A neutral, independent community in which members debate issues related to social justice.
The Politicization of Anti-"Political Correctness" Sentiment
In the past, elections have fallen mostly under liberal vs. conservative lines. However, this year, a new dynamic is emerging - the anti-political correctness vote.
Political correctness means something different to everyone. For some, it is the root of everything wrong in this world. For others, it is a welcome change to ensure that minorities and women feel comfortable. If you want my view, it is the phenomenon in which any statement that could be construed as reflecting negatively on previously marginalized demographics is harshly criticized. For better or for worse, what was once an issue mostly discussed as a cultural issue is now intruding into political campaigns as a political issue.
My fear is that a portion of voters, some of whom have sensible political views, may consider this as an important political issue and change their votes because of it. Nowhere is this more demonstrated than Reddit, where the antipathy towards political correctness influences people's opinion of the presidential candidates.
Is there a solution to this problem, or do you think that the use of "political correctness" as a campaign issue is productive to our political discussion?




"Political Correctness" can be more accurately defined as "kindness"... And the fact that kindness is scorned is very worrisome to me.
I don't completely see it that way, depending on how you define political correctness. If it means not being a dick to people for the hell of it, sure. But if it means mentioning facts and statistics that might reflect badly on a minority group, or if it means overly expanding the definition of bigotry to get offended at things that are clearly, to the average fair-minded non-bigoted person, not an insult to minorities? If it means enforcing speech codes at colleges and universities? That's when I begin to have a problem with it.
It is not particularly kind to overreact to things that would not garner offense to most people, often including many of the minorities themselves. It is not particularly kind to unfairly characterize people based on the worst interpretation of what they said, because it could be remotely perceived as bigoted.
All that I have said has nothing to do with what opposition to "political correctness" means on the political front. As of now, politics that is fueled based on resentment of political correctness is less about "political correctness" as defined by above, and more by the freedom to be overtly bigoted and enact discriminatory social and political policies, such as immigration restrictions and racial profiling. That is something that I am adamantly against.
So, what I am opposed to is more excessive outrage which runs counter to the principle of kindness, not making sure that our political policy is not discriminatory towards immigrants, minorities, etc.
Typically, when "black crime" statistics are brought up, it's brought up by someone who is racist against black people. That's just my experience. Not sure how much experience you've had with this.
How about you ask those minorities whether or not it's offensive and let them decide? If that community decides that something is offensive, who's the "fair-minded" one who's telling them that it ISN'T offensive?
Who gets to decide what's offensive or not? The person doing the offending? If you leave it to them, then nothing would ever be considered off-limits or wrong.
That depends on what the speech code entails, doesn't it? I don't have a problem with speech codes, because it prevents hatred from spreading.
Slavery wasn't offensive once. Neither was segregation. Neither were lynchings.
People should think about what they say before they say it.
Well, at least you've got that going for ya! :) It sounds like you're on the side of good, but I think you have a bit more learning to do.
How do you know? Saying something like that alone does not make one a racist. What other things have they said? The person might be trying to think about what may cause the discrepancy.
Which minorities? Do you know if the community at large actually took offense? Minorities are not monolithic groups in which one person can claim to speak for the entire group. Everyone is different. I'm not going to insist that people not be offended, but they speak for no one but themselves on that matter.
Does it? Or does it merely keep it underground and build up resentment? All the troubles that European countries are facing with their far-right, which, by the way, is worse than what is going on in the US, tend to suggest the latter. You can't banish an idea from someone's head. You have to directly challenge them in the open.
There's a difference between that and walking on eggshells. If you are interpreting things in such a way that assumes guilt and the worst intentions, that is not productive and leads to more resentment than goodwill.
All of these were violent and/or discriminatory actions. Not the same as someone making a comment can be interpreted in multiple ways, only one of which implies bigotry, or a joke. Especially the latter - I'm of the mind that one does not necessarily believe in a stereotype to laugh about it, only that the person understands the stereotype. And as discussed earlier, what is offensive to one minority is not to another, even of the same group(s).
