I am sick of the conservative, common sense, populist, chauvinistic attitude that is subtly seeping its way into the psyche of.. people. Anyone who reads the Daily Mail in a non critical way. I could talk about this all day, but political correctness has not gone mad, people have just got more racist. Anyone can be racist and because the media is not politically correct enough, a lot of things we think are okay are actually racist, so everyone needs to be aware of racist issues and be like extra sensitive. And sensitivity is not the problem, because if you start to say that the problem is political correctness, then racism becomes relatively more okay. It starts subtle, with fried chicken jokes and skin lightening treament aimed at women of colour, then gets worse and then you have lePen and UKIP gaining ground, then before you know it the KKK is back and the world problems can be blamed on Jews, and its okay because we never thought we were being racist to begin with.
You always see the press warn against the horrors of the Nazis or the KKK. But I found coverage of the Norway massacre last year and the Polish Neo-Nazis on panorama uncomfortable. They can't really keep the moral highground on that, because while in theory they aren't racist any more, the reports on immigration keep coming and Jeremy Clarkson is still on TV and they would complain about political correctness with more passion than they care about Stephen Lawrence or Trayvon Martin. breivik got his ideas from the Daily mail. The police are still much harsher on anarchists or socialists or anti fascists or whatever than they will ever be on the EDL and thats the way it has always been. Racism is a slippery slope and as a country (ew I hate saying that) "we" are not immune to it.
And racism must be overcome if we are going to succeed with this whole "stop capitalism" thing (lol) because the workers should unite and also racism in itself is bad.. but on its own being anti racism and politically correct can coexist with capitalism, they could get people of colour into powerful places (Obama) and commodify anything.
For this reason I don't think being anti racist is a political position that comes above socialist politics. Its more of a super necessary society thing, but lets not get sectarian about it.
So I am jumping through a lot of issues together here, probably all need their own coherent attention: Nazis, Rise of the far right, sexism/racism in products aimed at ethnic minority women, fried chicken jokes, reverse racism and generalising black/ white people, media racism.
but I just wanted to write this little paragraph because its
People have just forgotTEN that it is not OK to be offensive.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you misunderstand the criticism of political correctness. You shouldn’t make remarks about peoples’ skin colour (or hair colour, or for that matter the shape of their nose) because it isn’t *POLITE*, not because it isn’t politically correct.
Political correctness takes the entire thing too far; it is also inconsistent. It is, for instance, politically incorrect to make jokes about black people and muslims. But not about ginger people or clever people. It provides a platform for some groups to feign false offence in order to shut down legitimate debates about e.g. animal cruelty (in respect of halal or kosher meat), women's rights, or freedom of speech (witness the Danish cartoon thing). It distorts civil society (and even the law) by insisting that e.g. “racially motivated” crime be punished more severely than that with no “racial” component. So if (for instance) someone assaults me, it will be treated less seriously than a similar assault on someone with a different skin colour. Even if they attacked me because I have ginger hair (since that is not a “racial” attribute according to the politically correct).
The worst part by far is the restriction on freedom of speech. Quite frankly, while I’d like you to be polite (and therefore, for instance, not tell Douglas Carswell that he’s the reincarnation of Oswald Mosley, which is pretty rude of you), I will defend to the last your right to say what you please without fear of punishment. I am certain you wouldn’t defend my right to the same.
Finally, please disabuse yourself of the fatuous notion that there is any relationship whatsoever between people being a mite rude to one another and the Nazi extermination of the Jews. The two have nothing to do with one another, and there is no “slippery slope” connecting them.