Can someone please explain to me exactly when and how our society became so pitifully sensitive?
When our Navy drops a barrage of cluster bombs on a civilian-populated town in Baghdad, resulting in the death of dozens of Iraqis, the media takes care to ‘neutralize’ (sugar coat) the delivery and framing of the event. Thus, illegitimate mass murder of innocent civilians becomes ‘an above average casualty rate’ or ‘collateral damage.’ This play on language is only a mild example of the ever present ‘sanitization policy’ aimed to wean out images and words that some may perceive as unsettling or disquieting.
Conservative think tanks and liberal politically correct reformers have both invested astonishing amounts of time and resources in framing language because of the understanding that power over language means power over ideas, and thus power over social and political policy. Language construction determines the parameters of a debate. When Republicans wanted to suppress popular conviction in maternal choice and judicial adherence to Roe v. Wade, they wisely framed the debate on abortion as the ‘right to life.’ The seemingly innocuous slogan implies that abortion supporters are not pro-life, and hence must be pro-death. This framing rhetoric managed to persuade many that life begins at conception.
Politically correct framers, although willed by more noble intentions, appear to suggest that by changing language used to describe a condition, you can change the condition itself. I hate to point out the obvious, but calling cripples ‘differently abled,’ midgets ‘vertically challenged,’ the blind ‘visually impaired’ and stupid people ‘minimally exceptional,’ doesn’t make them any less crippled, dwarfed, blind or unintelligent. Aside from obscuring reality and parting from accuracy and clarity, these perky euphemisms encourage a climate of victimhood that insists external persons and factors are responsible for one’s disadvantage. So while the poor, or ‘economically disadvantaged,’ are busy feeling bad for themselves, becoming more and more dependent on welfare aid, we’re not looking to understand and fix the root of poverty so these people can become self-sufficient.
As if obscuring reality, externalizing blame and encouraging a cycle of dependency isn’t bad enough, PC advocates have also managed to instill a pathetic trepidation of hurting people’s feelings. Need I remind my menacing PC junkies that speech is almost bound to offend someone; it is an inevitable pitfall of diversity, multiculturalism, freedom of expression and an open marketplace of ideas. To censor, via social pressure or legal threat, insensitive speech that does not threaten to incite imminent violence inescapably presents a dangerous slippery slope where atypical and non-mainstream ideas will become an act of criminal dissidence.
This week, Don Imus, an indiscriminately discriminatory shock jock/political commentator, stumbled into the crosshairs of round-the-clock Anna Nicole Smith-type media coverage. MSNBC and CBS dropped Imus’ radio program after an explosive reaction erupted over his reference to black female players from Rutgers’s basketball team as ‘nappy headed hos.’ While certainly not a profound contribution, it’s hardly worthy of social or occupational capital punishment.
‘Nappy headed’ by definition refers to frizzy or kinky hair. I’m having a hard time seeing why that is so offensive. I have thin hair, but I’m not about to go demanding the resignation of my hair stylists who pointed that out. As for ‘hos,’ the sad reality is that contemporary cultural standards of decency are so bankrupt that ‘hos’ is an accurate hallmark for both female and male sexual norms.
Just like the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror’ turned out to be failures, so will the PC movement’s war on speech. If the liberal initiative does succeed, it will only breed a repressed populace of closeted racists, sexists and bigots, terrified of using ‘mankind’ to denote the human species for it might piss off a feminist, or ‘nappy headed’ might piss off Al Sharpton. Shirley Hufstedler, U.S. Secretary of Education under Carter, reminds us that, ‘You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.’
‘ Jennifer Frank is a senior politics, philosophy and law major.