Conservatives say they hate political correctness.  Well you know what?  I hate it, too.  I’m pretty sure we hate it for different reasons, though.

I don’t usually run to the dictionary for definitions of my topics. I had to this time, though. I have never really known what political correctness was supposed to mean at the outset.  I looked in Merriam Webster, Dictionary.com, even The Urban Dictionary. What I found was tongue-in-cheek blah-blah-blah and pseudo-political blah-blah-blah and just blah-blah-blah.  Which brings me to my first reason for hating political correctness.  

I hate political correctness because almost as fast as the term came into being it stopped having any positive meaning or any positive effect on any of us.  I don’t remember when the term wasn’t said with eyes rolling because it was hollow and annoying. I don’t remember a time when it didn’t mean a list of things you should say in the place of things you’d learned to say growing up with little explanation of why.  Some of them made some sense – mentally challenged instead of retarded; some were ridiculous – vertically challenged instead of short.  By the way, I’m short. I’ve always been short and it doesn’t matter what you call me, I’ll always be short. I own it. It’s part of my charm.

These days political correctness means almost nothing. At its absolute best, it helps us maintain a slightly more civil discourse.  At its worst, it keeps people from talking at all because its advocates have taught us that anything we say can and will be used against us.

Political correctness is as emblematic as “color blind” of how badly we’ve done at dealing with people who are different from us and who may want a different role than they have had in the past. It doesn’t mean what we want or need it to mean; it just creates more noise.  Color blind was, I guess, originally supposed to mean something good – that we see everyone the same. But we’re not the same.  We’re created equal, but we’re not the same. And that’s OK. It’s more than OK; it’s terrific. What a tragedy it is for all of us to pretend we don’t notice important things about the people around us. I used to work in a foster care agency where people were very proud of saying “I don’t see color.”  And I would think, “Why the hell not? There’s nothing wrong with color.” A former boss of mine who was African-American once told me that when people said that he wondered what they had to do in their heads to make it OK that he was black. Shouldn’t the goal be seeing all the colors and sizes and shapes and savoring the variety? Shouldn’t the aim be to learn everything we can about people who aren’t like us?

Political correctness should be over. It should be over and done and kicked to the curb. Civility. That’s a concept that works.  It’s better than political correctness or color blindness or tolerance. Civility is the reason a white person doesn’t call a black person the N-word and a straight person doesn’t call a gay person a fag. It’s civility and respect and empathy.  Empathy.  Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Put yourself in the other person’s place and don’t treat them badly. It’s not that hard.  Listen to people when they tell you how they want to be treated and do as they ask. I repeat: It’s not that hard.

Political correctness is window dressing. It makes our day-to-day interactions a little more pleasant while doing absolutely nothing about the underlying attitudes. That’s the second thing I hate.  Political correctness keeps us from knowing how people actually feel and gives us no way to change those feelings. It only gives us a stilted vocabulary that doesn’t sit naturally with anyone. When I was young I remember the old guys who would loudly address a group of women as “girls,” then laugh at their own joke before saying, “Oh sorry. ‘Women.’” Over time those guys learned not to say “girls” in public, but I’ll bet you most of them never changed in private. People can learn the language they’re supposed to, but that’s just glossing over something ugly inside or exacerbating the problem because of the resentment they feel at having to kowtow to the PC police. What good is that?  Evolution is a multi-step process and too many people think that because we’re using nicer words we’re almost done.

If we plan on having serious conversations about race or gender or sexuality, we have to learn to be more respectful toward and less suspicious of one another. That can’t happen if we’re so caught up in the latest PC rhetoric that we can’t be ourselves at all.