We the People
Why Political Correctness is not working
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them. — Toni Morrison
Today is Independence Day. I am celebrating it with my girlfriend, by listening to patriotic music and watching fireworks on TV. The number of military marches in patriotic music leads me to ponder the threats (both military and existential) to the US. One of those issues, involves Identity Politics: in particular, Political Correctness (PC).
Understanding PC requires understanding that socially, people are their boundaries. Our government recognizes the importance of boundaries. Many of the Amendments to the Constitution enforce individual sovereignty. To name a few: We can’t be enslaved. We have a right to think and feel as we like (expressed as Freedom of Speech). All citizens, with age restrictions, get to vote. People can’t be arrested for no reason. Our reputation cannot be lied about. We have sanctity in our homes. And so on. Yet these legalized boundaries is a balancing act. For Democracy to work, we need to be able to be ourselves and yet allow others to be themselves.
Human rights are social boundaries. Once we understand the sanctity of boundaries, PC seems like a natural extension of human rights.
However, as Francis Fukuyama has pointed out, rights is not enough to make a community. PC attempts to address the lack of community by forcing inclusion.
This article explores why PC can’t succeed. This is a long article but, I promise, well worth it.
First, let’s address what is exclusion.
1. What is discrimination?
Discrimination occurs when people are systematically excluded from social participation (excluding one for being themself, as a singleton, is not discrimination). For exclusion to be systematic, the excluded people must be somehow different. Thus for discrimination to work, discrimination requires reducing people to a marker.
Shame is the feeling of falling short of a standard. People can be shamed merely for being different, or they can be shamed by being excluded. In this sense, discrimination and shame go together even if they are not the same.
To address shame, PC came about. The first thing PC did was to use more “neutral” terms like “African-American”. But terminology was just the beginning.
2. Political Correctness is focused on shame
To understand shame better we need to connect shame to standards and boundaries. Let’s use bullying as an example.
2.1 Bullying is a violation of boundaries.
Bullying isolates the victim socially.
This isolation is established when the bully creates a standard of being accepted as a person that the victim cannot (easily) meet. (Some common standards may include judgments about skin color, gender, a rumor, a mental or physical difference, or how their parents dress them.)
Once the victim accepts the bully’s point of view, the victim will identify with that standard as being who they fundamentally are. (In extreme cases, the victim identifies with the feeling of shame itself which is where narcissism and codependence arise, but that’s a different topic.)
It’s important to note that shame is not necessarily bad. Shame is a healthy feeling when we feel remorse for violating another person’s boundaries. Shame is the feedback we need to in order to calibrate our behavior towards social appropriateness.
However, if our standards of appropriateness are warped (such as when we were children learning to socialize), then we may have an excessive sense of shame, or none at all — in essence, warped standards = boundary issues.
Warping standards in order to shame is what a bully does. A bully is someone who forces their victim to only understand themselves in the terms the bully puts forward. In this sense, a bully violates personal boundaries by forcing their victim to feel (and be) what they want their victim to feel (and be).
Not all victims of bullying are codependent. But what codependency and victims of bullying have in common is that they feel that other people’s opinions are more important than their own, especially regarding themselves.
PC practitioners can develop their own sense of self worth, but PC doesn’t emphasize that development, instead emphasizing that acceptance must come from others in the terms of the original exclusion. If you were excluded for having darker skin then you must be accepted on those terms.
The connection then, between PC and bullying can be put like so:
Like bullying, Political Correctness requires that what other people think of us carries more weight than what we think of ourselves.
This is why PC was so adverse to bullying. Social exclusion by discrimination may not be bullying but discrimination is only a stone’s throw away from bullying. Bullying and discrimination often go together.
2.2 Two strategies for dealing with exclusion
2.2.1 Remove the standard
This strategy leads some civil rights groups to insist that the standard for exclusion is inessential. This is usually done by saying that identity is socially constructed. Since identity can be forced on one from others (that one can be shamed for being X), shame can be undone by making that identity and its meaning irrelevant. For example, much of the work of critical theory does this, especially Queer Theory formed from the work of Judith Butler.
2.2.2 Reverse the standard
Reversing the judgement about the standard means that instead of the standard being a mark of exclusion, it can be a mark of inclusion. Thus, when gay pride arose, gayness became a recognizable as another civil rights group.
If exclusion = shame then inclusion = pride.
This reversal works because pride and shame are opposites. If shame is felt when one falls short of a standard then pride is felt when one exceeds or meets a standard. For example, the ’60s civil rights movement Black is Beautiful preformed exactly this reversal both socially and emotionally.
