Some people felt that the photoshoot robbed ballerinas of work they were more qualified for than Jenner. Political correctness is intended to help us use language that helps instead of harms. Whether the discrimination comes from racism, homophobia, sexism or transphobia, the bottom line remains the same. It's not always easy to find the right place to start. Our 'What's on your mind? What is political correctness? I think that we should try to use them as guiding points in how we plot the path forward and how we calibrate our responses.
But to expect these huge shifts in the makeup of the media and liberal spaces to happen without incident is unrealistic. It does seem, though, in America at least, that some of the excesses are being driven more by college-educated white people than by people of color. That aspect of it is purely because white people still dominate these spaces in which we see these excesses.
Marginalized identities and marginalized views, by the nature of being marginalized, do not own the means of cultural production. And, because white people are over-empowered or overconfident when it comes to their correct politics—not political correctness—they then go and enact what they think is the correct way to be an ally.
And most times these ways are narcissistic, self-involved, and actually detrimental to the wider cause. One thing that we have to be very mindful of is that, when there are offers of big cultural or corporate concessions to the demands of, for example, race-equality movements, those offers are not for us.
They are not for the marginalized. They are not for people on the periphery. They are for the white consumers of politically correct, or politically-consonant-with-the-moment products.
And those products are books. They are news articles. They are sometimes literal soup packets and milk bottles that have different branding on them. Did you follow the story in which the Philip Roth biography was discontinued by Norton after allegations of sexual assault against the author, Blake Bailey?
Bailey has denied the allegations. This seemed to me like a corporate damage-control situation, where the publisher had screwed up by not taking seriously initial allegations against Bailey. So they did damage control, in the form of pulling the book, which everyone I talked to seems to think was bad. Cancel culture, in many instances, if one bothers to look underneath the hood, is corporate damage-control culture.
All it sees are dollar signs or lack thereof. A comparable situation applies with regard to racism. If you polled Americans and asked them if racism is bad, everybody would agree that, yes, racism is bad. The answer is, obviously, that racism is bad by definition, so the things that people say, think, and do are by definition not racism. They would probably point out to you that some of the cabbies engaged in statistical discrimination against black people are themselves black.
An appropriately woke person would reply that we are talking about a social practice that systematically disenfranchises black people. Participants in that practice are acting to uphold a white supremacist order. In doing so, they are being racist. In other words, we can disagree massively about race and race-related behaviors and policies in America without anyone disagreeing at all that racism is bad.
News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. Dow Jones. Opinion Read the Latest. By Erica Komisar.
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