In Defense of Political Correctness

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Washington Post

23 February 16

Yes, it sometimes sounds silly. But we need more sensitivity, not less.

merica faces a life-threatening illness even more deadly than the Zika or Ebola viruses: “Political correctness is killing our country,” Donald Trump warned on the “Today” show last month. Ben Carson told Bill O’Reilly last summer, when he was the leading Republican presidential candidate, that political correctness was “destroying our nation.” Ted Cruz criticized President Obama’s ISIS strategy by claiming “political correctness is killing people.” Carly Fiorina said, “Political correctness is now choking candid conversation.” Marco Rubio complained that he doesn’t discuss his faith in public was because “I had been conditioned by political correctness.” Jeb Bush agreed: “The political correctness of our country needs to be shattered.”

Despite the uninhibited insults they’ve hurled at each other for the past couple months (Bush called Trump “unhinged”; Trump called Cruz “the definition of sleaze”; Rubio called Cruz a liar), the candidates who have sought the GOP nomination this year seem to agree that soft-pedaling our rhetoric is a mortal danger to the country. And a majority of Americans are with them: A Rasmussen Reports poll found that 79 percent of American adults think political correctness is a serious problem in the United States, with 58 percent believing that the country has become too politically correct. Of those who believe we’re being too careful, 74 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of those not affiliated with a major political party and 35 percent of Democrats concur. Only 18 percent think we aren’t politically correct enough.

This is nonsense. Although the extremes of political correctness can sometimes be absurd, America needs this trend to help it fulfill the spirit of the Constitution. Our country was founded on principles of inclusion, which means acting compassionately toward the many different people who make up our nation. Almost every group who immigrated to America was at one time the outsider — mistreated, abused and taunted. Maturity means not having to relive our mistakes of the past, but learning from them and doing better. Our country needs more sensitivity, not less.

The apocalyptic backlash against a benign combination of good old-fashioned manners and simple sensitivity toward others is easy to understand: Many Americans feel growing rage, fear and frustration as the country continues to evolve into something different than what they are used to. Plus, new technology accelerates cultural change, and the erosion of familiar and comforting traditions leaves us uncertain and uncomfortable. Every generation mourns the loss of the good old days, and the perception of change isn’t entirely imagined. For instance, in 1960, 73 percent of children age 18 and under lived in a home with two heterosexual parents in their first marriage. Now only 46 percent do. The country is 62 percent white today; whites will be a minority by 2043.

It’s true that efforts to show sensitivity and inclusiveness can go too far. It’s especially striking on campus: A survey at Yale University found 63 percent of students wanting professors to issue “trigger warnings” before saying anything that someone might find offensive or traumatic. Critics say the “microaggression movement” coddles students who should expect to be challenged to better prepare them for the real world outside. And students did seem coddled when 25 of them staged a UCLA sit-in because a professor corrected spelling and grammar errors on graduate-level essays. (They accused him of creating a “hostile campus climate” for students of color.) University of New Hampshire students received a list of resources to help them avoid offensive language such as “American” (because it suggests the United States is the only country in the Americas), homosexual (should be “same gender loving”), elderly (“people of advanced age”) and healthy (“non-disabled”). Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock say they won’t play college campuses anymore because the climate is so restrictive. Bill Maher claims that “political correctness Nazis” “hound me to censor every joke and apologize for every single slight.”

Outside the academy, some Americans have bridled at movements to replace “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays,” which seems to them a sinister attempt to restrict religious expression rather than a way to include non-Christians in the holiday spirit.

Here’s the problem with these attacks, though: Every political and social policy or tradition has examples of excess. We don’t define the value of a policy based on its most extreme manifestations. We can point to the absurd behavior of zealots around all of our most cherished values. We poke fun at helicopter parents for being overprotective, but we don’t erase safety laws and regulations that protect children.