These two strategies are don’t always lead to coherency as their methods are different even if the common goal is inclusion. For example, in the late ’80s, homosexuals used the second strategy (by flipping the connotation of gay from shame into pride) whereas bisexuals and transpeople often use the first strategy (by tossing the standard of homo-hetero). This difference (among others) has led to some discussion as to why trans and gay rights may need to have different movements.
2.2.3 The Pride and Shame remix
Of the two strategies, the second is more problematic because the second leaves the standard in place. Pride of identity is inclusive, but only if others also share your identity.
Once we understand that shame, identity and inclusion correlate, we can see how civil rights groups arise. There is no surer way to create a civil rights group than by excluding a bunch of people based on well, any one thing. By systematically reducing people down to a religion, race, sex, or even the color of their hair, under the logic of diversity, that newfound group will ban together to reverse their exclusion. The more intensely people are reduced into a single feature, the more intensely those people will fight back as a group.
Under PC Culture, one’s feelings of shame (or at least being bullied) is a measure of how excluded one is. This is why PC Culture focuses on the feelings of victims. The most oppressed is the one who isn’t included, perhaps because they have too many standards by which they need to first meet before they can be included (For example, the standards for women are often higher than the standards for men).
3. The Mechanics of Political Correctness
PC works by first acknowledging and then deflecting shame. Let’s say Alice feels ashamed because of a standard Bob mentions. Asserting Alice’s shame means that Bob has now fallen short of the standard of recognizing Alice as a person.
If Bob refuses to acknowledge the exclusion of Alice then Alice gets to continue to assert the standard not met by Bob. It’s important to note that since Alice’s shame is used to measure exclusion, Alice’s point of view has more weight than Bob’s intentions. Additionally, for Bob to acknowledge the exclusion, Bob must first also acknowledge that he fell short of a standard. Since falling short of a standard is felt as shame, for Bob to meet the standard of including Alice, often, Bob must first feel shame and be shamed.
This is where things turn dark.
3.1 White privilege
White privilege is real but not equally real everywhere. Most of the institutions and infrastructure, at least in the United States, was made by white people, so of course, in many cases, Caucasians continue to hold positions of authority and power. This leads to behavior which is exclusionary along racial/cultural lines, although perpetrators may not recognize it. For that reason, “calling out” white privilege may be meaningful.
However, there are also many white people who, for whatever reason, have not benefited from being white. Additionally, white privilege is a concept but not an objectively measurable phenomenon (we can’t say person A has 15% white privilege whereas person B has 67%). As a result of this ambiguity (and that we can’t peer into people’s unconscious processes), we have no clear method of who to call out (and for how much).
As a result, blindly applying shame on an entire group of people for something that they (may) personally have nothing to do with and may not be able to do anything about is unfair and can be damaging (at least to those who are not privileged). Recall that asserting a standard for acceptance on someone who cannot meet that standard is the criteria for bullying.
As an aside, even if people could change society to be fair, we are still not sure what a fair society looks like — how much consideration is fair? As a practice, fairness needs to be constantly negotiated, which implies that there is no one single standard.
However, as a result of the above, many white people turn to one of the two strategies outlined above.
The first strategy perpetuates the situation by turning a blind eye to white privilege. Additionally, this doesn’t necessarily address the shame that may blindly be inflicted by PC practitioners.
The second strategy is to reverse the very standard by which one is shamed. If one is shamed for being white, then one can reverse the white shame into pride. This second strategy is why white nationalism is on the rise.
3.2 The Cycle of Shame
Most white nationalists would probably be whites who seek to avoid feeling ashamed. Most likely they feel they cannot do anything about white privilege, probably because they don’t have any or they don’t see how (which includes not seeing that they have any). If they have white privilege and don’t see how to fix it, then that is a failure of PC to convey its intentions. If they have little to no white privilege, then that is also a failure of PC to deliver its message to the right people.
Understand that the key to forming a civil rights group is collective exclusion. Shame is just one aspect: the lack of economic participation is another. With the election of Trump, Neoliberal Globalism has been rejected. To many, the promise of wealth through multicultural inclusion is a lie. This is correlates with the complaints about immigrants and jobs.
Like the minority groups that held civil rights parades to get recognition (or even civil rights laws in place) white pride parades hope to accomplish the same thing: to foster greater inclusion in the larger economic sphere (perhaps, by excluding immigrants, or alternatively by claiming minority status).
