Remember the controversy a few years ago in which a white employee of the Washington, DC, city government used the word "niggardly" in a budget meeting (the word means "miserly"), and was fired after some black employees complained that he'd used a racist epithet. He was later offered another city job after it was pointed out that the complainers were ignoramuses, and the then-mayor was a coward.
Well, we have this year's "niggardly" controversy, brought to us by Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal. It's quite insane, but all too plausible. Excerpt:
The story began prosaically enough. Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his way toward a degree, was in the habit of reading during work breaks. Last October he was immersed in "Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan."Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired. Taking the book to the campus, Mr. Sampson says he was told, was "like bringing pornography to work." That it was a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s in no way impressed the union rep.
The assistant affirmative action officer who next summoned the student was similarly unimpressed. Indeed she was, Mr. Sampson says, irate at his explanation that he was, after all, reading a scholarly book. "The Klan still rules Indiana," Marguerite Watkins told him - didn't he know that? Mr. Sampson, by now dazed, pointed out that this book was carried in the university library. Yes, she retorted, you can get Klan propaganda in the library.
You won't believe the way this was resolved. These diversocrats are berserk. But powerful.
(By the way, did you know in the People's Republic of England, if a toddler says "yuck" to spicy food, he can be reported to his local government as a racist? No, seriously!)
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FBC, thanks for asking. I avoided additional verbiage in my previous post because in my experience with this topic most people see me abusing a deceased equine... :-)
My observation is based on my action-reaction premise. I hasten to point out that while I am complying with the prevailing usage of "conservative" and "liberal", in this case I mean them to be those who maintain and profit from the status quo (conservative) and those who want to change it (liberal).
Political correctness per se is a liberal construction, no doubt about it at least in my mind. As a person who self-identifies as a liberal -- intended in the status quo sense -- I am especially bitter about it. It permits bias to exist and continue to be applied in the status quo without actually causing -- let alone promoting -- change. My point is that a conservative will "accept" the verbiage of PC while in his own mind continuing and maintaining the meanings and connotations of the usages that PC intends to replace or suppress. I again hasten to add that I don't mean to use a broad brush and accuse every conservative, or even many of them, of using a PC term but thinking the offensive term. It simply serves as a brief way to illustrate my point.
So, "joint creation" is a confusing phrase. I apologize for not extending at least that part of my previous post to something like this: political correctness is a collaborative effort between the liberal creators of PC and the conservatives it targets to place a feel-good veneer over the fact that they are doing nothing to address the root causes. They have jointly created the atmosphere of superficiality we currently "enjoy".
A British person who says "I don't like foreign food" (i.e., "I prefer British food"), probably is suffering from one or another manner of irrational brain function -- if not racism, something else. Why do you think we conquered half the world -- we had to get some decent food.
The term PC actually comes from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (or from Mao's "Little Red Book,") doesn't it? So, anyone who is "politically incorrect," must be corrected, gently, if possible, but ultimately through "re-education camps."
I agree with Franklin, Facism is Facism whether it comes from the Left or the Right.
Wikipedia seems to have a decently researched page on Political Correctness. It apparently has its earlies roots in Marxism.
In my cynical and wholly subjective opinion, fascism is a cancer from which the world is always one step away. It knows no boundaries, not ideological, not national or ethnic, not racial, not religious.
Having supervised Keith, I am convinced that he did this with the knowledge that he would make trouble. Keith is student, yes but he was working as a janitor before he started taking classes. So the "student" is a misnomer, because he actually an employee.
Regardless, knowing that Keith is a troublemaker and a rabble rouser, I can only guess that he was reading the material, not because he sided with Notre Dame, but because he empathized with the Klan. Keith has tried the "reverse discrimination" thing before and failed. He is surrounded by blacks in his line of work, most are his co-workers and others are his supervisors usually.
This was calculated, but he again failed to get any money, which is his true agenda.
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