ROBUST discussion
Rants: OT & OTT
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To be PC or not to be PC
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I consider all words appropriate, but I don't trust all writers to use them appropriately.Just last night the word "retard" was used by the story's narrator in a book I'm reading -- and it fit perfectly. The writer was in control of the usage, putting the right word into the narrator's mouth.
Well, context is everything and I say this as a guy who dealt a lot with racial slurs growing up.In some cases, it might even difficult to write a certain type of book without using certain words.
On the other hand, I don't find, "I'm just not PC" as a get-out-jail-free card for offensiveness, especially when people are being sloppy or just trying to be offensive.
I've known several people who drop that line then starting going off with racist jokes and language as if just saying, "I'm not PC" somehow frees them from any consequences of their language choices.
People can say whatever they want in whatever context, but do have to be aware if they aren't careful their usage may be either better received or worse received.
Of course, no matter how careful you are, there will be some people who will be always be offended for some perceived slight against them, their beliefs, or whatever, but no real point worrying about them.
There are some people who make careers and lives out of being offended. For them political correctness is a gift, a weapon.
I've already been picked up in two reviews for doing things I very carefully tried NOT to do. J.a's right. You can't win and there is no point in worrying about them.
Mod
I fully agree with you on this. I've even seen it in action here especially in the political arena.
J.A. wrote: "On the other hand, I don't find, "I'm just not PC" as a get-out-jail-free card for offensiveness, especially when people are being sloppy or just trying to be offensive."
That old standby "I'm not a racist but..." comes to mind.
Is being thought of as PC being taken too far? I sometimes tend to think that on the whole, human beings are so terrified of offending that we've lost sight of many things.
Mod
One night at a benefit concert in London I'm backstage talking to some of Nelson Mandela's bodyguards who recognised me. I taught one of them to drive fast cars at the Police Driving School at Valhalla when a magistrate sentenced me to a day of community service a month for a year for leading several police chases 440 miles to Durban in under four hours when my girlfriend wanted to go ice-skating. Another was my sergeant when I did my conscript service in Intelligence, planning blitsoorvallings of countries three and four deep beyond our borders. Anyway, they all knew who I am; one who had been in the Bureau of State Security had hunted me when I was an exile.
Of course I spoke to them in Afrikaans and to the ones who spoke English in the accent they expected; I speak to everyone in their own language and accent.
When they left, I turned around and there was this shaven-headed girl, deliberately blocking my way. I later discovered she is a singer; I don't follow her sort of crappop. She was outraged. "How dare you show your face here?" she hissed.
Just then Mandela came up, looking for me, said, "There you are, my friend!" and embraced me. A British actor who lives down the road here, very distinguished, said to her, "Bit racist, condemning Andre just for having a white skin and being born in South Africa, don't you think." He has a stage-trained voice, so everyone within thirty feet heard the rebuke.
"Fuck you all," she said, and stalked off, shoulders stiff, feeling unappreciated for having been ever so politically correct, regardless of who she hurt unfairly.
To make it worse, I said to the actor over Mandela's shoulder, in his accent and at his Sandhurst pitch, "Thanks, Jeremy, but I was about to put her down myself," and there was an absolute gust of laughter.
I watched her back jerk. She knew they were laughing at her.
Whenever I hear "politically correct" or "PC", her back jerking in outrage floats up on the screen of my mind.
If trash like her is politically correct, it's a group I don't want to belong to.
Hmm - another story for the unauthorize Autobiography...
On the subject of PC - good manners are never politically incorrect.
Mod
No doubt - but I find it amusing as they try. Somehow it always backfires - on them.
Mod
My friend Douglas Sutherland, the author of the English Gentleman series of books, said once, A gentleman never causes anyone unintentional distress.
Sneaky word, "unintentional".
My uncle was a politician in the 1960's. He always said that being polite to your enemies serves 2 purposes - one is to piss them off, the other is to make them wonder what your up to.
My co-author, John Philpin, has exquisite manners leftover from an earlier century. He uses them sporadically. I love to watch him move in and out of his courtly behavior. It's like watching a ping pong match.
Well, for everything there is an equal & opposite reaction. We had years of political parties feeling it okay (and vote-winning!) to print leaflets saying "if you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Liberal or Labour". There was rightly a backlash against this kind of thing, and the force needed for that backlash has temporarily swung the pendulum the other way... It hasn't settled yet."I'm not homophobic but..." & "I'm not racist but..." were uttered by the man at the table next to me last Sunday lunch, followed by pretty appalling statements. I couldn't help laughing - he was such a cliche.
