Clara Jane Hendrickson | The end of political correctness

Leftovers | The anachronistic term only entrenches culture war

By Clara Jane Hendrickson 11/05/15 12:25am

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.”

When Donald Trump uttered those words at the first Republican debate in August, the crowd went wild. Even the Democrats I was watching the debate with shrugged their shoulders and said, “he kind of has a point.”

The term political correctness, which is usually applied as a pejorative phrase, entered mainstream usage after the publication of a series of New York Times articles written by Richard Bernstein in the late ’80s and early ’90s. However, the term is not a particularly useful one, and does nothing but exacerbate the culture war between the left and right. Conservatives often use it as an attack on liberals for introducing a “cultural Marxism” to academia and doing nothing but spreading “the disease of ideology.”

However, the application of the term often confuses social acceptance with censorship. One who uses gender-neutral pronouns or asks if someone has a partner instead of a boyfriend or a girlfriend sometimes receives the response, “Oh, you’re so politically correct.” It should not be politically correct to incorporate individuals who are gender non-binary or who are not straight in our conception of what someone could be.

The applications of the term to describe social acceptance and an attack on free speech are dangerous in their diametric opposition to each other. The efforts to include marginalized narratives in our classrooms should not be conflated with censorship and the attack on free speech.

In one of his most famous articles warning against the onslaught of political correctness in academia, Richard Bernstein describes a campaign at Stanford to eliminate a required course in Western civilization. Bernstein and his colleagues fear the growing curriculum that promotes affirmative action, queer and women’s and Africana studies and politically correct academic papers such as “Brotherly Love: Nabokov’s Homosexual Double.” They call this the worrisome “politicization of the humanities.” However, this view ignores the truth that the humanities have always been politicized. When has the canon of Western civilization ever not been ideological?

I bemoan both the Stanford campaign and the Bernstein camp. I am sad for the humanities student who never reads Nietzsche or Marx or Smith or Mill. But I am also sad for the student who thinks that F. Scott Fitzgerald more appropriately occupies a space on the shelf of great American literature than Zora Neale Hurston. I am sad for the humanities student that still believes that the white male speaks to the universal human experience while the black woman can only speak to the particular experience of her own community.

Penn political science professor Anne Norton writes about her concerns regarding the removal of politics and the normative questions of power from the discipline of political science. Many political scientists believe that their distance from political concerns “cleanses and clarifies” their research. However, her criticism of the divorce of the concern for politics from political research is not an endorsement of the “scholar-activist.” She writes, “Let me be clear. I have nothing but contempt for the ‘scholar-activist’ for whom all questions are subordinated to a cause. No one among us knows enough to give that kind of unquestioning allegiance. This is not a matter of serving a master. It is a matter of refusing all masters in the pursuit of the knowledge we need.”

It is our job not to censor one another but to encourage free speech. It is our job to let the research lead us instead of our ideological proclivities. It is also our job to reject tolerance as an acceptable alternative to inclusion. One tolerates bad breath or a long wait in line; one should not tolerate someone’s race or sexuality or gender identity, one should strive for meaningful inclusion.

When U.K. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband resigned after losing the election for prime minister to David Cameron in May, he told his constituency, “If I may say to everyone in our party: Conduct this leadership election with the same decency, civility and comradeship that we believe is the way the country should be run. I believe I have brought a culture to this party, an ability to have disagreement without being disagreeable.” I trust that we are clever enough to do the same. Creating such a culture will require an act of humility on our part, but I think we are up to the challenge.

CLARA JANE HENDRICKSON is a College senior from San Francisco studying political science. Her email address is clara@sas.upenn.edu. “Leftovers” appears every other Thursday.

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