“There is a time and place for everything” is a phrase that holds true for everything, including political correctness.
Yes, both you and I occasionally find ourselves tiptoeing around a prickly subject that makes us not want to hurt feelings. This, generally, is a good thing. If you’re talking about the Holocaust, slavery or gender, it’s usually best to avoid offending those around you. But on the same token as there being a time and place for everything, there are also instances where being vague about ethnicity or culture actually hinders communication.
The major problem with hampering speech with social rules – some more important than others – is that speech directly links to thought. When one makes the words a person says fit into a particular box, then that person’s thoughts are also confined.
Let’s use a simple example of how the absurdity of political correctness would change the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women, children, blondes, red heads, brunettes, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, left-handed persons of color, right-handed persons of color and so on and so on until we include every possible group of people imaginable are equal, that they are endowed by their own personal creator, or no creator at all if they are atheist or agnostic, with inalienable rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Am I the only person who sees this to be completely and totally absurd? There must come a point where “all” literally means “all;” that “all men” just automatically means “everyone.” There must be an underlying understanding of what is being said. If you taught a second grader the “politically correct” version of the Declaration of Independence, they’d get bored in the first sentence and not understand what the Declaration actually means. It means that all people are inherently equal in rights, and as such have no true differences at the start.
This, of course, ignores the largest problem with being politically correct: By specifically including or excluding things by their characteristics, aren’t we just amplifying the attention given to our differences? By categorizing people as men or women, white or black, gay or straight, we are more just ignoring the underlying fact that they are people, plain and simple human beings. It’s just another label. As opposed to saying white or black, we say Caucasian and African-American.
Instead of giving people a label based purely on their physical appearance or origin, use their names and true identities: Americans, Geneseans, human beings. Every single person is an individual and as such, using politically correct labels is unfair to not only him or her but also yourself; if you can label them, then they can label you.
Let’s get ourselves out of this political correctness rut. We are humans. We all live on Earth. We all laugh and love, work and play. We are all in a community larger than Geneseo and our nation, and as such we need to identify ourselves as humans and not as the differences we currently use to occupy our time. We all deserve it.