As the mother of two children who were born in Korea, I've heard the 'I'm not racist, but...' tag more often than I care to. My kids look Asian, but they speak, act and feel Australian (while being proud of their Korean heritage). However, they are constantly labelled and stereotyped and it brings out the angriest mother bear in me. I often get the feeling people think I'm just being overly PC when I complain, but hearing your child's heritage being maligned is really annoying. They might even add, 'Oh, I don't mean your children, of course!', but it makes no difference. Not racist, yeah, right!
One thing that annoys me is the presumption by some of the 'Not racist but' people that because I'm a white, middle(ish)-class heterosexual male I am going to share whatever jingoistic, repressed views they have. Like they want to confide in me to prove that everyone thinks like they do really.That said, to answer the original question I'd never not use an 'offensive' word if it felt artistically right to do so. In fact I have written a story from the point of view of a far, far right racist, and that obviously involved language choices that I wouldn't say myself. But the story itself, if it works, is anti-racist. But you have to present honestly what your being anti against...
... Re. Andre's story. That girl wasn't being PC & I think it's a rather tabloid driven view of "PC gone mad!" when people call things like that PC. When the meaning of a phrase has changed so much that someone judging someone by their accent/skin-colour is called PC (!) then we need to junk the phrase.But we shouldn't junk the *original* stimulus for the phrase.
Mod
She was stereotyping me, but her response to the stereotype was definitely PC in the time and the place.
I think your use of the word "fashionable" sums it up. When these kind of things become 'trends' then it's all over trying to discern any intellectual coherence in them. My own view is I wouldn't ever want to be in the position of trying to *ban* or stop someone saying something idiotic, hateful, or prejudiced. However, not would I want to be in the position of not being able to call them out on saying such things.
To often PC is used as a way of banning/stopping what people have to say (which I suspect is why you dislike it so Andre?) Me I want the idiot racist twats to have their say, so that it is obvious to all what they are.
Mod
That said, racism is still quite alive and well in this, our Rainbow Nation. Everyone thinks that with the end of apartheid the end of racism is a given. It's not only fully entrenched in the area I live in, it is fully entrenched in everyday life. Still.
To make it all worse, racial slurs by black people are often encouraged or thought of as a just reward that whites have to live with because we treated black people so abysmally for many years. I doubt that it is a situation that will change much in the near future.
I met Mandela once Andre. He was at a political rally in a white area trying to put everyone's fears at rest (many thought that once he was released there would be a full out war against whites but there never was). He was doing the usual meet n greet thing that politicians do. I shook his hand and he said it was refreshing to see so many young people my age there (I was around 23 or 24 I think).
Back then I had a friend whose nickname was Kaffir, the equivalent of Nigger in the US. He is black and mostly introduced himself as Kaffir for shock value. We all went out one night for dinner to a jazz cafe, with a mixed audience which was not unusual back then in Cape Town. One of his friends (also black) called out to him by using his nickname. A couple of black and white people at the tables nearby nearly caused a riot because of it. We were all highly amused though, it wasn't an insult to him or us but to them it was a huge insult (the black people especially took it hard when he insisted on being called by his nickname all evening, the white people were mortified). I've always prided myself on not being PC. There is no point I feel.
Anyone know the where/how/who s of how the term "PC" was coined? I've always assumed it was coined by detractors of 'it' but I don't know that.It's one of those words that everyone has a different meaning for, I guess, which is partly why the discussion of it never seems to go anywhere...
Mod
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politica...
Early usagesEarly usages of the phrase "politically correct" have been found in various contexts, which may not relate to the current terminology.[4][5] Examples of the term can be found as early as the 18th century. The previous meaning was 'in line with prevailing political thought or policy'. The term previously used 'correctness' in its literal sense and without any particular reference to language that might be considered offensive or discriminatory. For example, J. Wilson's comments in U.S. Republic, 1793:
"The states, rather than the people, for whose sake the states exist, are frequently the objects which attract and arrest our principal attention... Sentiments and expressions of this inaccurate kind prevail in our common, even in our convivial, language... ‘The United States,’ instead of the ‘People of the United States,’ is the toast given. This is not politically correct."[6]
[edit] In New Left rhetoricBy 1970, New Left proponents had adopted the term political correctness.[1] In the essay The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara says: ". . . a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist too." The New Left later re-appropriated the term political correctness as satirical self-criticism; per Debra Shultz: "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts".[1][2][7] Hence, it is a popular English usage in the underground comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, while ideologically sound, an alternative term, followed a like lexical path, appearing in Bart Dickon’s satirical comic strips.[1][8] Moreover, Ellen Willis says: " . . . in the early ’80s, when feminists used the term political correctness, it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement’s efforts to define a ‘feminist sexuality’ ".[9]
[edit] Current usageWidespread use of the term politically correct and its derivatives began when it was adopted as a pejorative term by the political right in the 1990s, in the context of the Culture Wars. Writing in the New York Times in 1990,[10] Richard Bernstein noted "The term 'politically correct,' with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities." Bernstein referred to a meeting of the Western Humanities Conference in Berkeley, California, on "'Political Correctness' and Cultural Studies," which examined "what effect the pressure to conform to currently fashionable ideas is having on scholarship". Bernstein also referred to "p.c.p" for "politically correct people," a term which did not take root in popular discussion.
