Politically Incorrect Essay, Research Paper

Report: Politically correct is such an innocent term. How can anyone be against something so friendly, something that is supposed to encourage harmony and peace between all people? My answer is Ha! Although I do agree that kindness, respect, and courtesy in our everyday life are to be promoted, it seems to me that they lose much of their meaning if they are oppressively forced upon us by political correctness. That is why there are no examples in modern times that are quite so hopeless to me as political correctness.

We are becoming increasingly censored in what we can say, write, or do because of this thing we call political correctness. Racial and minority groups are slowly but surely dictating what the rest of us can say, how we can say it, and where we can say it.

Some changes brought by political correctness seem long overdue, such as eliminating the widespread use of offensive racial slurs. Other proposed modifications, such as calling a female hero a “she-ro”, instead of a heroine, or labeling the white race a “mutant albino genetirecessive global minority” are sillier sounding than politically sensitive. According to the B.C. comic strip, “person-person” is the politically correct term for “mailman.”

Political correctness hasn’t gotten out of hand just here in the United States, either. Two comedians from Vancouver, British Columbia, open their act by asking the audience to stand and sing the Canadian national anthem.

They lead the group in singing the first two words —”O Canada”— then stop and motion for everyone to stop singing and sit down. The two then explain that “O Canada” is the only phrase in the song that will not offend anyone:

* “Our home and native land” is offensive to immigrants.

* “True patriot love” irritates those liberals who see patriotism as fascism.

* “In all thy sons command” angers women.

* “From far and wide” offends people of large size.

And so on until “O Canada” is the only non-offensive phrase left of the anthem.

People need to abandon the mess we’ve made for ourselves and stop taking political correctness to the extreme. The key is moderation. We should be conscious of distinctions but not make differences so large that we’re again living in a segregated society.

Americans talk a lot about race, but they’re only allowed to say certain things. To turn from the politically correct is to risk getting called a “racist”. Being judged as a racist is extremely damaging today, every bit as harmful to your reputation as being labeled a “Communist” during the Cold War.

It has turned into a free for all of criticism against whites, which is OK, but not when any effort by a white to respond to those criticisms is likely to get them labeled as a racist or supremacist, with extremely bad consequences. While I feel that the criticism is an important display of free speech and is often accurate, it is important that no group, not even the majority, should be intimidated out of defending itself.

While for whites to be vocal about taking pride in their ethnicity has become socially unaccepted, minorities are encouraged to indulge every idea of the superiority of their group that crosses their minds. How is this helpful?

To express any opinion other than that minority cultures are wonderful and majority culture is to blame for everyone else’s problems is to risk defamation as criminally intolerant.

So much of the politically correct approach to dealing with race, such as the hypersensitivity of groups, the playing games with inventing new uses of words and hassling those who won’t submit to using the new vocabulary, of boosting togetherness inside “oppressed” groups, is so unfriendly, and unconstructive, and so it is directly opposite to the goal of getting along, treating each other as individuals and eventually forgetting about race.

The majority isn’t the problem. Minorities aren’t the problem. Political correctness is the problem.