This Year's Foolish Political Correctness | QDaily 2017 Annual Report

Whatever its original intentions, political correctness has undeniably made the world more anxious and more divided — and it has done nothing to solve any of the problems it claims to address.

"The Inquisition is still a living institution, stripped only of its original methods and harsh judgments," said Jacques Barzun, an American cultural historian who received the National Humanities Medal in 2010. "Today, 'political correctness' and the speech police on American university campuses, along with the punishment of individuals and companies for using words and raising topics strangely labeled 'sensitive,' are all living proof that the spirit of the Inquisition endures."

In 2017, political correctness (PC) became not only one of America's most important issues; the ideological debate around it hardened into a kind of behavior — scrutinizing word choices against exacting standards, demanding that anyone who speaks first prove their "legitimacy," refusing to comment on anything that might invite attack, and slapping a label on everyone.

This went beyond what Barzun had observed back in 2000: "Today's 'political correctness' works on the same principle, though so far the punishments remain relatively mild — humiliation, dismissal, and permanent exile from one's profession. Every form of persecution implies that the persecutors hold an absolute faith in the power of ideas, even ideas spoken offhand."

Does political correctness impede free speech?

In 1987, the conservative American thinker Allan Bloom argued, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, that the multiculturalism within left-wing thought might in fact be impeding critical thinking.

Bloom built the book around three themes: students, American-style nihilism, and the university itself. "This book, a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education, has been written from a teacher's point of view," he wrote at the outset. Bloom's inquiry into the "democratic" nature of universities, and his attack on the absurdities inside them, remains a vital reference today.

The intellectual currents inside American universities have always exerted a major influence on society at large. Campus conflicts, to a greater or lesser degree, instantly reflect the contradictions society as a whole is wrestling with.

Look back through history and you find that the rise of political correctness and the conflicts it breeds are two sides of the same coin. One debate recurs: does political correctness restrict free speech?

Some see the 1990s as the pivotal period when political correctness first became truly controversial.

In the 1980s, in the wake of a racial incident at Stanford University, schools moved to curb discriminatory speech: Stanford first adopted rules banning offensive language, and within two years many American universities had drawn up campus speech codes or speech-review policies of their own, aimed at restricting any politically incorrect speech on campus. In 1989, for instance, the University of Wisconsin issued "The UW Rule" as the governing principle for handling racial discrimination and conflict across all 26 campuses in its system. The rule set out numerous restrictions covering both conduct and speech.

Neither students nor professors were permitted to make statements that created a "hostile and unwelcoming environment." Any statement with even a slim chance of provoking a strong reaction could be deemed politically incorrect and was strictly forbidden. As a result, free speech on campus became a fiercely contested topic, and eventually erupted into open conflict.

At the time, the University of Wisconsin's student newspaper, together with other students, took the matter to court, arguing that the rules the university had issued fundamentally violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.

In the end, Wisconsin district court judge Warren Urbom ruled for the students, on the grounds that "The UW Rule" was vague and overbroad, sweeping in a great deal of speech that would never lead to a breach of the peace.

In his 1991 commencement address at the University of Michigan, President George Herbert Walker Bush named the contradiction at the heart of the political correctness movement: "The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits."

Nearly 30 years have passed since the University of Wisconsin episode, yet the controversy over political correctness on American campuses has not eased in the slightest.

This past May, Evergreen State College held its annual "Day of Absence." The point of the event is to fight discrimination. In past years the school would set aside a day for all "non-white" students to stay away, underscoring the importance of non-white communities.

This year, Evergreen State College decided to flip the roles and ask white students to stay away for a day. Bret Weinstein, a white biology professor who had taught there for 15 years, objected strongly. He said he would not absent himself on "Day of Absence," because in his view this year's event amounted to coercion imposed on individuals.

But Weinstein's remarks angered many students. On May 23, close to two hundred of them occupied his classroom, setting off a confrontation. They blocked the police from entering and filmed videos to post on social media, calling Weinstein a racist. In the end, the professor resigned amid the uproar.

