preview

The Effects Of Political Correctness On Racism

Good Essays

Nowadays everyone from politicians to priests to even children story writers must watch what they say and even think to not offend anyone. But in a world with billions of people and countless different thoughts, viewpoints, and cultures is censoring everything really the solution? No, because in society, political correctness has zero effect on racism, it restricts free speech, and it also inadvertently promotes college censorship, just take a look at the evidence. For instance, how exactly does political correctness has zero effect on racism? First an explanation of how insults are formed is required. Insults are generally viewed as words with harmful meanings, however they are more than that. Insults are made of the meanings of the words, the intent of the user, the context of the language, and the deliverance of the word. Advocates of PC language and offended people in general tend to focus on just the meaning of the word, not any of the other factors. While the word is important to the insult, any word, deemed PC or not, can be taken out of context without any regard to the other factors and turned into an insult. PC culture just wants to cut out the middleman, the word, to eliminate the insult, however this doesn’t work very well and as a result leads to many unexpected consequences, one of these includes “The Euphemism Treadmill” (Ben O’ Niel). Essentially this is a process in which new PC words are created to replace old non-PC words, however since this doesn’t work for a variety reasons the process just ends up repeating itself over and over. Ben O’ Niel in his scholarly article “A critique of Politically Correct language” states, “Because the creation of a new, politically correct term for, say, mental retardation does not change the underlying realities or the social dynamics that pertain to the subject, the new term gradually enters common circulation, and speakers use it in the same way that they previously used the preceding term.” A great example of this, also stated by Ben O’ Niel, is the word retard. Originally meaning to delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment the word retard soon was used as a word to describe someone with halted mental development and

Get Access