That's funny, sometimes everything comes together. I just read an article I'd come upon in the Guardian last week to Anastasia. Formally about affirmative action, the underlying point was about class in America. Decided to post a topic about it
here on A2K. While looking up A2K and the Guardian on-line I found this thread here - and another article:
"US grapples with its most hated word". The word in Q: "nigger".
Political correctness has, of course, impacted Western Europe greatly, too. I always get a bit on edge when it is again lambasted, and not just because it's such an easy target. It was, after all, born from a justified and overdue push to ban the callous insults of minority groups that had become or remained so organically part of society's ways as a whole, that they symbolised everything about a society in which some were denied the opportunities others had merely because of their colour, origin.
But on the other hand the particular American brand and stridency of political correctness has also always bemused me. So many astounding problems of segregation, poverty, racism, back in the 70s - 80s, when PC emerged, still mostly unparalleled in Western Europe - and then so much passion, so much anger, and eventually so much succesful policing, of speech and behavior, all focused on the mere
expression - the
outside - of these problems.
It rings a lot of bells for a European bystander - confirming prejudice or incomprehension about American culture. Why has all this passion be channeled in to policing
form? When it's the
content , if I may put it so B/W, that's clearly ridden with trauma? When society's structures, social, economic, cultural, still damn so much of a whole generation of African-Americans to neglect, discrimination and poverty, why then focus seemingly
all the attention on the name, the word, the label that these problems of exclusion come bearing as their mask, when they face us on TV or in pop culture?
Is it - prejudice tells me - the American obsession with the surface, the impression, the image? Is it sublimation, driven by the fear instilled by acknowledging that the problem of racism goes so much deeper than swear words or boorish put downs? An acknowledgement that after all would threaten the belief that, fundamentally, the US are still the country where anyone can become anything he wants, if he tries enough? Is it a Puritan heritage - the tradition of social control over 'properness' in presentation and expression, as the overriding criterium of civilisation? Its near-superstitious respect for the Word, as the creator of our world?
Which cocktail of these elements have revived the Victorian impulse to cleanse ourselves of anything improper in appearance and expression as if, with that, sin would also be banished from the heart?
That's what I always stumble over in PC - this fundamentally hypocritical wishful thinking, as if, by hiding the word, the problem will dissapear? I'm using the phrase "the word" here deliberately because of that article I linked above, about the word "nigger", that just - astounded me - like examples of something you already know always do when they're stark enough.
It clearly shows where PC backfires, against its own causes even. Quote: "In Boston, one local newspaper banned the title of a play due to start next month called No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs while other publications were considering whether to print its name. The Boston Metro ran the title in its advertising using blanks and asterisks." And: "a local councillor in Baltimore failed in his bid to ban the use of city money to buy reference books - including dictionaries - that contain racial slurs." And the example the article leads with: teacher Shannon Schumacher, who began a project with her students at a school in St Louis, Missouri, to teach them why the word "nigger" is offensive, and gave them a chapter from the book,
Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by the black Harvard professor Randall Kennedy as homework. And was disciplined after an uproar of protest.
This is no longer redressing historical injustice by forcing people to conform to more just ways. This is a cover-up. America decides to undo its past by putting an embargo on talking about it. How can you teach your children about racism, if you can't show the example, can't lay it 'naked' on the dissecting table to expose it for what it is?
I believe that so much more could have been achieved if the anti-racists of the eighties and nineties had focused on attacking racist behaviour and structures rather than their mere reflection in the virtual reality of the spoken word. I agree with lash when he writes in this thread: "the revelation is not the problem-- the underlying racism is".
We had this little problem in Holland here last year called Fortuyn - you may have heard about it. He shocked all and sundry by saying out loud what for years was taboo - every night he would appear on his talkshow and say something that'd make you gasp - did he just
say that? It won him a staggering 17% of the vote. He wouldn't have won half as much if in the years before, people would have been given a little more trust concerning their intentions or basic benevolence when they'd talked rough, and action would have simply and all the more consistently and clearly been taken against anyone who'd
act in ways to harm or discriminate fellow citizens/humans.
There's a bit of rhetoric flourish in the above - I do know of the power labels can have, when perpetuated over generations or in onslaughts of its use in ways intended to alarm, incite - the former Yugoslavia gives some prime examples - and when somebody calls you a name that really hurts you, it may not seem so virtual. But my dumbfoundment [sp?] is real enough - the extent of PC, in combination with a seemingly relatively lacking awareness - or even willingness to hear - of how much deeper and more systemic the problem of racism could be - I don't get this combination.