The people who bring up those "black crime" statistics are typically only doing so in order to spread the propaganda that black people are inferior. Very seldom are they doing it in good faith. I have years of experience with this.
It is very easy to lookup the "why" when it comes to crime statistics. In fact, crime statistics are very similar across the board for most races, except when it comes to arrests, deaths, and harassment by the police, where blacks are more regularly/disproportionately targeted than any other group. Google "systemic racism" and see for yourself. I'm on mobile otherwise I would link you to a great source, but I'm sure you'll find it.
It is also very easy to get the zeitgeist of a particular group, and to determine what the majority of that group finds offensive.
I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse here.
Except, at least in terms of violent crimes, that is not the case.
"Police records consistently show that black people are arrested at disproportionally high rates (compared to their presence in the population) for violent crimes. For example, blacks are arrested eight times more often for homicide and fourteen times more often for robbery. Even less flashy crimes show the same pattern: forgery, fraud, and embezzlement all hover around a relative risk of four...
Once again, there are two possible hypotheses here: either police are biased, or black people actually commit these crimes at higher rates than other groups.
The second hypothesis has been strongly supported by crime victimization surveys, which show that the percent of arrestees who are black matches very closely matches the percent of victims who say their assailant was black. This has been constant throughout across thirty years of crime victmization surveys...No one has had any better ideas for how to corroborate the crime victimization survey data (self-reports of crime are subject to lying, after all), so it looks like probably that’s the best we will do."
For minor (read: drug) crimes, there is more evidence of bias present.
From the same source: "Usually when people talk about racial disparities in arrest rates for minor crimes, they’re talking about drugs. The basic argument is that black people and white people use drugs at “similar rates”, but black people are four times more likely to get arrested for drug crime. You can find this argument on pretty much every major media outlet: NYT, Slate, Vox, HuffPo, USA Today, et cetera.
The Bureau of Justice has done their own analysis of this issue and finds it’s more complicated. For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week – that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one.
When you do the math and control for all those things, you halve the size of the gap to “twice as likely”..."
As for shootings, there is not much good data. But,
"As you can see, a person shot at by a police officer is more than twice as likely to be black as the average member of the general population. But, crucially, they are less likely to be black than the average violent shooter or the average person who shoots at the police.
We assume that the reason an officer shoots a suspect is because that officer believes the suspect is about to shoot or attack the officer. So if the officer were perfectly unbiased, then the racial distribution of people shot by officers would look exactly like the distribution of dangerous attackers. If it’s blacker than the distribution of dangerous attackers, the police are misidentifying blacks as dangerous attackers.
But In fact, the people shot by police are less black than the people shooting police or the violent shooters police are presumably worried about. This provides very strong evidence that, at least in New York, the police are not disproportionately shooting black people and appear to be making a special effort to avoid it...
For some reason most of the studies I could get here were pretty old, but with that caveat, this is also the conclusion of Milton (1977) looking at police departments in general, and Fyfe (1978), who analyzes older New York City data and comes to the same conclusion. However, the same researcher analyzes police shootings in Memphis and finds that these do show clear evidence of anti-minority bias, sometimes up to a 6x greater risk for blacks even after adjusting for likely confounders. The big difference seems to be that NYC officers are trained to fire only to protect their own lives from armed and dangerous suspects, but Memphis officers are (were? the study looks at data from 1970) allowed to shoot property crime suspects attempting to flee. (This was later abolished.) The latter seems a lot more problematic and probably allows more room for officer bias to get through."
Not much good data, like I said, but what data does exist doesn't show much bias unless the police is allowed to shoot property suspects fleeing. This is something that should be studied further.
Where the biggest part of the problem lies is in sentencing, where there is indeed a disparity: "Most recent studies suggest a racial sentencing disparity of about 15%, contradicting previous studies that showed lower or no disparity. Changes in sentencing guidelines are one possible explanation; poorly understood methodological differences are a second."
