Charlottesville Changed My Mind About the Value of Political Correctness

DKC
DKC
Aug 26, 2017 · 3 min read
White nationalist student protesting among his peers in Charlottesville, VA

Ideas die in darkness, bringing the worst ones into the sun only serves to provide a moth light for troubled individuals.

Last year I wrote a piece entitled, “How to Turn a University into a Nursery,” the central premise of which was that political correctness actually stifles our ability to confront real racism. I thought back then that, as a person of color, I would like to see the culture of “safe spaces” and de-platforming speakers uprooted on college campuses.

My main argument was simple: let people express whatever biases they wish and progressive intellectualism will win the day, thus alienating the person who holds that view and pushing it to the fringes of the marketplace of ideas. Otherwise, if we don’t allow purely free expression, we won’t know who the real bigots are and they can propagate under the radar, unfettered by public opinion.

The tragedy in Charlottesville this weekend taught me that I was arguing from a faulty assumption: I assumed that outright racism was too fringe, too old-school to take hold among a large swath of people, especially young folks. The images that surfaced after this tragedy taught me just how naïve this notion was. In fact, one viral image shows a 20-year-old, self-proclaimed white nationalist from the University of Nevada, Reno sporting a torch to match a facial expression of pure barbarism and hatred.

What I wouldn’t have believed back then and what scares me the most about the images coming out of Charlottesville now is the utter minority of neo-Nazis with grey hair. These people are my peers. They grew up with the internet, with the most unfettered access to information that any generation has ever had. I thought that my generation would surely have ushered out American racism by our golden years.

Now I see my free-market style approach to social policy is completely backwards; ideas die in darkness, bringing the worst ones into the sun only serves to provide a moth light for troubled individuals.

For example, I said in that article that I would be fine with a student at my public university wearing neo-Nazi garb, not because I’m fine with neo-Nazism, but because I hoped that his “outed” racism would serve to alienate his views more so than the closeted variety. This is so obviously not correct:

Confused and disgruntled white folks who see their ilk joining arms in what they surely view as a righteous cause are not going to turn to minority voices, the media, or “traitorous whites” to solicit countervailing opinions. It seems that the only way to break the spell is to couple popular education with a culture of denunciation with respect to hateful and proto-hateful speech — this is what I view as proper political correctness.

This, of course, isn’t just a debate that should happen on college campuses. Many people are now familiar with the memorandum put out by a Google employee decrying the “leftist,” politically correct culture at the tech-giant’s corporate offices. This is a conversation that is taking place as much in cubicles as it is on campuses.

I am not saying that any radical solution should be taken, whether that is discouraging dissenting, right-wing opinions, or establishing unproductive, left-wing echo chambers. What I am saying is that skepticism about political correctness can no longer assume that racism is a fringe or dying issue in 2017.

Though skepticism about the problems of political correctness is not wrong in itself, the wrongness of PC-skepticism is directly proportional to the degree to which it dignifies real racism and bigotry. Charlottesville taught me that, in an America that is so clearly not post-racial, politically correct campus and corporate policy still serves as a bulwark against those who might otherwise see these hate groups as legitimate political visionaries.

The time to have tough conversations hasn’t been this ripe in decades. Everyone from the right and left should feel free to speak out, but those advocating hate and national regressionism should not be supported under the guise of free expression and anti-political correctness.

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