I remember well when I first heard those words to describe a neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin in 1985. "The politically correct East Side" as I recall, was the Marquette neighborhood down to Atwood. Politically correct in the 1980s in Madison was a lifestyle:people who supported integration and bussing, who went to international potlucks at the school, who grew a little prairie in their front yard or didn’t use bug spray on their roses or never used paper towels or napkins or paper diapers.
They went to little cafes with spider plants and scraggly philodendrons and ivy crisscrossing the bay windows and read the Isthmus and drank coffee. The rusty old Japanese cars and Volvos were held together by bumper stickers proclaiming life as a series of political choices. Everyone remembered where they were when the Math research building was bombed or how often they were tear-gassed. They bought fresh squeezed lemonade from the man who blew the Math Research Building up, living in (mostly) anonymity and operating the Juice cart on the library mall. You were politically correct if you knew Michael Feldman when he was local, not a nationally syndicated radio show.
Politically correct was not a curse word. It was a lifestyle. It was a bit hippy dippy, sincere but nostalgic and sweet all the same. Here were folks eating low on the food chain and still showing up to work their shift at the coop after all these years. People who volunteered their time and were neighborly. People sat on porches in the all too brief Wisconsin summer. One Atwood Avenue family always put out their banana tree on the front yard all summer. We read the Nation and went to hear Noam Chomsky- standing room only. We were for gun control (I still am). Politically correct was mellow, but there was a bit of keeping down to earth with the Jones about it. Buying a new car or building a new house wase a bit déclassé, and garage sales were social events..
And then suddenly (it seemed to me) politically correct was a term not just used to describe the shabby chic East side of a college town, but a way that the left in American looked down their noses at everyone else- a holier than though attitude which demanded euphemisms for everything but bodily functions (we were happy to call a vagina a vagina). How did this transition take place, exactly? One factor was the policy University of Wisconsin in Madison instituted in 1981 for its faculty that became one of the early standards of the so-called political correctness movement.
Nowhere is the conflict-cum-conundrum of interests implicit in the speech code debate more evident than at that University of Wisconsin, with its highly reputed commitments to the often opposing concerns of academic freedom and social justice. Speech codes were explicitly set up to serve social justice, and the University of Wisconsin was one of the first schools to institute them. The faculty code was adopted in 1981, and the student code in 1989, under the aegis of Donna Shalala while she was chancellor there. Madison is rightfully perceived— with loathing or admiration— as a paragon of political correctness.
But in 1991, a federal district court knocked down the student code, calling it unconstitutional. Plans to rewrite the code were scuttled a few years later. The faculty code remained untouched by the legal decision, however, making it all the more surprising when, eight years later (in 1999), the university knocked it down on its own. There is, after all, a fundamental difference between judicial intervention and voluntary action. For UW-Madison to willingly rescind a restriction on hate speech is akin to the Citadel announcing a plan to open a center devoted to queer studies.
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The policy was much disputed while I was in Madison and working on campus. Should people use words like "nigger" or "dyke" or "wetback" in lectures? That is a no-brainer when used as an insult by a professor to a student or vice versa, but what about in historic or literary context? What was the correct term to call students of color-we struggled to be something which became known as PC. One well-known incident occurred when an individual used the term "niggardly" (which means cheap and frugal and has origins unrelated to defamation) and they were much criticized (and later apologized to) by the press. I was uncomfortable about the policy which smacked of censorship, but I appreciated that it was a reaction to bigotry and hate.
And then there was the famous Politically Correct Bedtime Stories- written by a liberal James Finn Carpenter. These were alight-hearted self deprecating humor that somehow became a manifesto that liberals were forcing language to change to make social change- mail person versus mail man (letter carrier works too of course, or postal employee. The first book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 65 weeks and there were two sequels and many advertising spinouts.
I believe these books and the whole concept of PC did irreparable harm to our country and the progressive movement. My husband bought me one, thinking I would enjoy it, but I couldn’t read it. Many people now, either Republicans or Democrats or politically neutral, will drag out accusations of political correctness if you request they stop insulting people or using biased speech. For example the term "retard" as an insult to persons who you don’t like and believe to be stupid offends those who actually have developmental disabilities called "mental retardation." A diarist recently shared how this term made her feel, since this was the insult she faced often in her youth. Others strongly defended their right to use the insult, since it wasn’t directed at her. And now we have the discussion of religious figures naked and sculpted from chocolate- is this insulting or a proper topic for discussion? If someone is offended, what should they say? And what about artistic expression which can make one very uncomfortable?
Back in the newly free speech zone of Madison in 1999, this was one response:
"I'd rather people have the right to call me a faggot so at least I can determine my friends from my enemies," says Jason Shepard, the openly gay UW senior class president and another central figure in the opposition to the speech codes. Shepard also grew up in rural Wisconsin and like Kasper has endured the withering, demoralizing epithets speech codes are meant to discourage; yet both embrace the intoxicating if problematic notion that the best weapon against bigotry is the open marketplace of ideas.
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Others have supported this response.
"The Anti-Defamation League is firmly opposed to campus hate speech codes," says the ADL's Elizabeth Coleman. "We really believe that light is the best disinfectant."
"Speech codes are a fig leaf," agrees ACLU president Nadine Strossen. "They allow university administrations to avoid doing anything substantive to address minority issues on campus."
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So what should one do when hate speech, or hateful hurtful speech is used on a blog? Forget what the Republicans or the moderates or the Christians who wander on to the site might say or thin, what should I do a blogger and commenter? If sunlight is the best disinfectant, should I not speak out against the insult and bias when I see it? Should I not share how such statements make me feel?
An example here is rsevern here who writes comments when A** C****** and her supposed masculine appearance is commented upon, indicating she has had a sex change operation. Robyn has had a sex change operation, not without a lot of grief. She views being trans-gendered used as an insult as offensive and speaks out. If she supposed to sit quietly while someone treats her human condition as a joke and an insult? Or what about when gay males complain that jokes about prison rape are not that funny and insult gays as well as those who have been raped. Rape- not that funny to me.
If this diary seems to be offensively politically correct, then so be it. I see it as spring cleaning and letting the sun shine in, in a Dawning of Aquarius sort of way and a disinfecting sort of way. Free speech lets me say what I think as well as you, and if I find your language offensive, I may pop in and say so. And I will strongly defend the rights of others to do the same. Politically correct was a nice neighborhood to hand out in, back in the day in Madtown. Come sit on the porch and share some brewskis and let's try and get back to a gentler time.