrong to think of an entire race of people monolithically and assign traits to all of them -- not "just because." With the rise of Trump, I don't suddenly feel "allowed" to do these things; I still very much believe those things are morally and factually wrong. What I'm coming to realize is that I'm a lot more alone in that belief than I thought. I knew that American racism was too central to our culture and too deeply entrenched to go away completely, but I really thought that the sincere, intentional racism had receded into a minority of people, and I was wrong.

I believed America had truly become a better place than in earlier generations, but it was only pretending to be better, and that disappoints me.