Has Political Correctness in America Gone Too Far?

Amber Liu, Year 13, Keller

Among other events in this tumultuous year that is 2020, conversations surrounding race and diversity have started to loom over more and more dinner tables, both within and outside of the United States of America. However, in tandem with the amplification of voices seeking inclusivity, equality, and social justice are critics who argue that so-called political correctness has crossed the fine line between regulating hate speech and regulating free speech.

*** The year is 2015. To Parisians, this foggy, -2℃ January day is just like any other.

However, on the inconspicuous street of Rue Nicolas-Appert, today could not be more different. At 11:30am, two gunmen, both of whom are known to have ties with the Islamic jihad, break into the office of the infamously controversial French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, fatally wounding 10 journalists who work there. While the motives are not immediately clear, the attack — condemned by French president Francois Hollande as a ‘terrorist attack without a doubt’ — is most likely caused by the magazine’s recent history of mockery against Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, making it a target for a certain group of radical Muslim fundamentalists, who view the magazine’s provocative depictions of their faith as blasphemous.

Widely known and revered among French journalists, the Charlie Hebdo weekly magazine has grown to become a symbol of free speech and thought, with its regular publishing of cartoons satirizing current political and religious leaders and a tone often characterized by irreverence and provocation. This 2015 attack is hardly surprising, considering the fact that one of the most prominent cartoonists and editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, has been under police protection since 2011, when outrage at the magazine first started to devolve into violence against its members. Defiant in its aim to create and debate freely, however, the magazine continued to publish caricatures poking fun at Islam (as well as other religions), with a striking post of a naked Prophet Mohammed startling both French and American officials.1

The events that occured on that Wednesday morning of January 7 were to spark a new wave of debate2 in the USA — the ‘land of the free’ but a country beset with its own socio-political controversie nonetheless — all about political correctness (PC).

*** Neither this debate nor this expression are anything new: the term political correctness, coined by Marxist-Leninists in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia3, has long been a subject of contention. Popularised in the last few decades of the 20th century, it broadly refers to an attempt to avoid language, policies or behaviour that could be offensive to disadvantaged groups. The prevalence of the term political correctness in modern-day culture can be seen in its increased profile in many aspects of 21st century life, from elite higher education to the modern workplace, from daily conversations to international and domestic journalism. Since the emergence of the term, there has been heated debate surrounding its intent and impacts.

Politically, modern liberals defend PC language and culture on the grounds that it contributes towards establishing a more “liberal” democracy — that is, an expansive view of democracy that not only involves free and fair elections of government, but also universal protection of individual civil liberties and rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, the press, and the right to equal treatment before the law. On the other end of the spectrum, PC has been attacked by centrists and conservatives alike, who criticize it for, ironically, constraining free speech. The famous political commentator and talk show comedian Bill Maher called far left PC a “cancer on progressivism” in 2019,4 and more recently in July of 2020, a group of leading professors, historians, writers, journalists, and playwrights, mostly based in the USA, cosigned a “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” for the Harper’s Magazine criticizing PC5.

Academically, there is also fervent debate on this evidently contentious topic. There are views aligned with those of Jonathan Chait, commentator and writer for New York Magazine, who argued that PC is “a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.”6 In other words, critics believe that PC culture is dictating behavior in a way that limits open discussion with those of opposing stances, undermining free speech. Views in opposition to Chait’s include those of Richard Feldstein and Teresa Brennan, writers of the book “Political correctness: a response from the cultural left”, who agree that the term is “much disputed” but believe that its original purpose has been warped: according to them, PC was originally used by advocates themselves for the purpose of self-mockery and satire, but now political pundits of the right have twisted it into a “brainwashing campaign on an international scale” that has gained “political and psychological success”7.

But why would a term that seeks to represent equality for all and social justice draw so much fire?

A Sacramento Kings sports broadcaster is dismissed from his job of 22 years after posting a ‘politically incorrect’ tweet — ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ — for which he later apologizes, but to no avail8; the internationally respected Ivy League Yale University is subject to the hashtag “#CancelYale” and faces petitions demanding a removal of its 319-year-old name after it is revealed that the institution’s namesake, Elihu Yale, was a British merchant and slave trader;9 Aunt Jamima, the 130-year-old syrup and pancake mix brand owned by the Quaker Oats Company, is now preparing to undergo name and logo changes due to the brand image’s ties to minstrelsy, a form of entertainment popular in early 19th century America and denounced today for its disrespectful imitations of African-American vernacular and behavior, facing outcries that this move will erase the brand’s rich history and the culture associated with its recipes10.

Recent incidents like these, triggered by the racial reckoning that has struck America, have led some to bear the sentiment that PC, specifically the behaviors permitted to flourish under its culture and ubiquitous influence, has indeed gone too far.

far?’, it is important to delve deeper into the impacts of PC not just on the wider society in America, but also on the individual — the examples given above do not suffice.

If your friend were to describe an unfamiliar person to you by first identifying their race or skin color, would you consider them to be a racist? Probably not. What the following psychological experiment11 suggests, however, is that due to the increasing societal awareness of race, especially the growing aversion to the “racist” label, and incentivized by a desire to appear as unprejudiced as possible, a “strategy” or mechanism that many people adopt is color blindness, or unwillingness to address someone’s race altogether, which may in fact be counterproductive to effective communication in certain circumstances. The research report thus ends with the conclusion that this desire to avoid appearing prejudiced is a double edged sword, one that we should be more wary of.