Within a few years, this previously obscure term featured regularly in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against curriculum expansion and progressive teaching methods in US high schools and universities.[11] In 1991, addressing a graduating class of the University of Michigan, U.S. President George H. W. Bush spoke against "a movement [that would] declare certain topics 'off-limits,' certain expressions 'off-limits', even certain gestures 'off-limits'" in allusion to liberal Political Correctness.[12] The most common usage here is as a pejorative term to refer to excessive deference to particular sensibilities at the expense of other considerations. The converse term "politically incorrect" came into use as an implicit term of self-praise, indicating that the user was not afraid to ignore constraints associated with political correctness. Examples of the latter include the conservative Politically Incorrect Guides published by the Regnery editorial house[3] and the television talk show Politically Incorrect.
The central uses of the term relate to particular issues of race, gender, disability, ethnicity, sexual preference, culture and worldviews, and encompass both the language in which issues are discussed and the viewpoints that are expressed. Proponents of the view that differences in IQ test scores between blacks and whites are (primarily or largely) genetically determined state that criticism of these views is based on political correctness.[13]
Examples of language commonly referred to as "politically correct" include:[14][page needed]
"Intellectually disabled" in place of "Retarded" and other terms
"African American" in place of "Black," "Negro" and other terms. (However, "Black" is used in English-speaking countries other than the U.S.)
"Native American" (or "First Nations" in Canada) in place of "Indian"
"Caucasian" in place of "White", and other terms
"Gender-neutral" terms such as "firefighter" in place of "fireman," police officer in place of policeman.
Terms relating to disability, such as "visually impaired" or "hearing impaired" in place of "blind" or "deaf"
"Persons of color" in place of "ethnic minorities" or "non-whites" in countries populated predominantly by people who are white.[citation needed]
"Holiday", "winter" or "festive" in place of "Christmas"
In the United Kingdom, "political correctness gone mad" is a catchphrase associated with the conservative Daily Mail newspaper.[15]
In a more general sense, any policy regarded by the speaker as representing an imposed orthodoxy, such as the claim that global warming is a serious problem requiring a policy response, may be criticized as "politically correct."[16]
When I was a kid, this little old white woman wrote an op ed in our local paper for Martin Luther King Day.In it, she expressed how happy she was that society was so less racist then it was when she was a child. She spent paragraphs in praise of Dr. King, acknowledged we still had a ways to go, but in general said, "It's good to see that hate is dying."
She made one minor mistake. She used the term "colored".
Of course, everyone ignored this rather great and beautiful letter about racial reconciliation to instead try and act like this woman was one step up from David Duke because she said colored.
That one kind of threw me, even at the time. Colored is old-fashioned but it has, in general, never been much of a slur (at least in the US).
Mod
Colored has never really meant mixed in that sense here (except for later when "one drop" became more common so mixed = black). Mulatto, quadroon, and things like that were more used for for that. Though, these days people just tend to say mixed or tend to just assign the "minority" racial identity. In the US, you typically get something along these lines on government forms:
White
Black
Native American or Pacific Islander
Hispanic (usually with a sub-category for white or non-white)*
Asian
And if you're lucky some sort of "check all that apply".
States may break it down further because of particular funding or demographic concerns. I live in a region where there are many Hmong (a group originally from Laos), so forms often ask if you're Hmong.
Though there are a lot of South Asians in the US, sometimes they are treated as "white" for official purposes and sometimes as "Asians".
Of course, all of this, especially including "racial" categories that are more generally cultural categories, shows the general wackiness of all these things.
Mod
Mod
About your friend Kaffir...
I had one black friend, who now runs his own nation and a substantial part of the white nation that voted to go with him rather than the ANC, who used to come to my parties in Northcliff and, holding up two bottles of a rather good single malt he was the importer for, would say, "Here's Andre's pet kaffir." He did it on purpose, of course, he said "to sort out the limousine liberals from the guys you can count on in fistfight." The limo libs would find an excuse to leave and be gone an hour or two before the police, waiting outside, writing down number plates and names, would come arrest us.
Interesting thread. I find myself more preoccupied by political correctness in the categories of climate change, attitudes toward Islam vs. Christianity (particularly in how the media choose and portray stories - ie., silence on the nightly news about Christians getting massacred in Nigeria, Afghanistan, etc vs how the alarmingly regular number of "honor killings" in the States & Canada are portrayed), and the endemic schizophrenia of Hollywood (you name it, they're double-minded on it).
