Bullied Into Political Correctness

(A response to Arun)

Most of us try to avoid a lot of behaviors that aren't illegal. Many of those behaviors were acceptable in what passed for polite society a generation or three ago. I'm talking here about behaviors related to what we might call "political correctness." The most common examples are from everyday speech. Use of demeaning racial, sexual, and religious language was not long ago routine, even in the press and other media. These terms were insulting, but they were also part of a pattern of discrimination and intimidation. Burning crosses escalated into voter intimidation and lynching.

These behaviors are much less common today, and I would like to think that's because we have become better people, but the fact is that to a large extent we have been "bullied into political correctness", mostly by the disapproval of our fellows. There are at least two kinds of reasons for avoiding an offensive behavior - first, common decency and respect for our fellow man, and second, the possibility that the offensive behavior might provoke retaliation. I like the first better, but the second may be more important.

Why do people choose offensive behaviors, anyway? Why, for example, were offensive racial epithets in such common use some decades ago? Mainly, I think, to intimidate and humiliate. They were a tool to enforce oppression of minorities. Jim Crow took some of its first major hits in the American South when black veterans came back from World War II. They had been in the big war and they were far less able to be intimidated than they had been before.

When a bunch of yahoos gather to burn Korans today, they are following in the footsteps of the cross burning grandparents of a couple of generations ago, and they deserve the same kind of response.

Not every act that offends is offensive in this sense, though. A critical component of democracy is the right to criticize, and especially the right to criticize the politically powerful. Our Constitution gives us very broad rights to free speech, and this right has been interpreted to apply to lots of symbolic actions that are not literally speech or press. If I recall correctly, the issue of cross burning became a contentious issue at the Supreme Court for exactly that reason, and if I remember correctly even further (not especially likely!) it was held that the implicit threat it carried did in fact often make that illegal. Perhaps this is what Justice Breyer had in mind.

Breyer's point, and one I tend to agree with, is that particulars matter. So when is a potentially offensive act morally appropriate? Here are a couple of tests: are those offended being challenged for a specific behavior (like the Catholic Church's record of covering up child molestation), are those offended in power, or are they a disadvantaged minority (burning a Koran in Saudi Arabia is one thing, burning it in South Florida another.)