Political Correctness

Political correctness is a curious sociolinguistic phenomenon, being a form of self-censorship and conformity that has grown up, paradoxically, in free Western societies, especially in America in the last two decades. Generated by attitudes reflecting social sensitivity rather than frankness, it essentially seeks to eliminate prejudicial language and alter attitudes in addressing a whole range of social and political issues, including culture, education, curricula, gender, disability, and ethnicity. Language is naturally crucial to this dynamic of change, since political correctness involves a whole series of redefinitions of conditions, roles, attitudes, and programs. The axiomatic assumption is that to change language is to change social attitudes. Whereas euphemism and other forms of verbal sanitization have grown up spontaneously in the speech community, political correctness derives from less easily defined origins and pressures.

The formula “politically correct” has been traced back to the American New Left in the 1960s, and the terminology itself probably originated from an English translation of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book . (See Cameron in Dunant, ed., 1994, 18-19.) Although the Maoist sense was “conforming to the party line or expectations,” the formula came to be used in an ironic or self-deprecating sense in the early years of its currency. However, by the late 1980s political correctness had assumed a whole range of agendas and become a major area of debate, notably in America. On certain campuses attitudes of conformity hardened into programmatic requirements in codes of speech and behavior, often on issues unconcerned with politics per se . These were widely criticized (and in some cases legally overthrown) as violating the First Amendment of the Constitution. The irony that institutions that had traditionally upheld free speech and open debate were becoming centers of illiberal censor-ship and conformity was not lost on critics and opponents. They stigmatized the movement as both an attempt at “Orwellian” thought control achieved by language manipulation and a new “McCarthyite” witch hunt.

Curiously, the most common sources historically of complaint against abusive language, namely religious oaths and sexual insults, have not been the major focus of the debate. Instead, the concentration has been on terms for ethnic groups, disabilities, material deprivations, and criminal behavior, generating new areas of taboo and new euphemisms. Some of these were traditional, such as financially underprivileged instead of poor . But Black , previously euphemized by such terms as colored and darky , was now avoided as far as possible, even in traditional formations such as blackboard and the black pieces in chess. In parallel white was increasingly replaced by the curious misnomer Caucasian . In addition, new areas of prejudice were highlighted by the suffix – ism and – ist . While this suffix is established in modern forms like racism from the 1930s, new forms appeared simultaneously in sexism (1968), ageism (1969), ableism (1981), and lookism (1978). Classism has been recycled, having been first recorded in 1842 as “the curse of England and Englishmen” in Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical (II, xviii, 89).

Portentous pseudo-classical labels like phallocentric, gynophobic , and logocentric use an arcane register to suggest an agenda. In one of the movement’s most publicized ideological categorizations, “the canon of traditional western culture” sketched by Professor John Searle as existing “from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature” ( New York Review of Books , December 6, 1990, 34), was dismissed and trivialized by extreme political correctionists as being the provenance of “dead white males,” often abbreviated to d.w.m. , later extended and capitalized to “Dead White European Males” (DWEMs). This offensive formulation exploited precisely the racist and sexist categorizations that the propagandists claim to condemn. John Anette’s essay “The Culture Wars on the American Campus” (in Dunant, ed., 1994) recounts some of the more violent episodes in the campaign against “Eurocentric culture.”

Politically correct language typically avoids traditionally judgmental terms, preferring an artificial currency of polysyllabic abstract euphemistic substitutions. Thus drug addiction is avoided, the preferred formula being “substance dependence,” “visually impaired” is preferred to blind , while “sex worker” is the politically correct term for prostitute . Although cripple and spastic have become taboo, some formulas, such as “differently abled” for disabled , have proved too artificial to gain real currency.

Such substitutions, though apparently trivial, have provoked some scathing ripostes. Barbara Ehrenreich has questioned the efficacy of cosmetic linguistic changes upon underlying attitudes: “If you outlaw the term ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’ you’re not going to do a thing about the sexist attitudes underneath … there is a tendency to confuse verbal purification with real social change…. Now I’m all for verbal uplift … [but] verbal uplift is not the revolution” (in Dunant, ed., 1994, 23-24).

In a devastating rejection of the strategy of “verbal uplift” and a radical questioning of its motives, Robert Hughes commented in his polemical commentary on America, Culture of Complaint (1993):

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. Does the cripple rise from his wheelchair, or feel better about being stuck in it, because someone … decided that, for official purposes, he was “physically challenged”?

(18-19)

These objections go to the heart of the matter, questioning the assumption that changing the language truly solves social and political problems. Clearly George Orwell’s artificial “Newspeak” in 1984 was designed to make “thought crime” impossible by eliminating certain crucial concept-words like “free,” which Big Brother considered undesirable or subversive (1972, 299). It is a different matter to assume that verbal substitutions will alter mental and political attitudes in a free society. They may, however, serve the role of “raising consciousness.” Some critics have gone further, finding bowdlerism, intellectual intimidation, and a degree of pharisaic hypocrisy: “It seems to me that the main purpose of today’s bowdlerism is less to protect the ostensible targets of prejudice—black people, women or whomever—than to demonstrate the moral purity of the expurgators, their sensitivity to the evils of prejudice and discrimination” (Melanie Phillips, in Dunant, ed., 1994, 47).

Furthermore, politically correct language is the formulation of a militant minority; it is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. The curious history of African-American is germane in this respect. It was first formulated in the 1850s in the United States by black social leaders who wished to avoid the stigmatic overtones of Black and Negro . It then diminished in currency before being revived from the 1960s as the politically correct term. In Deborah Cameron’s terms: “Is not precisely the point of the linguistic intervention to challenge the kind of discourse that defines people by skin colour?” (in Dunant, ed., 1994, 28). While this sounds plausible, the attitudes of those affected by prejudice, when they are consulted, turn out to be quite different. David Crystal points out: “In one 1991 survey of black Americans, carried out in the USA by the black-oriented Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, over 70 percent of blacks said that they preferred to be called black , notwithstanding the supposed contemporary vogue for the politically correct African-American ” (1995, 177).

A parallel case emerges from the Cape Province of South Africa. From the 1830s the people of mixed race were referred to as Coloured , a term that carried increasingly stigmatic overtones in the racial categorization of the apartheid system. With the coming of the new democratic and egalitarian dispensation after the watershed election in 1994, various pressure groups started to campaign for the substitution of “mixed race.” However, a survey of the people themselves carried out by the Johannesburg Star newspaper in 1994 found that 75 per cent of those polled “did not mind being referred to as Coloured” (October 15-16, 9). Today Coloured is their preferred term.

The debate over the efficacy of politically correct language remains unresolved. Although there seem to be more critics than advocates, this mode of language, at once “raising consciousness” and camouflaging social problems, maintains its curious semiofficial status.