So, it's a lot more complicated a picture than "blacks are discriminated at every stage of the system" or "there is no institutional racism".
Of course, all of this only checks to see if the law is fairly enforced. Whether the laws themselves disproportionately impact minorities is another matter entirely, but that's a separate debate.
Unless you take a poll, not so much. The people you or I meet are not necessarily representative. Of course, you shouldn't continue to offend a particular person. But it's hard to speak for a majority unless there's some kind of poll or survey.
Again, merely stating the statistics serves no purpose other than to shine a spotlight on the perception that blacks are "inherently" more violent than other races, which is false, and is white supremacist propaganda.
What you fail to recognize are the systemic reasons that violence might be more prevalent, and how racism is the initial cause and one of the main contributing factors for violence.
And you're wrong. You CAN get a general idea of where the majority of a group stands on an issue by other means than conducting polls. Just look at their media and their social media feeds. That will tell you where they stand.
Also, you could just use your conscience.
So the people who research this is spouting white supremacist propaganda? The studies that I have quoted make no comment as to the "inherentness" of increased violence among blacks - pretty much no one even argues that except a few wacky "race realists". Right-wingers typically blame it on culture, which can be changed. Pretty much everyone would love to see the disparity in crime rate eliminated; the real issue is what is to blame. You could argue it's poverty, culture, or both; the former is a result of past racism.
Media such as what? Most social media sites have been known to be horribly unrepresentative of the general population, massively skewing towards young, urban/surburban people. This goes even more true for the people I see and follow. If you're talking about opinion articles, opinion articles are just well-written social media posts by a person with a viewpoint. While it would be common sense to not use slurs directed specifically against a group, it's harder to tell some things that might be construed as offensive but not obviously so. But as different people take offense to different things, it's a judgment call and you will make mistakes with some people. What my point is is what might be offensive to one person might be constructive conversation or funny to another, and you should treat each person as an individual and be considerate of each one.
You obviously don't have much experience dealing with this topic. Maybe that's why you created this sub - in order to learn more. In any case, I don't have time right now to address your comments specifically, but should have some time later today to do so.
No, but a lot of people try to use these studies purely as a means of putting black people in a negative light and suggesting that there is something inherently "different" about them.
And yes, even those who talk about it being "a cultural problem" are doing the same thing, typically.
There are actually quite a few of these "race realists" on Reddit and other sites like Youtube and other comment sections on many major newspapers. They spread their propaganda in very subtle ways, always with a negative slant towards minorities.
Their methods are subtle (well, not so subtle if you've been doing this as long as I have)... You'll typically see these people in the comments of websites saying things about crime statistics, and completely downplaying the injustices, as if black people deserve what is happening to them.
Again, it's subtle. But it's a rolling undertone that has infiltrated Reddit to a large extent, and most major newspaper comment sections, as well as, of course, youtube.
These people are afraid (thankfully) to air their prejudices in public, so they take to the comments sections online.
It's part of something called "Project Hatefuck" which cropped up after /r/coontown was banned on Reddit. Since that time, it has grown more organically and has just become more of a meme among white supremacists to do this sort of thing.
The entire anti-PC movement is part of the efforts of this same group of people. They've been doing it since the early '90s, but now their kids and their kids' kids are doing it too.
I get that, but here's the thing - Context is everything. If someone just bursts out with "black crime statistics" in response to a brutal police shooting of an unarmed black man, chances are, they're not on the up-and-up. But if a conversation just erupts organically, and in good faith, then obviously that's a different context.
For instance, check out these comments on Reddit from yesterday's incident.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4ruke3/dallas_shooting_gunman_wanted_to_kill_whites/d5484lm
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4ruke3/dallas_shooting_gunman_wanted_to_kill_whites/d5493bs
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4ruke3/dallas_shooting_gunman_wanted_to_kill_whites/d5496p1
These are the most upvoted comments in that post! They're not even fucking subtle about it!