Jobs are economic inclusion. As shaming is exclusion, than shaming and a lack of jobs correlate. It is also interesting to note that President Donald Trump, who is a standard bearer for many white nationalists, is a man who cannot admit to shame, or his own privilege, even to himself (even as he claims to be all about jobs.) The President has always been a role model. If he is a man who does everything to deflect shame and assert privilege then others will follow suit.
This brings us to the damage that PC doesn’t address to victims of discrimination or shaming. Being able to flip shame into pride is a social band-aid. Both the shame and pride rely on reproducing the conditions of exclusion to force inclusion. Under the logic of PC, we trap ourselves in categories that are exclusionary and dividing by nature.
As long as the burden of acceptance is on others, we will be privy to re-creating a cycle of shame, which alternatively includes shaming and pride parades, sometimes in the same event, as one carrying Jewish flags was told to leave a gay pride parade. In that sense, the logic of social justice warriors in attempting to shame white nationalists by calling them Nazis will never work — because being called out is what created white nationalists in the first place.
PC recognizes the reason for exclusion but cannot remove the markers. Thus PC is a band-aid for categorical divisiveness, and not true inclusion. Our inability to process these divisions away (since those divisions cannot be changed by PC) is what gives rise to a cycle that oscillates between shame and pride.
4. Undoing the Cycle of Shame
Remember: people are their boundaries. Violation of that boundary can result in shame for the victim and/or shame for the oppressor. Thus, for people to have good boundaries, both parties need to develop a strong recognition of both their own self worth and the other’s self worth.
Thus there are two sides to personal boundaries that need to be addressed.
4.1 The Internal Self
Disclaimer: I generally do not identify with being Asian. Having grown up in a predominately white suburb in the 1980s, there was very little for me to attach to to be Asian. If anything, I identify more with being an outsider. Nonetheless…
Let’s assume that I uncritically identify with being Asian. Let’s say I watched a Bruce Lee movie from the 1960s and felt pride. I identified with Bruce Lee, and the movie. Let’s say that someone disparaged the movie. Let’s say that he didn’t comment on Bruce Lee or Asians but instead disparaged the coloration of the film by concluding that the movie is unwatchable. As I identify with the movie, I might feel that his remark degraded my sense of self worth so I may attack him by trying to shame him into apologizing.
But let’s take a step back. I am not the coloration from the 1960s. I am not a movie. I am not Bruce Lee. And in some very real sense, if you want to take it that far, “Asian” is an abstraction people use to understand people. So I am also not that abstraction.
People, regardless of race, however, do think of me as being Asian (whatever that is to them), and that’s a reality I must live with. But whether I identify with their standards is up to me. When people get to know me they will refine their identification, and that is something I can influence but not control. Interestingly, some friends from High School stopped identifying with me as “Other”—which lead them to cognitive dissonance regarding Asian jokes. They were surprised to find that they needed to find a way to exclude me from being the butt of those jokes but still wished to find humor in the jokes. Their solution was to say that I was really white and not Asian at all. (Interestingly, they moved the boundary to save themselves and me from feeling shame. From the disclaimer and from experiences like that, you could say that I’ve adopted the first strategy.)
Of course, we need to live with others. So what other people think does matter. But realistically, we cannot make everyone accept us. People may authentically (that is, personally) not like us as an individual.
But there is a deeper caveat when it comes to navigating identity. We don’t have to identify with what other people think of us, although doing that requires that we have developed a strong sense of who we are, and not a sense of self that is a category.
4.2 The External Self
David Bouhadana, a celebrity chef, has taken to speaking with a fake Japanese accent when serving sushi. He is a white man from Florida, capable of speaking unaccented American English. Given that Asian accents are part of the cultural derision of Asians, should Bouhadana be able to perpetuate this “little joke”?
Let’s see. If we think that Bouhadana is singling Japanese sushi chefs out by accent then he is reducing people to a marker and that’s discriminatory. If we accept that accents are not something people can change, then provoking shame is bullying.
Under the logic of PC, since exclusion is measured by a victim’s “shame meter”, how can we say who will or will not be shamed? (The one feeling shamed may not even have an accent — they may be white and embarrassed.)
Someone who speaks with an accent may not place their self worth in terms of how they speak — such a person may even find delight in its accidental poetry. But this an exception, since many people do not have a strong sense of self, especially those who are still being socialized (like children) and those trying to figure out who they are. (Additionally, those who have a damaged sense of self may not be able to rely on an internal compass for self worth.)
Thus, for a celebrity to behave in this manner is a problem…but it’s a problem in the same way that a highly socially regarded person (like an authority figure, a teacher or a parent) may influence others to be socially inappropriate.
So again, we return back to boundaries. Since boundaries are social, how we as a society draw the line for acceptance really depends on who we think we should be.
