By Phil Shannon
A recent radio phone-in on the ABC on "Has Political Correctness (PC) gone too far?" had all callers agreeing that it had. They lamented that certain kinds of jokes can not be told without the teller being accused of being a racist or a homophobe or a sexist by the "politically correct" thought police.
Criticism of Aboriginal people or Australia's immigration intake was liable to cause the user to be labelled a racist, protested one caller. Not even the church is sacrosanct any more, wailed another — some revised versions of the Bible refer to God as the Father/Mother.
Amongst the radio talkback population at least, the popular perception of PC is that these linguistic changes represent an abuse of freedom of speech, a new totalitarianism that would ban politically incorrect books, thoughts and behaviour.
Complaints have been aired on some campuses that to suggest that intelligence may be genetically linked to race or sex is to fall foul of the PC censors and thus inhibit the pursuit of truth. Conservative academics and journalists, or liberals like Keith Windschuttle, Robert Hughes and the novelist Doris Lessing, lambast what they call the PC left.
In related developments, date rape is dismissed by anti-feminists for being "sexually correct', whilst the dangers of uranium mining, woodchipping and the greenhouse effect can all be brushed aside as "environmentally correct".
Politicians have been getting in on the act. George Bush when he ran for re-election took swipes at PC "extremists", whilst John Howard criticised Labor's proposed racial vilification legislation for being "politically correct" by infringing on the individual's freedom to tell "harmless" Irish jokes. Tim Fisher has recently criticised the proposal by the head judge of the Family Court to grant the same legal rights to same-sex couples as to de facto heterosexual couples as a politically correct attack on the "happy heterosexual marriage".
US President Bill Clinton has reacted to the anti-PC climate by cancelling his own nominations of persons from allegedly favoured PC groups to senior positions (such as the liberal female black, Lani Gunier, to be assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice).
In the US, where PC had its genesis in the late '80s, the university has been the main site for the PC wars. The critics of PC claim that the universities are controlled by radical academics and students, whose obsession with the politics of race and sex is undermining academic and cultural "standards" and intimidating conservative or moderate faculty into silence.
A "left McCarthyism" is said to be rampant in the "politicised" university, enforcing loyalty to politically correct norms about blacks and women by "PC left fascists" (the phrase is from Jeane Kirkpatrick — an old Reagan administration trooper) through:
- "affirmative action" for enrolments and appointments for members of minority or oppressed groups, leading to so-called "reverse discrimination";
- "curricular revision" (undermining the traditional canon of Western civilisation and culture with the works of minorities and oppressed groups);
- "language reforms" (referring to slaves as "enslaved persons", blacks as "African-Americans", etc) and "speech codes" (banning language which is offensive to minorities and oppressed groups).
The PC charge is also laid against class politics — "Marxist dogmatism" to the anti-PC crowd, who bewail socialism's continued loitering in the academic world despite the "end of communism'.
This picture of PC fanatics waging a campaign of terror against non-leftist staff and students, and against the honest citizenry more generally, using social ridicule and institutional processes to enforce correct leftist group-think on their victims, is, however, totally false.
Who dominates?
On the campuses, for example, the claim that left academics are dominant is way off target. Left academics are in a minority in the universities. A survey of 35,000 faculty members in 392 US colleges and universities in 1989-90 found that 40% identified themselves as "moderates", 37% as "liberals" and 18% as "conservatives", with the "far left" kicking in at only 5%.
Of course, for a right wing which wants the kind of hegemony on campus that it has elsewhere in the economy, media and government, even 5% is too much of the left, and even "moderates" and "liberals" can show insufficient zeal in opposing leftist, feminist and anti-racist ideas.
With the forces of the left so grossly exaggerated, much of the anti-PC hysteria depends on the manufacture of alleged PC abuses — the sacking of conservative academics, mandatory quota systems for hiring black faculty, women's studies classes spending all their time joking about severed penises and poking fun at Ernest Hemingway, amongst others.
Some of the alleged PC language euphemisms, the more absurd ones, are anti-PC stings initiated by PC opponents. Fabricating horror stories is, of course, standard right-wing fare which demonstrates the right's lack of intellectual integrity, and which feeds on their fear that every breach of the conservative walls will send their ideological world crashing down.
Thus they denounce all challenges to conservative tradition as an awesome tragedy, whether, say, a comparative literature course is "lost" to black Studies or to deconstructionism (with its mongrel left/right pedigree) or to the dreaded cultural studies with its focus on hip-hop and pop music videos.
The PC scare has the strategic function of winning the "moderate" centre to far right views: if the PC left are totalitarian group-think ideologues, then all true democrats will unite with the embattled right to scourge the evil of PC from the campus and society.
Right-wing PC
In so doing, the PC scare turns the spotlight from those who have real power and real right-wing political correctness. As Noam Chomsky has argued, the right is firmly in control of the mainstream ideological system and the PC scare is currently the vanguard of a "campaign to extend conservative control still further over ideologically significant sectors of the colleges and universities, now replete with professorships of free enterprise, lavishly funded far right student journals ... and an array of other devices to restrict the framework of discussion and thought to the reactionary end of an already narrow spectrum".
