Tyler Nichols

2/10/2016

PC and the Lefts

Self Administered Propaganda
Political correctness (or PC) has been particularly volatile subject matter to feed the
flames of media along the political spectrum. The left unyieldingly defends its murky concepts as
if contemporary PC culture were something as second-nature as defending anti-slavery. The
right drags PC through tedious and tiring arguments about the first right in the US constitution,
and some decry it as proof of Americas turn to communism. Of course, both wings are
experiencing turbulence as they take flight atop their social-media soap boxes. Unfortunately,
what good intentions the PC left1 holds are sometimes radically usurped by the self-confirming
and ironically imperialistic propaganda it generates in the name of progressive politics.
I contend that political correctness has become a set of rules that govern how certain subjects
should be treated and with what minimum level of respect, and that provide a checklist of
acceptable and unacceptable terminology. An example of a colloquially accepted PC guideline is
calling a black person black rather than Americas older term negro. Of course, PC finds
itself in all niches of contemporary discourse, and for good reason. No matter how educated we
are about a given topic, most of us can always stand to be more empathetic and conscientious
even those of us espousing the need for collective PC consciousness. A great deal of what PC
culture is trying to construct is a sort of metaphorical database as to how to approach politicized
issues. Feminists contend that jokes about sexual assault, in a country in which a large majority
of women experience sexual harassment throughout their lifetime, are offensive rather than
1 I would argue that the right has its own PC culture. Flag burning and slandering
any (republican) president is seen as a grave offense. There is no doubt that this
same process of self-reflexive propaganda exists in the right, but the right is hard
pressed to find the ideological allowances to be aware of it. For example, the rights
disgust at the term undocumented immigrant as a replacement for illegal
alien/immigrant, and then the rights insistence in using the latter term becomes a
form of right-wing PC protest with inversed PC ideology.

funny. Trans awareness groups advocate the understanding of proper pronoun usage to cis
genders when socializing with or referring to non-gender binary people. Black Lives Matter
questioned the medias coverage of the Oregon occupation and rightly asked, If these were
armed black men, would they be called patriots or terrorists? The call for safer places on college
campuses are accompanied by demands for administrators to resign who are deemed inadequate
to provide these spaces. The promotion and development of PC is not limited to a single area of
the left, and it is not limited to academic or colloquial circles. Pushback to PC is felt in both of
these arenas as well.
A typical argument against PC runs, that if PC has not already, it will eventually place a
gag-order over dissenters of the left. However, this critique from the right is, ironically, more
applicable to the left. As the left continues with a PC culture that does not leave room for its own
critique, it further condemns its arguments and perspectives to unimaginative and ineffectual
conformity. Figure 1 serves as an example for this reflexive censorship and self-administered
propaganda. Taken from Facebook as a popularly shared picture, the opening text describes in
clear letters the revisionism inherent in a great deal of (not all) PC rhetoric. It is apparent that the
picture is meant to be a joke and to poke fun at the ludicrous content of the news titles prerevision; however, this picture demarcates a trend of resistance towards those who raise
questions with the mercurial and enigmatic doctrine of PC. This joke is a very real
phenomenon. Every day we subconsciously rewrite not only the fantastic headlines bringing PC
into question, but our own psyches.
The intentionally insensitive comparison of the lefts defense of PC to the lefts defense
of anti-slavery was used to call into contrast two relationships. Firstly, much of PCs intent is to
fight against the semiotics of oppression by casting light upon, and trying to reduce the practices

of, harmful vocabulary and concepts. This fight is against the very real fallout of slavery, sexism,
homophobia, and a whole slew of other oppressive actions taken against the non-cis, non-white
populations of the past. As Jim Crow died, a new, more subtle reanimation was born, and PC was
conceived to meet the challenge.
Secondly, during Americas time spent with the civil rights movement, no single answer
could be put forward to alleviate the oppression of blacks. Of course, having one catch-all
answer would take part in the very imperialist, bureaucratic modernism that gave rise to the
problem in the first place. Zizek succulently states when talking about Greece and the Eurozone
crises:
The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact
that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of
theoretical cowardice; it functions as a fetish that prevents us thinking through to the end the
deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of
the tunnel is most likely the headlights of another train approaching us from the opposite
direction.2
I keep faith that most leftists would consider the use of PC as one method among many
changing the language used in discourse is an important step, but only one along the way.
However, has the left implicitly consented to a radically new PC culture without understanding
its fickle nature?
Recently, some southern states like Louisiana have begun to look favorably on more PC
cityscapes and governance. Notably, New Orleans successfully voted to remove four statues
honoring confederate civil war soldiers that were located around the city. It is beyond question
that these monuments express racist sentiment. However (be mindful, this is not a but), the
existence of these statues in their location, effectively unquestioned until late 2015, stands as a
testament to the internalized racism of New Orleans. Is the removal of these statues an act of
2 http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/slavoj-i-ek-greece-couragehopelessness

revisionism rather than progression? Council member, Stacy Head, said that "[the statues] will
not improve the socioeconomic balance of the cityIf it would make the city more color blind,
if it would create more balance, I would sacrifice almost any physical object to get us to that
point.3
Unsurprisingly, the council member is most concerned with the socioeconomic aspect of the
monuments and tangentially with the moral and ethical aspects. Her statement implies that, if the
statues were a boom for local business, they might have more support for remaining unbothered.
Her use of the phrase color blind, as if issues of race could be washed away, reflects the
sentiments of her mayor, who has stated that we, the people of New Orleans, have the power
and we have the right to correct these historical wrongs. 4 Certainly race, like class or gender, is
nothing that can be done away with by obscuring its physical or metaphorical monuments.
According to popular PC discourse, ditching the monuments would be the best option. But would
that not benefit the establishment most, the ones that should be suffering for the longstanding
political oppression? Why not instead make these statues monuments to their own racism and the
revisionist tendency that tried to remove them? If these statues are to be removed, it would create
a fresh page of propaganda. The lefts intention to swipe under the rug the ugly history will
make it possible to attribute a mayor with a progressive win; and racism will continue on in New
Orleans, unaffected.
Before we reach to correct, scold, redraw, we should instead understand the machinations
pushing us to revise, and ask if they are pushing us to propagate systemic oppression rather than
to fight it. PC should not be a given, as no one is born with an intrinsic understanding of it. There
are no objectively correct PC guidelines (which is not to say that all guidelines are equally
3 http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/us/new-orleans-confederate-monuments-vote/
4 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/us/new-orleans-city-counil-confederatemonuments-vote.html?_r=0

correct!) which we can follow, and PC culture is constantly under change and formation, but the
left should be more cognizant of how it is situated with PC. It should not be the case that a
member of the left should catch more attention for questioning PC prescriptions than members of
the right who constantly attack and debase it.

Figure 1.