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censorship of a specific kind
Over at Smart Bitches Candy has a longer post on the appropriation (or, hijacking, as she puts it) and manipulation of the term politically correct.
She's right about this, of course. Linguists have been watching the evolution of the term and writing about its semantic shift for a good while. Deborah Cameron provides a great deal of information on this in her book Verbal Hygiene: The Politics of Language. She's got some great examples of how the term has been overextended in the oddest ways. One I remember, from a woman calling into a talk show on dieting: "I know that salt is not politically correct, but..."
And of course there's Bill Maher, who gleefully proclaimed himself politically incorrect, and made a successful television talk show out of that. Really, what he was saying was rather simplistic, and it went like this:
I'm going to say what I think, and I don't care who it offends. I won't be censored.
But even so, there were restrictions on what he could -- and did -- say. He couldn't slander or harrass (because the law would stop him), and he chose not to use racial epithets (I would guess because he had no wish to use them, but also because the television station would have stopped him). He could say things like: I think all this stuff about racial profiling is hogwash -- which he did, in a limited way. That caused a lot of discussion, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He could have said (but didn't, to the best of my knowledge): Minorities have it too easy in this country. That would have offended and enraged a lot of people, but he would have been within his rights.
Maher seemed (and still seems, on his HBO show) to be focused primarily on political issues, and taking unpopular positions in a devil's advocate kind of way. This went well for him until he said, post 9/11, that it was wrong to call the hijackers cowards. Whatever else they might be, he said, it took some courage to fly a plane into a big building for your convictions.
He lost his show over that statement, which underscores nicely what I set out to say here: political correctness is an overly simplistic term for a very complex set of rules set up to regulate the way we conduct ourselves in public. If somebody breaks the rules (in this case, the rule Maher broke was something like: never show understanding of, or interest in, the underlying factors that motivate people who attack the US).
Another thing to consider about what we call political correctness is simple courtesy. People have a right to name themselves, and to have those names acknowledged. My father took offense at being called a Guinea (unless another Italian was using the term). I've heard someone say she wants to be called a Lakota Sioux rather than an Indian or a Native American. Where I'm aware of what people want to be called, I will certainly do my best to honor those wishes.
Except. When I was teaching at Princeton I had a student who took great joy in reinventing himself. Every few days he'd stand up in class and declare himself newly minted. Today he wanted to be called James Elroy, tomorrow Mombera Ato something or the other. If I forgot and called him Steven, he'd correct me. Finally I had to take him aside and ask him to settle on one name a week, as it was becoming disruptive. He was not pleased, but then this had more to do with exhibitionism than some deep need to claim an identity.
Finally, I want to say something about the discussion of political correctness and historical fiction which is going great guns in response to Candy's post. As somebody who writes historical fiction I'd like to point out something: it's impossible to be completely accurate and true to the historical record sometimes. The best way I have to demonstrate this is with a really disagreeable, horrid word: nigger. This is not a word I use in conversation. It is so fraught with historical baggage and pain that it is best simply avoided. And yet, there was a time when the term was in common usage and wasn't so weighed down with terrible associations. To try to understand this, think of the word Oriental, which was once common usage but which is now slightly out of tune. These days Asian is the preferred term. Oriental makes some people wince. Now, imagine two hundred years from now the word Oriental getting the name reaction in conversation that nigger gets today. If you were projected forward in time and used the word Oriental in conversation, you'd be mystified at the reaction you got.
So torn between the demands of historical accuracy and simple good manners and courtesy, what can an author do?
You know the answer. You simply can't use the word nigger, or have a character who is supposed to be even vaguely sympathetic use it. There are other questionable things you can get away with by appealing to historical accuracy -- a widely loved character can give his wife a light beating to make a point in th 18th century (if you handle it just so) -- but that same character could not talk casually about a man he ran into on the street and call him a nigger.
So my take on all this is that these discussions tend to skirt the underlying, more complex issues. They are certainly important and need to be discussed, but I don't think it's possible to resolve them in any functional way.
July 27, 2005 04:43 PM
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Comments
Hi sara,
Probably doesn't belong here but I loved your books. I love historical fiction, and good characters, and when I first found the "Wilderness" book I was thrilled to see it was part of a series. I love Elizabeth and Nathaniel and I think you portrayed their early "courting" beautifully. I blushed right along with Elizabeth. Can't wait for the next one.
amy
P.S. : is that Jamie you're referring to in the character who "lightly beats his wife"?
Posted by: amy at July 27, 2005 06:10 PM
I find it interesting that only white people can't use the word nigger, even to the ignorant and extreme length of criticizing them for using the word niggardly, whereas blacks, among ourselves, can use it almost as an everyday word.
My grandfather commonly and casually referred to whites as peckerwoods (referring to sharp, beaked noses), terrapins (lazy characters) and crackers (white, dry and crumbly), but never, ever to their face.
The closest I see to it now is in casual conversation the person designated as white with a common pejorative added, such as referring one's boss as That White Bitch (I don't actually have a boss now, but if I remember correctly, I did refer to damn near all of them as That White Bitch).
Posted by: monica jackson at July 27, 2005 06:17 PM
About Outlander- I hate hate HATE that part.
But Mrs. Gabaldon is able to justify it by showing the character thought it was the moral thing to do, whereas using derogatory (by today's standards) language would just show ignorance, which is not a trait that belongs to a character we love, no matter how historically accurate. We are twenty-first century readers, afterall. I really hate that scene.
Posted by: sara g at July 28, 2005 01:24 AM
The Billabong Books, a series of Australian children's books originally written circa 1910-45, were re-published in the mid 1990s. To my distress - I loved the notion of reading the very same words my contemporaries would have been reading on, say, the eve of the First World War - I learned that the books were very heavily edited to remove stereotypical racial identifiers in an effort to make the book politically correct.
I can see why they did it; it is hard to present overtly racist protagonists to a young audience. But I find really interesting is that some form of racial stereotypes were unapproriate and removed (the Aboriginal rouseabout's smile described as "a slit in a coconut) but others, such as the frequent exclamations of "Yerra!" from the Irish stockhand were apparently appropriate.
(Oh, and I hated that scene in "Crosstitch" as well, even if I can see the legitimacy of it - and I was gratified to see that at least Claire didn't take it lying down, so to speak)
Posted by: Meredith at July 28, 2005 03:22 AM
I saw this post last week but work was crazy and home's internet has been down while the cable company plays in the mud or something.
The whole politically correct thing carries an unintentional humor for me, thanks to my grandmother. When I was a small child, in the mid-70s, I recall my grandmother saying something about an actress, whom she identified as "African-American." My mother corrected her, saying, "No, Mother, that's not the term now; it's Black."
My grandmother sputtered, in her throaty Mississippian accent, "First you told me Colored wasn't proper, but I had to call them Negroes. Then you said that wasn't allowed, and the phrase was African-American. And now you say I'm supposed to say Black! I wish you'd just make up your mind."
Heh. In the last few years of her life, senility took my grandmother's mind, and I wasn't surprised to hear her refer to one of her nurses as "colored". The nurse was my age, and just shrugged and rolled her eyes; I think she understood that it wasn't meant as a slur, but as my grandmother going back to the "polite" term she'd learned as a young woman. But I'll never forget my grandmother's frustrated attempts to keep up with her daughter's insistence on the current version of a "polite" term.
Posted by: sGreer at July 30, 2005 07:41 PM