simply won't find a job today. So, this is why PC is no longer useful because it is excluding poor whites without college educations too. So, PC has become reverse discrimination in the extreme and therefore it has become an abomination in today's world.
begin quote from:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/25/opinions/new-pc-should-include-white-people-mcwhorter/index.html
We need a 'PC' that includes white people
Story highlights
- John McWhorter: Liberals tend to focus on political correctness that affects people of color
- President-elect Trump won the votes of many whites who felt they were being stereotyped, he writes
John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy and music history at Columbia University and is the author of "Words on the Move." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN)We
wonder what the election of Donald Trump means for America. I suggest
one thing it means is that educated Americans need to do a reset on what
we mean by "politically correct." We need a new PC.
The
simple fact is that a core constituency of white people just aren't
going to "get it" the way the left wants them to. This is the case, for
example, on race.
The
left wants white America to see itself as profoundly culpable, as the
bad guy in the drama. For many black people, for instance, the very
definition of black identity is enduring racist dismissal from whites.
To claim that any other particular trait is "black" is considered
stereotyping, as we are to see black people as endlessly diverse.
The
one thing that doesn't count as a stereotype, which is thought to unite
us all, is experiencing racism. Moreover, it is considered key to
intellectual and moral engagement to be in eternal battle against the
stain of racism in the American fabric.
That
is understandable in itself. But naturally it can be hard to be white
under this analysis. (Note: anyone who thinks this editorial is a
defense of racism will likely feel differently if they read to the end.)
One likely tires of being endlessly assailed as complicit in sin.
Indeed,
many white people figure that they have gotten the message that they
shouldn't stereotype, that black people have a lousy history, that a lot
of people aren't free of racist bias. But white people feel like they
aren't bad people, and are sick of being told that they are, no matter
what they do. The idea that they are bearers of a "white privilege" for
which they must endlessly apologize, no matter what they do or think,
likely rankles especially. They feel damned if they do, damned if they
don't.
"Good,
that's the way they should feel!" many will insist, white as well as
black. But here is where November 8th comes in. There is so often a
difference between what should be and what is, or ever will be.
Namely,
some whites are so resistant to conceiving of themselves as defined by
bigotry that they are sticking up a middle finger at the whole business
and cherishing their "white identity." Others are less confrontational
than this, but folks, let's face it -- their vote for Trump shows that
his bigotry and sexism was not a deal-breaker for them.
It's surely relevant that many such people, as Arlie Hochschild has documented,
feel as if the national conversation "privileges" people of color over
them despite their not having the easiest time in their own lives.
Now,
whether these people are "right" is a complex issue, but more important
is a simple question: can anyone change their minds? On the left, a
healthy strain now wonders how we might "reach" such
people such that they wouldn't vote for someone like Trump again. But
just how, beyond our gauzy hopes, were we hoping that might happen?
It's
time to admit and grapple with the fact that all of America will never
be, as it were, PC in the sense cherished in liberal college towns. All
of America will never see the present through the lens of the past, and
will never entirely shed a tendency to stereotype.
The
left is seeking a vision of human empathy, historical awareness, and
even concentration, that would be achievable only via submitting all
citizens to a rigorous mental training akin to what we all recall from
"The Karate Kid" -- or even "1984." The time comes when it's time to admit that it ain't gonna happen.
That
time came the morning of November 9th, and it's time for a new
conception of what is politically correct, that we can reasonably expect
all people, of all levels, to get on board with.
The
idea is not to cease battling racism, but to do it in a way that we can
reasonably expect a populace of human beings to understand. Herewith, a
new PC -- or, in current parlance, what it is to be "woke."
It is "woke" to understand that Trayvon Martin and so many other black people would be alive if they had been white.
It
is "woke" to revile Republicans' attempt to disenfranchise as many
black people as possible on the basis of a fallacious concern with
virtually non-existent voter fraud.
It
is "woke" to despise and prosecute whites who act out on their
frustration with being called racists by becoming racists themselves and
propagating hate crimes against minorities, as has been repugnantly common since Trump's election.
Those
who don't "get" these simple truths must be treated as requiring
education, and we should stick at it. However, there are things it's
time to stop calling "woke."
In
an America we can actually expect healing in, it will not be "woke" to
assail a white man wearing dreadlocks, or a gay white man adopting some slang expressions and gestures of black women, as committing the sin of cultural appropriation.
It
will not be "woke" to call for reparations for abuses of black people
committed eons ago, hoping that whites will cherish black Americans as
human history's only people whose legacy permanently cripples them in
the present.
It will not be "woke" for the media to treat the video of
a white man nearly killed by black men as any less of a racially
charged incident in the wake of Trump's victory, as if black people
carry some kind of immunity to censure because of slavery and Jim Crow
and redlining.
It
will not be "woke" to pillory people as racists for passingly
infelicitous gestures, such as referring to black people as "colored
people" (like Good Morning America's Amy Robach did last summer), or photoshopping themselves riding
on the back of a black athlete in praise of their accomplishment (Ellen
DeGeneres and Usain Bolt), or showing blonde, white Khaleesi embraced by brown-skinned Dothrakis on Game of Thrones.
I
know the objections -- "Don't you understand that America was founded
on racial hierarchy and even today remains predicated upon structural
racism!!?"-- and I do understand.
But
we cannot make more than a hyper-educated sliver of white Americans see
those facts as justifying a contemptuous view of themselves, or as
justifying submitting black people to different standards of morality
and expectation. How do I know? Donald Trump is our next president. We
need new tactics.
No comments:
Post a Comment