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Well, quite - Galvatron's first post draws a clear distinction, where open-mindedness and consideration (good) can be antithesised against the malign, cancerous mutation of the qualities, which is PC (bad). One could reasonably assume that these bars are set pretty clearly according to what he, Dead Megatron, does and does not want to do. He does not want, I imagine, to burn crosses on people's gardens, so the decision not to do that is open-minded and tolerant. He may want to be able to make jokes about gay men that trade on stereotypes of them as limp-wristed, effeminate and weak, and might in that case feel that people disapproving of this would therefore be "PC". His characterisation elsewhere of Mordant Carnival as "PC" might in fact be a promising discussion point, as it suggests that "PC" may, in fact, be being used as a universalising mechanism: “Mordant Carnival is questioning my right to say what I want to say, and this is not only in subjective terms disagreeable to me, but can also be idenitifed as objectively wrong by bringing in the abstract concept of political correctness, by partaking of which she is condemned.”
All interesting stuff, natch. His subsequent statement disavows his first, but claims instead that repressing certain terms from the "lexus" (presumably a kind of ethereal lexicon from which language cultures draw) is newspeak. We can agree that this is a bad thing, because it is a bad thing in 1984, when it is used by an oppressive dictatorship. We can apply the same rule, by the way, to casual sex (Brave New World) – always wrong.
This aim - repressing terms - is not overtly associated with the "Political Correctness" he mentioned in his previous post, but presumably this must be identified as part of the "PC project", or else why would he mention it?
So, how do those interrelate? Let's take the ever-popular N-word, used formerly as a colloquial and now as a derogatory term for what in the UK we tend to call black people. A hypothetical Michael Scott might feel oppressed by PC and unable to use it in his office environment, but he is still clearly at liberty to use it in the privacy of his own head, and for that matter to watch a chris Rock HBO special and find it highly amusing.
In other situations, people might feel able to use the term as an endearment between friends, safe in the knowledge that they will not hurt or offend the person they are addressing. On the other hand, the same person might well not get the same feeling of comradeship if somebody they had never met before, and/or someone who would have no experience of the term used in a derogatory fashion against them, called them the same thing.
Now, this is by no means a hard and fast rule. There's an argument that in a public place you have no means of knowing who is caught in the radius of your exchange with your friend – so, the 70-year old African-American whose parents were brutalised by people shouting that very word might not be happy to hear it in the sanctuary of the diner he has attended for lunch every day for a decade. The British playwright and actor Kwame Kwei-Ama has expressed the opinion that the term can never be reclaimed, and that those who use are ultimately reinforcing their own victimisation and legitimising its wider use. Nonetheless, used it is.
Which actually helps, perhaps, to explain the relationship between Dead Megatron's first statement and his second, and also a mistake he is IMHO making. What he sees as an attempt to remove a word, and its connotations, from use might in fact be an attempt to make those who are not adversely affected by it question its use, or be made aware that its use is open to question. Of course, if you do not consider those on the receiving end to have a voice – if the subaltern cannot speak, or at least cannot say anything worth hearing – then this can indeed look like total suppression.
Which brings us to Dead Megatron's final contention, or more precisely his final question, in which he expresses doubt at the effectiveness of “PC” - which he has defined, roughly, as the attempt to remove certain terms from any given language, and we have refined as the removal of the ability of anybody, but in particular somebody who is not generally likely to have experienced a specific term in a derogatory context, to use certain terms without risking that their use of the term may be challenged, in preventing “prejudiced thinking”.
There are a couple of issues with that. The main one might be that it assumes that the only goal of the activity identified by him as “political correctness” - broadly, the creation of an environment in which people are unable to rely on being able to use terms considered to be offensive, derogatory and/or discriminatory in certain contexts without their entitlement to use those terms being questioned – is to prevent prejudiced thinking. As Jack Fear says above, the fact that terms may be used, but that the person using the term risks their use being questioned, is presumably going to make people look at their use of terminology more carefully in light of the offence it might cause.
Of course, many might argue that those who question their usage are simply being “PC” in the first sense Dead Megatron gives for it – a cancerous and malign mutation of consideration and open-mindedness – that is, something that can only ever exist in a condition of having-already-gone-mad (maddengeseinheit?). Others might chafe against the bit to the extent that they claim that their use of offensive language and their expression of offensive beliefs is intended to mock and offend “the PC Brigade”, with the implication that no right-thinking person could do other than support them in this brave stand. On the other hand, those who do this would, I suspect, use the same terminologies and express the same views if they did not feel oppressed by political correctness.
There's a further question about how power functions in particular environments, but later for that... |
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