They are sometimes literal soup packets and milk bottles that have different branding on them. Did you follow the story in which the Philip Roth biography was discontinued by Norton after allegations of sexual assault against the author, Blake Bailey? Bailey has denied the allegations.
This seemed to me like a corporate damage-control situation, where the publisher had screwed up by not taking seriously initial allegations against Bailey. So they did damage control, in the form of pulling the book, which everyone I talked to seems to think was bad. Cancel culture, in many instances, if one bothers to look underneath the hood, is corporate damage-control culture. All it sees are dollar signs or lack thereof. In the end, books are products. And the people who publish books are vulnerable to public opinion.
Milo had said several things for many years beforehand that were controversial, but this was seen as one that was particularly commercially damaging. And then, suddenly, they had a very active role. One thing that does seem different to me about corporations now, though, is that they are often concerned about their employees and also the consumer. I think that social media is part of this, because employees have their own outlet to talk about these things. And this also goes to the age difference you were talking about.
In the book, I talk about something called growing pains. This is a function or a feature of growing pains in a society. You get a situation in which you are stormed, as opposed to things happening in a regulated, modulated, sensible way. That I find concerning. You start then behaving like politicians, and you start thinking about reputational damage.
You start thinking, Maybe we just throw this person under the bus to show that we are moving in the right direction. And so that method is one I find extremely disconcerting, because real people are getting caught up in it.
But to collapse all of it into that, I think, is not accurate. Which I think is a giveaway, in this performative-solidarity literature and performative-solidarity consumption of that literature. It makes me think that it is actually more about engaging in cultish self-help trends or self-improvement trends than it is about wanting to enact profound change in which your demographic loses quite a lot of capital actually, if you were to do it right. And so, instead of helping the grass roots to drive and push the periphery more toward the center—for example, by encouraging participatory democracy, voter registration, etc.
It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians.
So, while we are busying ourselves with corporate H. Having said that, the rhetoric of political correctness involves being careful about the language we use to express our ideas.
And yet … the popularity of the artistic group Oulipo demonstrates that limitations can spark creativity. Results: the first group, which was not sensitized to political correctness, proved to be the least creative: it essentially reproduced existing models with slight variations. The fourth group, with girls and boys working together who had been sensitized to diversity, proved to be the most creative, coming up with innovative ideas with strong practical potential.
Conclusion: Diversity has an effect on performance only when it is imbued with a culture of fair treatment and an inclusive approach. Username Password Lost password? First things first: is this a legal concept or an ideological vision? Politically correct or ideologically orthodox?
Attempts to rehabilitate the political principle of justice Activists in the fight against discrimination At the turn of the s, those involved in the fight against racism and sexism became frustrated by when discrimination became separated from politics.
The benefits of active benevolence Inclusion also means being actively benevolent: paying attention to other people and their unique characters, with all their personal history, temperament, sensitivity, culture, experience, situation in society, and so on. Marie Donzel, for the EVE webmagazine. Translated from French by Ruth Simpson. These pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors from the s had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the subjects of their criticism.
They complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.
The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness and anti-anti-political correctness stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report.
They are also perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others. Meanwhile, a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow liberals decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his followers were doing the same thing.
The anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for months they gravely underestimated the seriousness of the real threat to liberal discourse. It was not coming from women, people of colour, or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or elsewhere.
It was coming from realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and far-right websites such as Breitbart. T he original critics of PC were academics or shadow-academics, Ivy League graduates who went around in bow ties quoting Plato and Matthew Arnold.
It is hard to imagine Trump quoting Plato or Matthew Arnold, much less carping about the titles of conference papers by literature academics. During his campaign, the network of donors who funded decades of anti-PC activity — the Kochs, the Olins, the Scaifes — shunned Trump, citing concerns about the populist promises he was making.
Trump came from a different milieu: not Yale or the University of Chicago, but reality television. And he was picking different fights, targeting the media and political establishment, rather than academia.
As a candidate, Trump inaugurated a new phase of anti-political-correctness. What was remarkable was just how many different ways Trump deployed this tactic to his advantage, both exploiting the tried-and-tested methods of the early s and adding his own innovations. First, by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established the myth that he had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to prevent him from taking on the difficult challenges facing the nation.
By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made them feel powerless and devalued.
They were great and would be great again. Second, Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness — he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. In , when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage.
This willingness to be more outrageous than any previous candidate ensured non-stop media coverage, which in turn helped Trump attract supporters who agreed with what he was saying.
We should not underestimate how many Trump supporters held views that were sexist, racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and were thrilled to feel that he had given them permission to say so. It costs the powerful nothing; it pays frightful dividends. Trump drew upon a classic element of anti-political-correctness by implying that while his opponents were operating according to a political agenda, he simply wanted to do what was sensible.
He made numerous controversial policy proposals: deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, introducing stop-and-frisk policies that have been ruled unconstitutional. But by responding to critics with the accusation that they were simply being politically correct, Trump attempted to place these proposals beyond the realm of politics altogether.
Something political is something that reasonable people might disagree about. By using the adjective as a put-down, Trump pretended that he was acting on truths so obvious that they lay beyond dispute.
His contempt for political correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics itself. Debate and disagreement are central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that he has no time for these distractions. To play the anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question about policy is to shut down discussion in much the same way that opponents of political correctness have long accused liberals and leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring that the topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it is pointless to discuss it.
The impulse is authoritarian. And by presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives himself permission to bypass politics altogether. Now that he is president-elect, it is unclear whether Trump meant many of the things he said during his campaign. But, so far, he is fulfilling his pledge to fight political correctness. Trump has also continued to cry PC in response to criticism. The leaders of that backlash may say so.
But the truth is the opposite: those leaders understood the power that anti-political-correctness has to rally a class of voters, largely white, who are disaffected with the status quo and resentful of shifting cultural and social norms. They were not reacting to the tyranny of political correctness, nor were they returning America to a previous phase of its history.
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