One of the more elusive polemical tags of the lC20, political correctness (PC for short) can be an insult, an accusation, a joke, or the name of an effort to change a society—in particular, its ways of handling power relations of »race«, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality—by means of wide-ranging but often small-scale cultural reform. »PC« is primarily a negative term for the ideals and actions of others. Designating an attempt to fight social discrimination by changing everyday speech and behaviour, and to enforce such change through public pressure on individuals as well as legal or other institutional sanctions to regulate group conduct, it implies that these measures are petty, rigid, humourless, intolerant, even totalitarian in impulse. Politically correct is then a judgment disguised as description; deflecting attention from the substance or value of the reforms in question, it expresses a dismissive attitude to those who advocate change. The latter in turn may reclaim the phrase as an ironic self-description.

Used adjectivally »PC« has largely taken over from doctrinaire, which Raymond Williams (1976) saw »used, in a political context, to indicate a group or a person or an attitude which can be seen as based on a particular set of ideas« with »the implication … that political actions or attitudes so based are undesirable or absurd.« However, the more recent term assumes a greatly expanded or, some would say, more diffuse sense of politics. Coming in the wake of feminism, anti-racism and other social movements active since the 1970s, »PC« can cover diverse minute controversies over etiquette, protocol, attitude and dress as well as ideas, policies, and programs. It also refers to protests against stereotyping or negative representation of disadvantaged groups in books, films and the media. The noun phrase combines all these to suggest an organised movement, often with sinister implications: »a new McCarthyism« (Taylor, 1991), »intellectual fascism« (Brown 1992), »a new form of thought control« (Kimball, 1990), a »victims’ revolution« (D’Souza, 1991)

An ancestral term is found in the »scientific« Marxism invoked by communist regimes in the mC20. For the former a correct analysis of social forces, achieved through study and discussion, should guide political action. Under the latter, the penalty for incorrect ideas or behaviour—meaning subversive or merely critical of the regime in question—might be prison, exile, or death. However, in liberal democracies the casual use of »politically correct« or ideologically sound reversibly to assert or mock a pious conformity to group norms (»party-line« or »correct-line« thinking) emerged among feminist, Black Power and anti-war activists in the early 1970s. Perry (1992) records a 1971 exchange between writers Toni Cade [Bambara] and Audre Lord over Cade’s wish to raise her daughter as a »correct little sister«, and she cites such period humor as: »We could stop at McDonalds … but it wouldn’t be politically correct«.

These uses from the left of politics were almost exclusively adjectival and played on doubts about the difference in C20 historical experience between principle and dogma, liberation and repression. So when the U.S. President George Bush, Snr., declared from the right in 1991 that »the notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land« (Aufderheide, 1992: 227) left activists were puzzled, affirming no such notion or noun. However, adding to the old doubts a new and now typical association between political triviality (»attempts to micromanage casual conversation«) and terror (»political extremists roam the land«), Bush’s claim that free speech was under attack in liberal societies swept internationally through the media.

As the hot new label spread between different contexts of use, its range expanded to incorporate a host of conflicts arising in advanced capitalist countries from social change, corporate restructuring towards globalization, and the dismantling of welfare states in the lC20. Bush gave his speech at the University of Michigan, and in the USA it prompted furious debate about the effects in higher education of affirmative action policies designed to boost minority participation; of speech codes to protect individuals from expressions of bigotry and hate; of canon revision to diversify a curriculum over-heavy with the works of dead white males; and of the relativism that some feared would follow from multicultural teaching. These debates in turn prompted studies of the funding cuts and declining real participation rates of, especially, black students that also marked this period. One critic saw in charges of PC a »smoke screen« for »downsizing« and restricting access to higher education (Lauter, 1995) and another an »attempt to undermine everything >public<« (Berube, 1995). Still others found in the culture wars »the humanities’ biggest opportunity in years« to reach a wider audience (Newfield and Strickland, 1995).

Elsewhere, the term served different polemical purposes. In Europe academics spoke of PC as an American disease, sometimes a »Protestant« or »puritan« problem. In officially multicultural Australia, bureaucrats were a major target for critics of PC. One wrote scathingly of »government-sponsored diversity«, meaning, »conformity enforced« by the »media, academe, the political parties, the thought police« all together (Coleman, 1995). Everywhere, the political correctness panic created a folklore of »cases« of victimisation based on anecdotes and unsubstantiated rumour. These continued to circulate widely even if refuted; the pleasure they gave seemed more important than the value of their claims to truth. Indeed, as the term began to exhaust itself through extended over-use, the core of its appeal crystallized as a widespread anxiety over the power of language and the inaccessibility of truth in media-saturated societies. Recalling the dystopian regime created by George Orwell in 1984, opponents and defenders of PC alike accused each other of »Newspeak«.

There are signs in recent usage that political correctness is reverting to a simple term for orthodoxy. In liberal democracies it still generates ironic spin-offs, such as economic correctness (a hostile term for neo-liberalism) or professional correctness (Fish, 1995, defending disciplinarity). Its meaning in authoritarian polities is classical. The present writer can attest that in 2000 the expression »the Chinese mainland« was more politically correct than »mainland China« for usage in Hong Kong.

 

 

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