PCGM

[Guest Scot]

Language and liberty

 

Overzealous officers don't change the fact that political correctness has improved the world

 

Roy Hattersley

Monday April 17, 2006

The Guardian

 

 

Judge Jonathan Feinstein has become the hero of the tabloid newspapers. He has a way with the sort of words they love. And he has given judicial support to a view that the more lurid columnists have been promoting for years. The decision to prosecute a 10-year-old boy for the offence of calling a classmate a "Paki" was, his honour said, "political correctness gone mad". No sooner had the judge spoken than a retired policeman was acquitted of charges that were brought against him after he called a serving woman officer a dyke.

 

Inevitably, all the old stories were regurgitated. Anne Robinson was almost indicted for questioning the purpose of the principality. Tony Blair is still likely to be questioned about an exasperated reference to the "f***ing Welsh". Television drama seemed to be on the side of the political correctness critics. Andy Pascoe, a fictional detective chief superintendent in a cops-and-robbers series, denounced the do-gooders - obsessed with the fashionable way of treating women and the black British - who interfere with the work of honest police officers. Life on Mars, the story of a detective inspector transported by time-machine back to 1973, bases most of its jokes on the rejection, in a more robust age, of effete modern preoccupations.

The renewed assault on careful use of language is not surprising. Elevating vulgar abuse to the level of criminal conduct is absurd. But the most important objection to the over-reaction is not the complaint that has been repeated so regularly in support of Judge Feinstein. The campaign for what has come, derisively, to be called political correctness is essential to a civilised society. An understanding of its true importance ought not to be prejudiced by overzealous police officers or self-appointed guardians of the minorities.

 

Whatever doubts I ever had on the subject were removed long ago during a visit to Washington. I had waited in Senator Robert Kennedy's outer office for almost an hour beyond the appointed meeting time - my impatience hardly assuaged by a member of his staff who apologised with the explanation: "The senator always gives priority to nuns." When we eventually set out on our journey to meet Bayard Rustin, the great civil rights leader, the car had barely moved from the front of the Capitol building when Senator Kennedy asked if anybody knew whether Rustin liked to be called Black (with a capital B) American, Person Of Colour or Afro-Caribbean. None of us did. Then, said the senator, someone must go and find out. Irritated beyond good manners by the constant delays, I offered the opinion that it was easy to be too sensitive about such details. Senator Kennedy addressed me in the strange nasal voice which was common to his whole family. "If your grandfather had been a slave, you would be sensitive about what people call you."

 

Justified though the rebuke was, political correctness is more than the need for simple courtesy - more even than the duty to demonstrate support for what used to be, and often still are, persecuted minorities. It is an attempt to create a world in which 10-year-old boys do not call their schoolmates Pakis because they do not hear such expressions - not descriptions but terms of abuse - used by the adults around them. Anyone who thinks that it does not matter if a little boy refers to his schoolmates in that way almost certainly thinks of all British children whose grandfathers emigrated from the Indian subcontinent in similar terms, and believes them to be second-class citizens.

 

We think in words. If we use words that suggest there is something reprehensible about gays, women or ethnic minorities, that is how we come to think about them. What is more, our bad example can cause prejudice in others. Political correctness has helped change the world. It is at least in part because decent people denounce talk of poofters and queers that something approaching legal equality has been afforded to gay men. And it is because such language is still defended in the name of liberty and plain English that there are still some dark corners of society in which they are regarded as inferior.

 

Every attack on "the thought police and its campaign for political correctness" encourages the crude view that such people are fair game for barroom bullies. Those attacks should not be made superficially plausible by the behaviour of unthinking zealots.

[charlie clown]

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