Accents are real. If you have an accent (or speak a foreign language), people may not want to interact with you (because it may be more difficult). On an individual level, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that.
We cannot enforce people to accept each other personally. (People have a “right” to find you annoying or not like you, since that is their feelings). And yet exclusion is a problem when society as a whole automatically and systematically excludes people for something they cannot change.
There is a quasi-solution: we could make a standard of acceptance only on things people can change. We may require people walk on twos, except when they can’t (such as people in a wheelchair). Or require that people don’t drool, except when they can’t (such as babies). PC culture has gone some distance with this. But this standard doesn’t disallow people from lying. How many politicians and public figures have claimed exclusion based on neutral terms such as “experience” or “personality” when exclusion may be based in things like race or gender? We can suspect, but we don’t really know.
This inability to really decide why people are being excluded is the reason that enforcing acceptance is not a real solution: There is no way to really verify why someone is excluding us. So the final solution cannot really be the enforcement of personal acceptance.
In a sense, Political Correctness is just a step in the United States’ evolution as a people. We have avoided asking this real question because, in theory, at the founding of the United States, this question was answered.
We the people…But who are we really? What standard should there be for acceptance? Should there be different standards for different people?
There are different standards. This difference in standards is what white privilege is. Michael Mark Cohen, the author of the link above, would like to mark that signification as douchebag. While the term douchebag is not quite right (regarding women, at least) the idea that one can be in a position of class elitism where one can behave inappropriately and still “get away with it” is an idea that is not tied to an aspect of a person that cannot change (thus it is not bullying). The confusing distinction here, is that while white privilege refers to white people with privilege, not all privileged individuals are white… So the question becomes, are we fighting (a) race or are we fighting systemic privilege?
Society has to find a way to agree to set boundaries. Focusing on shame as the way to set boundaries is too ambiguous and thus, prone to abuse. Instead, we should focus on setting appropriate public standards while being respectful of how people personally come to find who they are.
5. Deciding who we are
There is a gap in PC between pride in one’s identity and inclusion. Accepting others is not the same as having pride in oneself, and vis versa. In trying repair their own feelings, people can forgo the inclusionary ideal. They can police others to maintaining their own acceptance, which doesn’t bridge the gap for a community being whole.
While we can’t get rid of understanding people by group characteristics, since that’s how understanding works (by classifying), we still should always try to recognize the person beyond the categories we impose on them. We can recognize difference without judging the worth of someone based on that difference. Women may be less able than men at opening jars. Shorter people may not be able to reach the top shelf. We don’t have to judge (or shame/exclude) people based on these. (Some women may be better at opening jars than men. Some shorter people may be able to reach the top shelf without a problem.)
But in order to get to that more authentic truth, we have to (re)decide what standard we will use to judge who is an acceptable person.
This abuts a deeper question: is this country ours, or is it someone else’s?
Who is the “We”? Are we first and foremost a sexual identity? A racial/ethnic identity? A specific culture? Or are we all just people, who happen to live and participate in the same geopolitical system?
What’s at stake isn’t just philosophical. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant said that strangers need a shared nation to be neighbors. But that doesn’t answer the question for the here and now: By what standard should people be recognized? Should we not try to recognize people automatically, and if so, by what means?
If we accept self sovereignty for nations as a Democracy then we must also accept that individuals can answer existential questions about selfhood. People can choose who they are, instead of being forced into seeing themselves through other people’s categories. A homosexual woman doesn’t have to make her sexuality central to who she is — in fact many homosexuals do not. Just the same, a white man doesn’t need to make being a man or being white the basis for identity or self worth.
Self determination is ours to answer. With each election, with each generation, with each moment, we decide. That’s why we must reinterpret the Constitution constantly and why as a Democracy we must remain vigilant. Identity Politics is the price we pay for the freedom of self determination. Social topography fluctuates based on technology, trends, immigration, interracial marriages — and that’s the reality we have to accept. How we navigate among all of us and where our collective agreement as to what boundaries are is what We the People requires.
I, for one, do not believe people should be manipulated to feel what others want us to feel. But I also believe people should be exposed to the unforseen consequences of their actions. Deciding who we are and what we should be is a deeply social and deeply personal question, one that each of us has to be personally responsible for. After all, such a decision will influence how our personal boundaries are remade — and that is not a decision others, including the government — should make. Abdicating that decision would defeat the very essence of what the Constitution and its Amendments were all about.
For everything it has done, Political Correctness is not the way to answer this question about who “We” are, at least, not in a way that will lay this question to rest.