A fairer critique would ask whether political correctness had solved the problem it was devised to address: Has it scrubbed away American prejudices? Certainly not yet, and of course it’s impossible to tell whether political correctness is even helping to diminish these, given how many other factors can influence behavior. But the task is worthy and vast: to erase centuries of bias in our country’s collective unconscious — and one way to do that is with language. For the same reason we no longer use terms that came to seem pejorative (Negro, colored, chick, bitch), we should eschew phrases tinged with hate (fag, cripple, retard) from our vocabulary.

There is some evidence that this works. Research at Cornell University concluded that political correctness may aid the creativity of mixed-sex work teams by “reducing the uncertainty that people tend to experience while interacting with the opposite sex,” according to associate professor of organizational behavior Jack Goncalo. “[E]stablishing a clear guideline for how to behave appropriately in mixed-sex groups made both men and women more comfortable sharing their creative ideas,” he said.

Even on a purely anecdotal level, we can look around and see younger generations growing up to be more aware of instances of discrimination based on gender, race, religion, or gender identity and not accepting them. Armed with this awareness, young people are less likely to accept bullying or exploitation simply because it’s endorsed by a social code. (“Glee,” “Modern Family” and Macklemore’s “Same Love” are a few examples of pop-culture pushback.) They will be more self-reliant, stronger and more tolerant of others. Better Americans.

PC’s opponents point to its most extreme examples to argue for doing exactly what we did before political correctness showed us the racism, misogyny and homophobia embedded in our language: Nothing. Deriding political correctness gives people permission not to fix a problem, because the real problem, they tell us, is the cure. This is the logic of vaccination deniers and climate-change skeptics. Or all those hard-core smokers back in the 1960s and ’70s who laughed at the warning labels about the damage cigarette smoking could do. They accused the government of being a scold and boosted cigarette sales by over 7.8 billion in 1966, the year the labels first appeared on cigarette packs. Arrogantly clinging to wrong-headed traditions is not good for the country.

At a February rally, Donald Trump repeated with mock shock what a woman in the audience had just shouted about Ted Cruz: “She said, ‘He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible!” The audience shouted their approval, even as Trump grinned and pretended to be offended. But there are serious consequences to insulting someone by calling him or her a vagina. It furthers the association of women with weakness. Every time we laugh at this suggestion, we’re endorsing the narrative of women as less than men. Every time a male coach berates his players by referring to them as “ladies” or tells them to “hike their skirts” while playing, we’re perpetuating an atmosphere in which women are not men’s equals.

Anti-political-correctness rhetoric serves as a clever tool for politicians who wish to distract voters from the real issues (and their lack of solutions) by tapping into their darkest fears about those who are different than themselves. It’s genius — as long as those they’re manipulating are too zombified to think for themselves.

Which is exactly what they want. They want you to feel and behave like children while they pretend to be the all-knowing benevolent father. While they rile you up about how immigrants are stealing your jobs, they distract you from the expert assessments that show how Latino immigration has had less effect on employment than factories that moved abroad, weakened labor unions and recurring recessions. So while we’re told to focus on building a massive wall to keep out immigrants, the real architects of job loss and economic instability continue unaffected.

We’re better off taking back the reins of our future by following the suggestion of 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

Why the Deafening Silence on Cutting the Military Budget?

By Harvey Wasserman, David Swanson and Bob Fitrakis, Reader Supported News

23 February 16

Watch Amy Goodman interview Harvey Wasserman on Democracy Now!

ernie Sanders’ common sense proposals for dealing with universal health care, college tuition, restoring the infrastructure, confronting poverty and more have encountered predictable scorn from “fiscally responsible” corporatists.

They all scream about the “deficit spending” and tax hikes that might be required to pay for these vital programs. From predictable right-wing corporatists to Hillary Clinton (“free stuff! free stuff!” she mocks) to fictional “left-leaning economists” invented by the New York Times, numerous voices scorn Bernie’s agenda because his proposals “cost too much.”