On this storm, The Washington Examiner wrote that a new mood now grips American campuses, in which some students will not tolerate dissenting views and use radical tactics to drive out those who disagree — "some have drawn comparisons to the Red Guards, Germany's SA stormtroopers, and the Jacobins of the French Revolution."

Last week, 3,000 conservative students from across the United States gathered in Florida, loudly protesting that "we are under attack" and rejecting today's political correctness.

"This country is splitting apart. Some people own the media; some people tell you to vote for Hillary and the Democrats. Those people have no interest at all in understanding our views. They believe the left is the country's only way forward," said Greg Aselbekian, a 24-year-old student at Niagara University, in an interview with The Guardian. The mood today, he said, is one where "if you're white and you voted for Trump, you get labeled a white supremacist."

Censorship

In October, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report arguing that tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter must act more aggressively against extremism and political misinformation — or risk having governments curb free speech for them, unless they "take on a more active role of self-governance."

Not long before the WEF report appeared, the German government had just passed a law warning that social networks that fail to delete hate-speech posts in good time would face fines of up to 50 million euros.

In November, YouTube announced a new policy: it would take down videos with extremist overtones or scenes of violence. That a platform long proud of being the most free and open should suddenly impose so sweeping a censorship policy left many people puzzled. An anonymous YouTube source confirmed the policy's contents to Reuters, adding that it came in response to mounting pressure from governments.

YouTube's new policy drew fire from civil-liberties groups, who stressed that content review of this kind should not be something governments handle first.

Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president and general counsel, responded on the company blog: "There should be no place for terrorist content on our platforms."

Faiza Patel, a professor at NYU School of Law, pushed back: "The reasons any one person commits an act of violence are extremely complex. To assume a single video can drive behavior is an extremely simplistic way of thinking."

The pressure to fight extremism was not confined to YouTube. Twitter removed 290,000 accounts in the first half of the year. The company said that fewer than 1% of suspended accounts were taken down at a government's request; 95% were the result of its own internal decisions. It stressed that it was actively combating extremist content.

The Absurd: Great Principles in the Smallest Details

The controversies over political correctness have lately reached a level unlike anything before.

In 1972, the American comedian George Carlin read out "the seven words you can never say on television" in a live stand-up set, the bit that made his name. Carlin often took sharp aim at the news of the day, pricking the illusory bubbles people build for themselves, with a particular eye for the machinery behind everyday language. He even wrote a book, Brain Droppings, that touched on so-called politically correct speech.

Carlin held that the basic logic behind political correctness's renaming project was this: "They start by linking the old name to shame." The word "cripple," for example, was abolished and replaced with "physically challenged" or "differently abled." But Carlin put it bluntly: basically everyone is some kind of "differently abled."

In early November, staff at New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (M.T.A.) received a new memo asking announcers to improve the words and phrasings they habitually used over the loudspeakers.

The familiar "ladies and gentlemen," heard so often by passengers, was to give way to more gender-neutral alternatives such as "everyone" or "passengers." Once the policy was announced, the conservative New York Post attacked it as "absurd": "The M.T.A. has taken so-called political correctness to a whole new level."

Another contested case involves the NFL's Washington Redskins, which has faced years of pressure to drop a name it has carried for decades.

In 2009, Native Americans (American Indians) filed a complaint with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, arguing that "Redskins" is a slur for Native Americans and gives offense. On June 18, 2014, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board voted to cancel the Redskins trademark, ruling that it fell under the Lanham Act's bar on marks that "disparage… persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols." Soon after, nearly 50 sitting senators signed a letter demanding the team change its name.

But on April 25, 2016, the Washington Redskins filed a petition with the Supreme Court, arguing that the ruling might violate the First Amendment.

In fact, the Redskins are not the only team named for Native Americans. There are also Major League Baseball's Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians. Seen through Chinese, all three names refer equally to Native Americans; seen through English, "Redskins" looks considerably more contentious than the other two.

As the controversy broke, fans began arguing heatedly: does the "Redskins" name they have backed for so long really carry a hint of discrimination against Native Americans?

The Washington Post ran a small opinion poll, gathering the views of 504 Native Americans. Nine in ten said the name did not strike them as especially offensive today.

