Larison: "The Revenge of P.C."

Great prickly post by Daniel Larison about what the diverse reaction to the Obama speech tells us about the cultural moment, with reference to what political correctness has wrought.

Larison starts with this diavlog clip between John McWhorter (black, conservative, pro-Obama) and Glenn Loury (black, liberal, pro-Clinton). (I just watched the 6:38 clip, and can't wait to go back later and watch the entire diavlog). Towards the end of the clip I linked to, McWhorter observes, with some ire, that the level of education listeners to Obama's speech have guided their response. McWhorter complains about white people who are sick and tired of being hectored about racism when they haven't discriminated against anybody lack a sense of nuance about race relations, which led them to unfairly dismiss Obama's speech. Larison jumps from this point to explain why elite commentary has been so favorably disposed to the Speech, but not the broader public:

[P]eople who spend a lot (or too much) time in academia or elite institutions of any kind are exposed on a regular basis to the demands of political correctness and will start to internalise them if they are not very careful, and they are conditioned to appreciate subtlety, nuance and context to what can be an almost maddening degree for many people. These people generally, but not necessarily, responded favourably to the speech because it was pitched to them and written by someone who comes from the same kind of background and speaks their language. Those who have a background in “higher education” but who turned against the speech did so for at least one of two reasons. The first is, as I have suggested earlier, that elite conservatives have defensively internalised the requirements of political correctness as a way of retaining mainstream respectability and gaining access to the conversation, and so insist on enforcing them against deviants on the left, oblivious that reinforcing these rules works ultimately to squeeze them ever more tightly until they are compelled to abandon entire subjects for fear of violating the ridiculous speech rules that they once used to reject out of hand. The other reason centers around the difference over policy and philosophical disagreement, and these negative critiques tended to focus on the standard liberal policy fare Obama offered.

Boy, did the first part of this passage ever hit home for me, though my take is somewhat different. Larison says conservatives who work in elite institutions agree to abide by p.c. rules governing speech as a "way of maintaining mainstream respectability and gaining access to the conversation." That's only partially correct, because it suggests a degree of choice in the matter that in my experience doesn't always exist.

I've blogged before about how inflexible and harsh p.c. codes inside corporate America can be. If you violate them, you run the very real risk of being demoted, sanctioned or even fired by corporations that don't want to run the risk of a lawsuit. It's not an abstract threat. There is no such thing as tenure in corporate America, so you have to be extremely vigilant not to violate terms of the conversation set by liberals. The reason conservatives are so quick to cite liberal violations of the same codes comes in part from resentment over the absolute conviction that they (conservatives) are being held to a double standard, and in part out of self-defense: they may feel that if they don't show liberals at every opportunity the cost of p.c. speech codes, liberals will not think twice about using those codes to destroy conservatives who violate them. In other words, it's a defensive maneuver, a pre-emptive strike, however feeble, to preserve your job.

But it's absolutely true that in some cases conservatives will avoid certain subjects for fear of transgressing the rules and losing their jobs. There are subjects -- not particular opinions, but entire subjects -- that I will not talk about in my office, nor will ever discuss in any newsroom environment, not because I've ever been told by anybody in authority not to go there, but rather based on past experiences and my knowledge of how newsrooms work. And I work for an editorial page of a major newspaper, which of all places should be an environment where open and frank discussion of all subjects should be possible. This is not because I want to gain access to the mainstream conversation or preserve respectability; it's because I don't want to lose my job or have my career damaged or destroyed. One slip is all it takes.

This is what p.c. has wrought. I was corresponding with a black reader earlier this week, who says he was dismissed from a job once for complaining about a racist cartoon being passed around the office. That's terrible. I have no doubt that this happens. Still, my experiences are real too. I think this is what Obama was getting at when he said in his speech that both blacks and whites in America say things among themselves about race relations that they don't say in public because of fear of retribution of some sort. To me, that was one of the truest and most valuable things Obama had to say in his speech: that we can't even talk honestly to each other about what's on our minds and in our hearts. And if we can't do that, then we retreat to our enclaves to nurse our grievances and feed our stereotypes of the Other. What's more, we become so focused on our own experiences that we allow our ability to empathize with the very different experiences of others to atrophy. We get involved in a form of victim one-upsmanship that can only end in resentment and further division.

Anyway, Larison points out that lots of people (Your Working Boy included) ran from Ron Paul when it came out that he was closely associated with white race nuts, even though nobody believes Paul holds those vicious views. That was considered by the mainstream to be the right and proper thing to do, because even though Paul has given no evidence of having agreed with that garbage, the fact that he wasn't terribly offended by it tells us something worrisome about his character. Yet when presented with Obama guilty of more or less the same offense as Paul -- being too close to people who hold offensive opinions -- we are told to be nuanced in our understanding of these relationships, and not to hold Obama to the same level of accountability. Larison agrees with McWhorter that it's "sad" that so many middle Americans rejected Obama's nuanced speech flat-out, but he blames p.c. conditioning:

Yet this shouldn’t surprise anyone–if the speech fell on deaf ears, it was the elites who deafened them years before with a single, simple imperative: “Don’t pay attention to race, except when we tell you to!”

And, of course, the corollary to that: "Let's have a dialogue about gender/race/homosexuality/whatever: we'll talk, and you'll listen until you agree with us."

In the comboxes earlier this week, Eric W characterized the argument we were all having over Obama's speech as (if I recall), "an irreconcilable conflict between two metanarratives." Yes, actually. Or, in layman's terms, culture war.