Edward Said concurs: "... the campaign against political correctness has mainly been conducted by various conservatives and other champions of family values", diverting attention from the "amazing conformity and political correctness concerning military, national security, foreign and economic policy".
Like the red scare before it, the PC scare has a real target despite its lies, misrepresentation and frenzy of denunciation. The McCarthy anticommunist witch-hunt was really out to nail postwar trade union militancy, New Deal liberalism, the peace and anti-nuclear bomb movement, and all traces of radicalism or critical thinking in the media, Hollywood, schools etc. The anti-PC heresy hunters are out to get what remains of the gains of the movements of the '60s — the black movement, the student revolt, the antiwar movement, women's liberation and the lesbian and gay movements.
These movements did not eliminate racism, war and oppression based on sex and sexual orientation, but they did leave a great many people aware of and opposed to these injustices and willing to defend the real, if limited, gains that have been won in these areas. In the universities, many faculty members who lived through the '60s have retained some greater or lesser commitment to the ideals of those years and are thus the target of the PC scaremongers, who portray them as the "tenured left", a time-warp academic cohort corrupting the new generations of students.
The anti-PC conservatives want to turn the clock back to the smug conservatism and stifling conformity of the '50s, when women and blacks and gays knew their place and no-one questioned the nuclear family or the decision makers who invaded countries at will and who ran the economy in the interests of a rich few.
Language
Taking on the anti-PC right, however, does not mean ignoring that PC does exist, in however minimal a fashion, and is open to criticism. For example, some multiculturalist, feminist and black critics of traditional Eurocentric accounts of human history and culture, whilst rightly criticising the racist, sexist and imperialist assumptions which permeate Eurocentrism, leave their critique open to trivialisation by the anti-PC zealots if their criticism fixates on what the PC-critics love to call DWEMs (Dead White European Males).
Terms such as "Western', "European', "male", "white" are in fact secondary to class as explanatory categories because war, oppression and slavery were all to be found in the class societies that succeeded the early tribal "primitive communist" societies — regardless of the physical characteristics or geographical location of the peoples concerned but very much determined by the class structure of their societies. Shelley and Marx are both DWEMs, yet both were critical of capitalist inequality, religious obscurantism, racism and sexism — unlike, say, Indonesia's Suharto or England's Thatcher.
PC is most open to a right-wing backlash in the field of language. In the US, in response to an outbreak of racism and bigotry in the late 1980s, many university administrations adopted "speech codes", making abusive and offensive language concerning race, gender and sexual orientation a disciplinary offence, with some PC support for this action. The Labor government's racial vilification legislation is similar to these speech codes.
Outlawing language, however, does not change ideas. It is united struggle of white and black, men and women, gay and straight, around common interests that changes backward ideas and isolates the hard right bigots.
PC is often publicly at its most vulnerable over language reform. "Humour" books on political correctness have flooded the bookshelves. These books poke fun at the ludicrous aspects of euphemistic language reform, from "vertically challenged" for "short", and "follicularly impaired" for "bald", which are not PC terms, to those that are, such as "herstory" and "wimmin" (in a misguided attempt by feminist patriarchy theorists to purge the dominance of "men" from history and culture).
This process is used to ridicule PC and the left. "Intellectually challenged persons" for the mentally disabled, and "African-American" for US blacks, for example, come in for attack, whilst the conservative satire, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, laughs away poverty, imperialism and all oppressions.
Language is a political issue. The adoption of new linguistic terms reflects the strength of social movements and successful political struggle. "Black" is an advance on earlier racially offensive terms and reflects the gains made by militant struggle for civil rights. Similar offensive terms for women or gays have fallen out of popular usage for the same reasons. It was offensive to call the southern Vietnamese guerillas "Viet Cong" (the US choice of a dehumanising term derived from gorilla) and it was an act of solidarity to refer to them as the National Liberation Front.
Changing the language, however, can become a tokenistic substitute for the harder job of changing the social and power structures of capitalist society. Where the demand for language change derives from the oppressed or minority group themselves it is justified, but putting the cart of language before the horse of social change only provides fuel for the anti-PC right.
Left PC is a wildly exaggerated phenomenon compared to the real PC that is stifling critical thinking and political freedom through capitalist control of the universities, media and politics. Here speech codes abound — "capitalism" and "imperialism" are unmentionable whilst "the free market" and "liberal democracy" are unquestionable. Language reform is rampant — "enterprise bargaining" is not a job-cutting mechanism to boost profits but a step forward in making the workplace more "productive" and "Australia" more internationally competitive.
Capitalism is a systemic affirmative action rort for that tiny class minority who benefit from its inequality of wealth and power. The current PC scam would have us believe that the PC-led minorities, oppressed and exploited majority under capitalism are the forces threatening society, but it is the privileged minority who run and profit from the greed machine who own that tag.