On hearing the results, Redskins owner Daniel Snyder was the first to step forward and voice his delight: "We've always believed the Redskins name has, for a long time, stood for honor, respect, and pride."

But the controversy was far from over. Some groups kept arguing that no survey could truly capture the views of the Native American community. "I reject this poll," said Harjo, a 70-year-old Native American activist.

On December 18, New South Wales, Australia, handed doctors a new rule: when speaking with "obese" patients, they could no longer use the word "obese" directly. The guidance advised softer, more palatable language instead — for example, "outside a healthy weight range." The news drew immediate skepticism, with the Australian Medical Association saying flatly that such "sugarcoating" would do nothing to help patients lose weight.

Overreach

In August, a white-supremacist march erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering clashes that ultimately left three people dead. The site sits on a battlefield of the 19th-century Civil War.

The march's flashpoint was the growing call in recent years to remove the state's statue of the famous Confederate general Robert E. Lee. When the Civil War broke out, Lee was tapped by President Lincoln to command the Union Army, but chose instead to stay loyal to his home state of Virginia and became a military leader for the Confederacy.

Those who wanted the statue gone argued that Lee's past as a slaveholder made him unworthy of commemoration; those opposed argued that taking it down amounted to erasing history.

In April, Charlottesville's city council voted to remove the statue. As far back as 2015, the statue's base had been spray-painted with the words "Black Lives Matter."

In July, a group of self-proclaimed white supremacists came to Charlottesville demanding that the Lee statue be protected, and began street demonstrations that soon erupted into clashes.

Mayor Michael Signer laid the blame for the clashes on Trump: it was the White House and the people around the president who had created the situation America now faced. Trump's reply: "Not me, not Obama — this has been going on for a long, long time."

In 2016, Houston also voted to rename "Robert E. Lee High School," which had a large Latino student body.

On the clashes the Lee statue set off, some American scholars argued that the statue had simply been given new political meaning in different eras, and that sweeping removal and renaming only laid bare how American society is tearing apart.

In October, The New York Times broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's sexual-harassment scandal. In less than two months, more than thirty prominent actresses came forward online to say they had been harassed by him — among them Ashley Judd, Angelina Jolie, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Then the American actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter, urging anyone who had been sexually harassed to share their story online and tag it #MeToo.

In less than a week, the call drew 17 million posts, with voices across 85 countries. Milano posted again: "If we stand together, this movement will only keep growing." The movement's participants were named Time magazine's Person of the Year, the users honored as "The Silence Breakers."

Almost no one had expected the movement to blaze through Hollywood, New York, and Washington the way it did. Name after name was exposed in the #MeToo posts. The top ranks of many major companies were cleared out as a result — among them Roy Price, head of Amazon Studios. The prominent actor Kevin Spacey also saw his career grind to a halt.

While the #MeToo accusations were spreading everywhere, Claire Schmidt, a former vice president of technology at 21st Century Fox, confidently unveiled a new website project of hers called "AllVoices."

The site claimed it would improve the handling of workplace sexual harassment, offering a platform where anyone could report workplace harassment or inappropriate gender discrimination "anonymously."

In an interview with CNN, Schmidt said: "We want every employee to feel they have a chance to drive the change they want to see."

She hoped the site would give power back to victims — but some asked whether contested incidents, handled anonymously, would be harder to fact-check, or even open to abuse.

According to The New York Times, Kristina Tsipouras, a Boston businesswoman, said that as the harassment firestorm spread, the women at her company were so angry they wanted the firm to stop hiring men altogether. Tsipouras made clear she thought this plainly was not the right approach.

Many men in companies now show signs of strain. Though they have always supported equality, they are no longer sure what to do. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg publicly warned that a pattern of "avoid women, avoid controversy" had begun to take hold.

Sandberg argued that the movement set out to fix the imbalance of power in the workplace and gradually raise women's standing, but that it had brought unintended harm as well: "Treating women fairly at work is not only about mutual respect; even more important is not isolating or ignoring them. That means equal opportunity — the key is giving men and women an equal chance to succeed."

Nike Leaves Trump Tower, Starbucks's Cup, and Silicon Valley's Discontent

Beyond the care individuals must take with their words, companies face a PR minefield too: sometimes even a well-meant gesture can be swallowed by a sudden wave of public attack.

