Sometime amidst the social justice crash course that is a freshman year at Colby College occurs a related, but importantly different, discussion. It’s a meta-discussion, really; it’s talking about talking. That conversation is about political correctness.

It generally starts off with one question: “Why is everyone at Colby so sensitive?” That question often follows a Civil Discourse post or general campus discussion about something that offends one group of people or another. Many ask the question, but it’s heard most often from our lovely contingent of straight, white men (a group in which I am a lifetime member).

I asked the question, too. I remember feeling very vividly in high school and early college that political correctness was really just a suppression of free speech by people who couldn’t handle the realities of the world in which we all live. This is the basic rationale of the anti-PC crowd. A cursory googling revealed this AskMen.com detritus in which the writer articulates a commonly held opinion:

“ Everyone is afraid to insult anyone else. Everyone seems afraid to speak the truth. No one wants to offend no one, as if hurting someone’s feelings will make the world stop spinning. I hate it.”

He’s wrong on multiple fronts. In the mind of the anti-PC’s (a group not comprised solely of bigots, but they do beat this drum louder and harder than most), sensitivity is, obviously and unequivocally, a bad thing. Those feelings you’re having? Stop at once; feelings are for the weak.

The problem here is so glaring and moronic that I’m profoundly embarrassed for having ever taken that stance. The problem here is that feelings are literally the only manner in which human beings can interact with the world around them. It is asinine to ignore feelings, and destructive to suppress them. (There’s a discussion to be had about men and masculinity here, but I don’t have the space to write about it.)

Racist jokes, sexist comments and calling things you don’t like “gay” are all, on some level, reminders of racial, gender and sexual trauma and oppression that say “we know you’d like to think we’ve reached widespread equality, but in actuality we’re far from it.”

The process of language exchange is a two-sided one. Those harping on political correctness would have you believe that it isn’t: they think that meaning lies exclusively with the speaker, and that the receiver of language has no say in the content of the exchange. This is false, and the relevant implication of its falsehood is that the joke is more hateful than playful.

You don’t get to choose how other people feel about what you say. The privileged white boys want to believe they do. Rather than level the accusation of oversensitivity, understand that the feelings aroused by your crass commentary are real, genuine and important. The burden is not on others to adapt to your churlishness, it is on you to adapt to living in a society with other human beings.

If you, at the helm of your SUV, purposely t-boned a MINI Cooper, it would be insane to blame the Cooper for being “too sensitive” to your own hulking symbol of inadequacy. We’d (correctly) blame you, for driving in such a way that negatively impacts others’ lives. The same is true of political correctness.

It exists to protect us not from some ridiculous, Republican understanding of what “truth” is; political correctness is a buffer from real expressions of hate and reminders of a bygone era of systematic cruelty. Those are objectively bad things that we must be committed to reducing. Political correctness is merely a weapon in that fight.