Something I never paid much attention to, but knew about, is that the entertainment industry contains a large Jewish population.I suspect that has a very strong influence on how Muslims are portrayed in the media.
I've also noticed that more often than not, Christians are portrayed as foam-at-the-mouth crazy killers.
The patterns are very deeply ingrained.
K. A. wrote: "Something I never paid much attention to, but knew about, is that the entertainment industry contains a large Jewish population.I suspect that has a very strong influence on how Muslims are por..."
That ignores the fact that that Western European societies have clashed on and off with Muslims for a 1000+ years. It also ignores that, on average, Christians aren't exactly all that pro-Muslim either (especially in the US, which is really what we're talking about).
The last 1000 years of Christian-dominated literature isn't exactly overflowing with respectful depictions of Muslims/Mohammedans/et cetera despite the occasional outlier (Saladin being one of the noticeably consistent exceptions).
The pattern was ingrained before Jews could even participate in the media. It may be enhanced, especially since the the mid-20th century because of the tensions over Israel, but I'm dubious if every Jewish person left the media tomorrow it'd make much difference given Muslims weren't faring much better before then in the media.
As for Christians being depicted in a negative light, that has a lot more to do with relatively recent secularization than anything else. After all, it's a rather recent phenomenon, so it's not really a "deeply ingrained" pattern. Jews have been a major part of Hollywood since the beginning and one can't argue about any sort of serious anti-Christian bias until relatively recently, again tracking far more with secularization that Jewish participation in the entertainment industry.
Though just a note about stuff happening elsewhere. One does have to adjust for the fact that the America media pointedly minimizes its attention on overseas stuff in general. So, in some ways a lack of attention to what's going on to Christians (or whomever) overseas is perhaps more a reflection of insularity than political correctness.
Though, in general, most media outlets, regardless of country, do tend to pay more attention to things of local concern/occurrence than distant concern unless it involves people of their nationality (at least based on the sampling of news I've done for international media, which has covered, at some point, most of the countries that most of the active ROBUSTERs live in).
Mod
Yes, here in Australia, there's a 99% chance we'll be given a ten minute report on the day's football games before we're told of an earthquake overseas that's killed 2000 people - unless quite a few of those people were Australian.
Mod
I hate that on the news: "hundreds dead in a fire and - good God! - a British man was sprained his ankle!"I also hate the mealy mouthed phrase: " friendly fire"
Mod
Christians have been getting the good deal for a very long time now. There are other worthy stories out there involving other cultures and beliefs but until domination of Christian beliefs throughout not only the entertainment industry but every sphere of life starts slowing down, evil will always be the ever murderous infidel.
I thoroughly enjoy watching British news. Here, murder and mayhem is an everyday thing. Crime on the level it happens here (you will be slaughtered for your cell phone or small change in your pocket) is so different to how it is perceived overseas.
Mod
The racism practised in South Africa today by the ANC is so much greater than any ever practised under the apartheid regime, and more pervasive, and vastly more vicious, yet we hear nothing to denounce them from the so-called American Liberals, or the European left which used to march in the streets against apartheid.
Such hypocrisy sickens me. What's more, it is a worse racism than any practised by all those that they have condemned in the past and the present.
Mod
The only reason no one protests now is because Africa means nothing much on the international front. And we don't have oil. If Africa meant anything, places like Sudan and Ethiopia wouldn't have the refugee camps they have, the Rwandan genocide would never have taken place and Somalia wouldn't be the piratical issue it is.
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Mod
Kench!
I agree with J.A.'s comment on recent secularization. I think there's a good argument to be made for that as the culprit in regards to modern biases in the news media and Hollywood. I don't mind people having different opinions (vive la difference, unless it means you want to chop off my head), but I wish those folks would just be more honest about it! Most recent, glaring case in point: the treatment of women (Bill Maher vs Rush Limbaugh, etc).Good point about insularity and the insulation of distance.
Claudine, Africa certainly does have a great deal of oil, doesn't it? I was under the impression there were tremendous reserves in Sudan and Nigeria.
I was very pleased to be one of the thousands of women who protested Limbaugh to his sponcers. When I heard that there was 5 minutes of dead air on his show I did a happy dance.Bill Maher is also an idiot.
K. A. wrote: "I was very pleased to be one of the thousands of women who protested Limbaugh to his sponcers. Good.
Bill Maher never met a woman he respected.
Retard (and it's various forms)
Spic
Raghead
Wetback
Nigger
Cracker
And any other unPC like word. Is it automatically disqualified in order not to ruffle any feathers or should these words still enjoy usage in literature?