On December 4, Nike announced it would open a new flagship store in New York in 2019. At the same time, it would close its five-story location inside Trump Tower — a store long regarded as one of Nike's most important.

Many read Nike's departure from Trump Tower as a direct response to Trump's habit of making divisive political statements.

A veteran Manhattan real-estate developer told Forbes that Nike's exit would make other companies wary of the location: "If a foreign department-store brand moves into Trump Tower, it might be seen as having ulterior motives — as if it were up to something, or in cahoots with Trump."

Faced with the speculation, Nike spokesperson Ilana Finley declined to address any politically motivated theories, insisting only that Nike had been planning the move out of Trump Tower for years. The new location, she said, would give Nike more opportunity and more room to experiment with new concepts.

Whatever Finley said, more often than not politics and business are not so far apart.

Starbucks has been releasing holiday cups for more than 20 years — by now it is close to a tradition.

This November, Starbucks put out a video introducing this year's holiday cup, featuring many different kinds of customers, among them a pair of female cartoon figures holding hands.

Conservatives were furious at the cup, making much of the hands on it — from which, they argued, you could not tell male from female. They saw it as using a traditional holiday to promote a gay agenda.

Beyond the imagery on the cup, even the choice of holiday greeting could spark a fight.

During last year's presidential campaign, Trump, at a rally in Wisconsin, loudly vowed to win back the "War on Christmas." He was objecting to a change made under Barack Obama: to show religious diversity and inclusiveness, the government had switched its official greetings across the board to "Happy Holidays" rather than the specifically Christian "Merry Christmas."

The New York Times has reported on the origins of this "War on Christmas." For more than a decade the topic lived mostly in conservative media, but with Trump's rise it became a fresh focus for many. In this round of the "War on Christmas," some companies that had adopted more inclusive language — Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and Best Buy among them — were blacklisted by certain conservative groups as bad corporate actors.

On December 15, Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman published a blog post titled "E Pur Si Muove." The title is Italian, meaning "And yet it moves" — a reference to the words Galileo is said to have muttered under his breath in 1633, after the Inquisition forced him to recant his heliocentric theory ("Eppur si muove").

In the post, Altman wrote that the current climate of political correctness in San Francisco and Silicon Valley was "very bad for innovation": "Restricting speech is, in effect, restricting viewpoints and innovation. The most successful societies are usually the most open ones. Mainstream ideas are welcome; heterodox ideas are dangerous — yes, I know. But the truth is, some unpopular ideas may be the very ones that carry society forward. And the smarter people are, the more they bridle at these restrictions. Plenty of people around me have already left."

The political correctness Altman attacked is Silicon Valley's present habit of treating different industries differently — the root reason being that new ideas might be deemed "controversial."

He stressed that Silicon Valley had no welcome for experiments and research in fields such as "intelligence augmentation," "genetic engineering," and "life-extension drugs." "To some degree, you have to allow people to say things that are discriminatory. It's uncomfortable. Of course we should say that such statements are bad and wrong — but you can't therefore treat the person as a dangerous radical."

Look across history and every generation has its own knots to untangle; how exactly we reached the present state of unease that so many people feel is a question with no simple answer. What is clear is that political correctness is not merely a phenomenon of the internet's trustless exchanges; it has seeped deep into face-to-face daily life. It is not only a move in the game of political power, but a counterweight on the value judgments of ordinary people. It is a weapon, and also a form of self-defense. It is in a hurry to assert a kind of certainty, yet is itself shot through with ambiguity.

Whatever its original intentions, political correctness has undeniably made the world more anxious and more divided.

"We live in another era of democratic self-doubt. For most of the past decade, low growth has been the new normal. We don't know how to win the wars we're in, regretting action taken (Iraq) and action not taken (Syria). We live in a culture we despise but can find no way to improve. Congress is paralyzed. Parties are splintering. The president is an embarrassment."

This is a passage from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, writing on November 13, 2017, in a piece titled In the Age of the Strongman, Who Will Defend Liberty? Political correctness solves none of these problems.

Cover image from THE WEEK