But nowhere do we find anyone willing to take on the biggest imperial welfare program of them all, the most obvious source of revenue for the programs needed to heal our nation: the military budget. If Sanders were willing to cut the military budget he’d encounter no criticism for raising taxes, because he’d have no need to raise taxes.  We hope that he’ll no longer pass up this opportunity to tell us how he would cut into a military budget that exceeds nearly all the rest of the world’s combined, and that largely has nothing to do with fighting terrorism (and so often makes it worse).

It’s not that Bernie doesn’t have a good answer for how he would pay for everything. He does, and it’s plenty clear and simple for an intelligent fourth grader, and possibly even Donald Trump, to grasp. But just try squeezing the following into a sound byte television response to “You want to raise my taxes!”

Bernie Sanders economic proposal. (photo: Worldbeyondwar.org)

Even this lengthy list does not seem to straightforwardly explain that Medicare for All could raise your taxes, but would give you net savings as you dropped your health insurance payments.

For those who can get past sound bytes, Sanders’ proposals are good, and the taxes all needed for the sake of equitable sharing of wealth and power. But cutting the oceans of cash going to the armed forces is also needed for the purpose of slowing down the military industrial complex and its penchant for creating wars.

And there are projects that the United States and the world desperately need that aren’t listed above. Rather than more wars and occupations, the United States has a moral responsibility to begin a massive investment in actual humanitarian aid to the world, a world beginning to suffer from climate change driven more by the United States than any other nation, with the possible exception of the much, much larger nation of China.

The United States is currently extremely stingy in foreign aid by global standards, and a Marshall-Plan scale investment could work wonders in transforming world opinion about the U.S. government. A similar investment, much more than $100 billion per year, is needed in the United States for green energy. The possibility of creating a Solartopia is slipping away from us, while the cost of the Iraq war alone would have been enough to halt climate change.

Here are some simple, obvious ways to pay for all those programs Bernie advocates, and much much more:

• There are various plans afoot to “upgrade” the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, with price tags in the range of $1,000,000,000,000 and more. Why don’t we just get rid of all of them and use the money to pay for much of the above?


• There is talk of a replacement fleet of a dozen “Ohio Class” nuclear submarines at a (currently estimated) cost of up to $8,000,000,000 each (which is bound to soar), with construction to begin in 2021. These are perfectly designed to protect us from the Soviet Union, which no longer exists, and will do nothing except bankrupt us, making us more vulnerable to the likes of ISIS, which was created by our intervention in Iraq.


• The United States currently maintains at least 900 bases outside its borders, with troops stationed in 175 foreign nations and waging or threating war in some of the handful of nations that do not have U.S. troops (Syria, Iran). The financial cost is over $100 billion a year. The bases, in many cases, generate an enormous amount of popular resentment and hatred, serving as motivations for attacks on the bases themselves or elsewhere — famously including the attacks of September 11, 2001. Why continue to pay for this?


• The military spends millions every year advertising itself as a career opportunity, with fly-overs at football games, saturation TV spots, marching bands (the military is the nation’s leading employer of musicians) and more. In fact, it has an entrenched interest in keeping college tuitions high, as a key incentive for young people to enlist is to be able to afford tuition. Yet while the armed forces are heavily over-staffed, and recruitment ads for the National Guard depict the bringing of aid to natural disasters, the reality is that a major effort to aid those at home and abroad impacted by climate change or disasters like the methane gas leak at Port Ranch, California, doesn’t exist and would be a prime step toward guaranteeing a true global peace.

If the military were scaled back even a little, in the direction of a purely defensive operation, we could create such a modern civilian conservation corps and, among other things, put solar panels on the rooftops of every building on earth.

There is, of course, much more that could be done to cut the military budget and pay for what we really need.  The vast bulk of military expenditures today have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In many cases, the clumsy bludgeonings of our over-stuffed military actually promote it.

Yet this kind of discussion has not yet made it into the mainstream. We look forward to either journalists or brave nonviolent event disruptors inserting this topic into the endless election coverage.

Originally published on World Beyond War.