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Hello, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope, advanced episode. Hi, Lulu.
Hi, James.
In our basic episode, we were talking about the generalities of political correctness. For this advanced episode, I want to get into the more nitty gritty of PC language, specifically how it's almost impossible to know what is PC now.
Yeah. Has it been taken too far?
I, me personally, I think some people do take it a bit too far. You can see this by how the standard just keeps changing. And there is no set standard of what is or is not PC, but it seems like people keep moving the goal post.
It's like… it's like you can say this but not that. Now you can't say that either you have to say this, now you can't say this, you have to say those. It's like… what is right?
Yeah. And who's to decide what's right?
That's the other key, it’s like who gets to make the decision, because if it's say, if we're going to talk about like the common one that shows up a lot, let's say just simply, should you say black or should you say African American?
OK. So who is the one who decides which is politically correct? If you're talking about the community that you're directly referring to, they don't… themselves have a consensus of what is or is not PC. So if you have the group, you're trying to avoid offending, who can't decide whether it is or is not offensive, then you're at a loss.
The other thing is, you were talking about language being ever changing, especially this whole PC language. You know that the whole idea of reclaiming certain words.
For example, that's just again use this idea of black. So white is okay but black is not, it's been for a period of time people thought that was not PC, you have to say African American, what not. And then there are people saying, no, why shouldn't we say black? We should reclaim that word and then just use it in a positive sense.
You see, in a lot of aspects, language has been reclaimed to mean something positive because why should you think black is an offensive term if it's just a word?
So, as… there's no good answer to that and I… sociologists and other much more educated people than us debate this all the time and they don't get anywhere with it.
No, it's almost like debating for debating’s sake.
I think that's what they get paid to do. They're talking heads.
Yeah. The other thing that's very big, that's also relevant to PC language is the idea of cancel culture.
Yes, cancel culture. This is a big one right now. And you see this a lot, like this is something big, you'll see in a lot of college campuses in America right now, is students trying to stop speakers from coming to the school to give presentations, because some of the students don't agree with the views or the things that speaker says, even though the university invited them to introduce different views and different opinions.
And right now, cancel culture, I personally think cancel culture is extremely dangerous, just because somebody doesn't like something is not a reason that you should stop them from speaking.
Because if you use like in a classroom, like I spend time in the classroom, we have questions and discussions, and students get to share their opinions. I don't always agree with my students’ opinions, but I'm not going to prevent them from sharing their views in class. And I'm also not going to let my students argue or insult students for sharing opposing views.
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