After racist remarks were painted in the Free Expression Tunnel last week, I read several student responses that claimed offensive terms don’t matter because they are just words. A similar dialogue played out nationally with the firing of Juan Williams, from NPR, and Rick Sanchez, from CNN. Both were fired because they expressed their opinion at the cost of being politically correct. There were also people who supported their rights to do so.
Political correctness is not overrated. Words, especially those spoken and displayed in public, matter. They have the power to create certain imagery to those who witness or hear them. They have the power to evoke painful memories from the past, or to add fuel to an already volatile atmosphere. These offensive words have been termed slurs because they were used as derogatory terms against a suppressed group of people. We are only decades away from times when sections of the population discriminated against others in this country because of race. As a community, we are still dealing with traces of these sentiments.
Discrimination to the levels where it becomes harmful and threatening does not build overnight. It happens over time, over a series of incidents, and words in public discourse play a major role in them. Consider the “Final Solution” implemented in Hitler’s Germany. The socio-political atmosphere in which such a scheme could be even thought of did not happen in the blink of an eye. There were public figures who vented their personal feelings of hatred against the Jews and others in the years preceding Hitler. If people in the society had actively discouraged such figures from acerbic verbal attacks, if the society had checked the figure’s popularity against their thoughts, then maybe history would have taken a different turn.
Being politically correct is about not rushing to judge a person or a group of people on the basis of race or personal beliefs and practices. By being politically correct, we are stating that we value other human beings for their values and their merits, and that alone determines our equality with them. It is not always an easy thing to do, but it is the ideal we should strive for. Achieving it will be no small feat, but our choice of words would be a good place to start. By being conscious of what we say to the people we come into contact with every day and considering the meaning of them, we could begin to solve the problem we are having on campus.
