Your kind, it keeps on cutting
Divisions you create
Now it’s all exploding
Soon nothing left to break— Prong
In 1960, 94 percent of U.S. college students were white. By 1991, that had fallen to 80 percent. Women became a majority among students and also gained more representation within faculties. With these demographic changes came demands that white male professors, administrators, and students listen to points of view they had not had to consider before.
…Today, as the country continues to become less white and women and minorities gain access to more positions of power, maybe it stands to reason that the movement against political correctness has moved from academia into just about every part of public life.
A quick trip to Google will confirm that “divisive” and “polarizing” are terms frequently applied to Donald Trump. But I’m pretty sure everyone actually agrees that he’s an asshole; his fans just happen to love that about him.
This, on the other hand… I mean, JSTOR Daily is basically a Reader’s Digest of academic journals in blog form. Gershon’s brief post about the historical usage of the term “political correctness” is written in anodyne language. And yet, I’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of divisive, polarizing rhetoric.
To summarize her summary in my own words: critics of political correctness are just bitter, resentful white men who feel threatened by the gradual loss of their power and privilege. Yes, it turns out that people who dogmatically insist that race and gender explain everything about culture and politics also insist that it explains any criticism directed toward them. Anyone who argues otherwise becomes ipso facto an angry white male conservative (those who insist, inconveniently, on being critical without being white, male, or conservative are, of course, just fellow travelers suffering from false consciousness, mindless puppets dancing on the strings of their white male controllers). Any self-identified liberal who refuses to toe the party line will be treated as a conservative for all intents and purposes until they wearily give in and accept the label.
It’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating tactic. It’s a perfectly closed circle of logic which guarantees that once all the heretics have been expunged, the true believers will turn on each other in the inevitable purification rituals. Nothing worth keeping will ever grow from this poisoned soil, and yet, too many liberals continue to make excuses for it out of the fear of looking conservative. As Trump would say: Sad!