Does PC really help?
I heard today that the Virginia Senate passed a law to remove mentally retarded from all public documents and signage — the phrase intellectually damage will be used in its place. I admit that I haven’t followed up on this to make sure it’s correct, but that’s not really important because the point is the PC (politically correctness) of such motions in general. First mentally retarded is an actual definable term (follow the link), however intellectually damaged is not so this is a change for the sake of change not a change for clarity.
[NOTE: Image is from an interesting article “A Politically Correct LexiconYour ‘how-to’ guide to avoid offending anyone” by Joel Bleifuss.]
It seems to me that a lot of the changes in language that are urged upon us in order to stop bias, negativity, and various fill-in-the-blank-isms don’t really make a difference. Over the last several decades many changes have been made but I can’t see that the world is any better for it. Hate is still alive and well and so is bigotry and discrimination. All that’s changed is our words, but the venom and emotion behind those words just moved — now the words may sound nicer but the attached emotional-negativity is still there. While changing language does do a lot in some cases for example changing fireman to fire fighter does make sense because a female fireman — well, it’s just weird. Having the job isn’t weird it’s the verbal label for the job that’s weird — the occupational title should be gender neutral. However, many of the latest changes are just a result of someone somewhere getting their knickers in a twist and thinking if they change the label the problem will go away.
Problems don’t go away when you ignore them, cover them up, hide them, or relabel them. They just go along for the ride and eventually get in your face again. You can’t change discrimination by changing labels — you must change the underlying emotional baggage that causes the problem in the first place.
As Juliet says in Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
However, a skunk cabbage labeled a rose is still going to smell to high heaven. It seems that too often we opt for the easy way out of our problems. We stick on a bandaid or give it a nice coat of paint. What we need to start doing is the hard stuff — we need to look at the underlying causes of the problems and deal with them. If you can manage to change things at the bottom the sting will come out of the hurtful words because there won’t be the emotional baggage attached.
So, do we want clarity and change, or just a bandage feel-good effort?