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OPINION
| UPDATED JAN. 29
A New Brand of Thought
Political correctness is best
used in moderation
In the past, being a minority was incredibly
rough. Racial, sexual and cultural discrimination was not only the
norm, it was part of the day-to-day language. Through the civil
rights movement, policies propagating discrimination were struck
down as unconstitutional.
Those movements took care of the legal discrimination, but social
discrimination still existed. In response, a new construction of
thought — political correctness — began to take shape
in the early 80s .
This brand of thought sought to rectify past injustices by changing
the terms referring to minority groups. Keeping those groups from
being offended, this worked well and everybody complied with this
new agenda.
Suddenly the pendulum begin to swing too much to the left.
Now in the overly politically correct climate, if a person is not
current on the correct term-of-the-week for every group that is
not comprised of heterosexual white males, they run the risk of
being dubbed the worst Nazi since Adolf Hitler. This hyper-politically-correct
group labeling has gotten out of control.
This was brought to my attention while watching FOX’s “Man
Vs Beast.” Pitting humans against animals in a variety of inane
contests, this particular episode attempted to answer the age-old
question: “Can 44 midgets pull a DC-747 a distance of 50-meters
faster than a full-grown elephant can?”
The thing I found incredibly funny was how the announcer keep referring
to the midgets as “little people.” Midgets are not “little
people.” Children are “little people.” The Oompa-Loompas
are “little people.” Midgets are really short — not
little.
People have started to simply react to words in messages rather
than the message itself. For example, one evening on “Late
Night with Conan O’Brien,” comedian Sarah Silverman joked
that she had been called for jury duty but didn’t want to serve.
The joke continued, “My friend said, ‘Why don’t you
write something inappropriate on the form, like ‘I hate chinks’?
But I don’t want people to think I was racist, so I just filled
out the form, and I wrote ‘I love chinks.’ ”
The audience exploded with laughter, but some in “TV Land”
didn’t.
The Media Action Network for Asian-Americans was offended and demanded
an apology from Silverman.
Taking the joke as a whole, a reasonable person could assess that
this is not a racist joke but a joke about racism. Don’t believe
me? Substitute “chinks” in the joke for any number of
pejorative terms about any group of people (i.e. crackers, niggers,
japs, cripples, carpet-munchers, fudge-packers, Aggies, etc.) The
joke still works.
It is no secret that America believes firmly that if a little is
good, a lot is better. This works for a lot of scenarios but not
this one. Political correctness, in moderation, is the best system
to ensure that certain groups are not arbitrarily offended. But
too much political correctness keeps us from openly discussing discrimination
issues we as a country need to deal with.
— Demond Reid is a staff columnist for The Shorthorn and is
a journalism senior.
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