Senior government and politics major
Political correctness has always seemed, at its root, fruitless to me. My instinct is always to be objective: If I come to the end of a column and realize my thesis sounds like “People need to understand,” “People need to be” or “People need to think,” I tend to scrap it. When I wrote last year that the sand pile outside of Oakland Hall should be cleaned up, it quickly was. I don’t know if I was the reason, but at least I could feel as though I had helped meet an achievable goal. The aim of political correctness is not so concrete — when prejudice is dismissed, assuming it can be, we won’t be able to spot its physical absence.
It’s for this reason I often step away from identity politics. Social justice and political correctness are a hornets nest of relative rights and wrongs. Contrary to its name, there is no such thing as political “correctness,” just a standard that is correct today and will be different when our standards inevitably change. From a utilitarian standpoint, the best move I can make is just to comply with the standards set before me, because campaigning for political correctness simply doesn’t return on investment the way a tangible cause can.
There are obviously some strong beneficial results that come from campaigns for social justice as a whole. Pay equality, a decreased wage gap, reduced racial profiling and other real effects can come from concentrated political movement. Political correctness, on the other hand, is a cat’s paw that distracts from this idea. Spinning us around and around by what’s offensive today and tomorrow, political correctness diverts attention from the tangible issues, opening social justice up to apathetic opponents to dismiss the entire movement as confusing because of the nonsense language policing creates.
Let’s put it this way: I can’t raise money for political correctness. I can raise money to raise awareness of political correctness, yes, but that’s a shotgun strategy. The most effective method of increasing political correctness quantitatively is to contact all the individuals in the world, educate them and hope it sticks. This is as ineffectual as it sounds, and barring mind control, it’s the only option.
I don’t want to fall into the fallacy of relative privation — I understand that some people see this issue as worthy of their time and might rank it more highly than I do. Rather, I think it’s worthwhile to consider what pushing for one movement does to others. Pushing loudly to defend people’s emotions when behemoth issues like the wage gap hang in the balance is not the right approach.
In fact, what strong proponents of political correctness could stand to learn is when to stop talking.
Emma Atlas is a senior government and politics major. She can be reached at eatlasdbk@gmail.com.