The Experiment: Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction Research Report In 2006, before the Charlie Hebdo shootings but at a time when PC was gradually gaining traction, professors from the Harvard Business School, Tufts University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all based in the US, co-authored and designed two studies to explore the “ramifications of endorsing color blindness as a strategy [by Whites] for appearing unprejudiced”.

Two studies were conducted: Study 1 was carried out with the aim of unveiling the disparity between Whites’ perceived ability and their actual ability to distinguish people on the basis of race. In Study 2, the Political Correctness Game was introduced to examine the rather negative impacts of this discrepancy.

Study 1 involved 57 White student volunteers either completing a sorting task or a hypothetical task. The simple sorting task required participants to assign photographs to each of 7 categorical dimensions: race (Black/White), gender (Male/Female), age (Over 30/Under 25), color of the background in the photo (Blue/Red), hair color (Dark/Light), facial expression (Smiling/Not smiling), and facial hair (Present/Absent). In the hypothetical task, participants were given a questionnaire asking them to imagine completing the sorting task and to rank the 7 categorical dimensions according to how quickly, or well, they believed they could assign the photographs.

The students’ response times in the sorting task were also ranked 1 to 7 for easier comparison with the hypothetical tasks’ rankings, and the results did not surprise the researchers: as expected, the White individuals underestimated the speed with which they would be able to categorize by race.

In addition, the dimension of race saw the largest difference between actual speed and perceived speed, compared to the other dimensions. Students actually overestimated their ability to categorize by gender, which according to the authors, provided evidence that the participants had essentially “substituted a less controversial dimension — gender — for a more controversial one, race”12.

To counter the possibility that individuals are simply not aware of their capabilities of recognizing race, the same tasks were given to a group of Black individuals, and to no surprise, the results demonstrated that their estimates of how quickly they could categorize on the basis of race were significantly higher than those of their White counterparts.

The researchers thus concluded Study 1 with the conjecture that “Whites’ underestimation of [their racial categorization ability] results from a specific desire — one not shared by [the] Black participants — to appear unprejudiced.”, underscoring their reluctance to admit the extent of using race as a differentiator and thus the prevalence of color blindness as a subconscious mechanism among White individuals.

Researchers continued with Study 2, the Political Correctness game, which was conducted on another group of 30 White students. In this task, essentially a game of “Guess Who?”, the students were paired up with White or Black partner and both sides were given photographs of faces from various dimensions, including race, background color, and gender; students were told to ask yes/no questions to their partners to guess the photo that they were looking at, behind a curtain.

The results from their performance were, yet again, predicted by the lab: the White participants were more likely to mention race in their line of questioning when paired with a White partner than when paired with a Black one. This tendency to avoid race with Black partners also resulted in more questions, on average, being asked, suggesting that their subconscious behavior did in fact have a negative effect on the task’s efficiency.

These studies, taken together, suggest that adopting a color-blind mindset, at best, produces mixed results, and may be more complicated than we believe. Is shunning racial differences among us really the optimal solution?

Under the influence of PC, the desire to avoid prejudice in our behavior and language is only growing. The problem, then, lies in the fact that PC and liberalism as a whole, have fundamental weaknesses which, when considered together carefully, mean that all good intentions aside, PC inevitably faces criticism, for several reasons.

First, while PC is not a social or political movement, the “cause” that it preaches is undoubtedly inclusivity and individual rights for all, which closely aligns with the ideas of liberalism. However, due to this “definition” of liberalism, PC is vulnerable to attack: by assigning correct or incorrect morals to opinions from either side, PC is detrimental to its own “cause” of freedom of speech for all, and undermines liberal values that everyone possesses a set of inalienable rights — in other words, unchallengeable rights that cannot and should not be taken away — and therefore it is not difficult to see how PC can be liable to denunciation.

This is reinforced by disagreements among liberals themselves. On the topic of hate speech, John Mearsheimer, famous American political scientist and international relations scholar, wrote that “Liberals who are absolutists regarding free speech believe it should be tolerated even if they find it abhorrent. Other liberals, however, want to ban it because it can seriously hurt those who are targeted, who have the right to be protected from verbal abuse...”13 This polarization of ideas even among liberals themselves results in a lack of universal agreement over what “individual rights” are, whether or not they are important, and which ones take precedence; because of this, liberalism, and hence PC, are even more susceptible to attack.

Thirdly, while some argue PC has been exaggerated by the right, or in fact that the “notion” of PC is a “wholesale fabrication of right wing forces designed to wrest interpretive authority away from the left”14, this is not the case: evidently, PC is still very much widespread today. Why else would editors and writers from one of America’s most respected news sources, the New York Times, speak up in recent months against the lack of diversity in the newsroom after opinion pieces from political conservatives are rejected by the company15?

While media bias and politicisation in the news is another story, what we can deduce is that the relationship between PC and its critics is a mutually disadvantageous one: the more PC dominates conversations and curtails diversity, the louder the criticism, which then results in While the intentions of PC may be progressive, insofar as critics are concerned, it has gone too far. PC has and will receive more and more backlash for its “silencing” of opinions. This double edged cultural phenomenon under the umbrella term of PC is thus not conducive to liberal success in the long term due to the sheer amount of criticism it faces as well as its own contradictory nature.

Regardless, what needs to happen now is either a reckoning for a new era of politics in which PC becomes the new norm, or a reconciliation between proponents and critics of PC, which is, from observation, unlikely.