I love finding the little bits of irony in life, especially systems put in place that do quite the opposite of what they want to or should achieve, like police brutality or an abusive mother. Another example of this is political correctness.
People tell me that the objective of political correctness is to be able to communicate with others while minimising any chance of offending people. The irony I see in this is that the concept of political correctness is offensive in and of itself. This I can illustrate in a number of ways.
One: It’s hard to communicate when every time you speak, you sound like you’re reading from a damn scientific journal.
Two: The fact that you use politically correct terminology, offends the person you’re talking to because it completely destroys any informal setting, further distancing yourself from the person you’re addressing, thus breeding the animosity you were hoping so much to avoid.
Four: It is just fucking impractical.
Really. If I’m in a mall and a small dark man of a certain sexual orientation with a hearing problem and questionable fashion sense steals my wallet, I can guarantee you that I won’t be shouting “Someone please immobilise that hearing-impaired Afro-American homosexual in a female aeroplane crew member uniform! He, or she, if he prefers to be addressed as such, has wrongfully repossessed my faux-leather monetary container!”
If I don’t shout out “Stop the deaf black midget homo nut case in the stewardess costume!” I demand you strike me down with a baseball bat immediately. I’d rather offend a crowd of shoppers than look like a jackass with a ridiculously large vocabulary.
How people think that purifying, sanitising and polishing our existing language are means to an open and tolerant society is beyond me. The irony is that the savage underworld of society we call ‘teh internets’ seems to get it.
I can call someone an ‘AIDS-ridden donkey fucking whore’ and it’d fetch me quite a few ‘lolz’. Doing this in your local Starbucks will most likely get you a first class ticket on the Asskick Express.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that politicians and religious figures seem to be the only ones particularly concerned. I have yet to meet someone who isn’t heavily involved in either extracurricular activity that is wholeheartedly PC.
By the way, you might’ve noticed I skipped reason three. This would be that PC is completely pointless and unnecessary. To illustrate why, I’ll use the best example I can come up with: St Nicholas.
If you’re familiar with the Dutch holiday of Sinterklaas, you can see where I’m going with this. On the 5th of December St Nick on his pretty white horse goes around leaving gifts in all the homes for all the kids in a similar fashion to that of the abominable American fabrication of the Coca-Cola Company. Mind you, he does it with the help of his Zwarte Piet or Pieten, which literally translates to Black Peters.
Oh my. Black? Peters?
Why yes! Nicholas goes around with a bunch of black faced people in costumes more flamboyant than that of the Swiss Guard, handing out candy to little kids.
Racial undertone?
Well it seems that much of the Netherlands doesn’t seem to care. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone debate the ‘political correctness’ of it. If they have, it surely didn’t make front page in the media. Not even the Netherlands Antilles seems to mind that much, and the majority of people there are blacks. I guarantee you though, if this was done in the States, Jesse Jackson will be the first one up there with his panties in a twist crying “Racist!”
There are few people who do see the possible racial connotation in it, so they explain to kids that they’re just white people who got soot on their faces and hands when they were going through the chimneys to deliver the gifts. Sounds like a neatly gift-wrapped lie to me.
The truth is there really isn’t a racist thing about the holiday at all. Yes, the Black Petes are his slaves. No, they’re not African slaves, nor Spanish ones, despite their Moorish attire.
The legend comes from St Nicholas, the real one, who one day defeated a demon or devil, shackled him and made him his slave. Basically he goes around that day giving kids pockets full of diabetes with the help of the Beelz himself. In Austrian celebrations, they do portray him as a devil.
With everything bad having been called ‘dark’, i.e. the dark ages, it’s no wonder that the devil is portrayed as being black, the darkest of the dark. Try explaining that to the bourgeois du jure of America, I assure you they’d still label it racist.
In the Netherlands Antilles, kids look forward to this holiday as much as they do their own birthdays. As someone who was born and raised there, I can tell you there are some seriously ignorant retards in that country.
This one rich guy who built a colonial themed resort in Curaçao wanted to open a restaurant called the West Indian Company. I can see how this would fit perfectly with the rest of the resort, which is a very lovely one, might I add. I can also understand why it caused uproar among several black politicians there. After all, the WIC is the very same company that brought many of their ancestors from the African west coast. It’s fucking ridiculous because the restaurant in no way promotes slavery, but hey. I understand the concern.
I may hate political correctness, but in no way do I promote people acting like utter assholes. Words only have a value when used in context. I have no problem with a historian using the N-word when describing life in the 19th century. However, I do have a problem with a certain bounty hunter using it a couple of dozen times to describe his son’s girlfriend.
This is exactly the issue PC seems to overlook, though. As long as words aren’t used in a derogatory and insulting manner, I shouldn’t… no one should fear persecution for using those words. I know plenty of people who understand this. It’s called common sense. As long as you use common sense, there should, in theory, be no problem.
Despite it all, I fear that ‘common sense’ is nothing more than a misnomer, though, as day by day I get the impression that it’s hardly common at all.
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