Political Correctness In Society example essay topic

Political correctness has gone too far The "Politically Correct" movement's purpose is to bring historically condescending terms, offensive music and art, and controversial educational content to an end and replace them with more positive and less-offending references. Offensive and demoralizing efforts are wrong, but the censorship and deletion of words and phrases that do not contain the intention to demoralize are taking political correctness too far. Politically correct (or "PC") antics have created a social decline that is growing worse with each generation, specifically regarding areas of art, education, language, and our right to freedom of speech; the degradation they have brought to the American psyche has even led to name-changing. The PC mindset has also discouraged artistic expression.

Imagine being to be so sensitive about offending people that we let the art we create be determined by the offended. New art would be restricted and old art would be censored. The creative ability would be limited to what is considered acceptable by everyone. We would be like the fool who tries to please everyone. How would music and art exist if the free reign of creativity ended? If art and music continue to face influential restrictions on content, then the quality of art will fall into artistic mediocrity.

PC policies have also compromised the accuracy of educational content in textbooks. Material close to being offensive is removed or adjusted to satisfy the super-sensitive or to avoid any unforeseen complaints. For example, American Indians can't be depicted with long braids, in rural settings, or on reservations, even though many American Indians do have long braids and live in rural settings or on reservations. If the depictions of our historical figures are incorrect, then the new PC textbooks should ensure their historical accuracy and footnote each change appropriately. In addition, if the information is correct but is being altered to satisfy sensitive groups, it should be changed back, regardless of the offending potential.

How far could this evolve? Will we continue to erase provocative and controversial details of our history? It "dumb's down" our textbooks, leaving them bland and far less interesting. This effort to cleanse our history is wrong and it is killing our education efforts / system today. We are becoming more aware of the sensitive nature of groups and individuals, but are we taking it too far by correcting words that are not intentionally insulting? The word snowman is not offensive by any means.

It was not created with an intension to offend, demean, or label any group. But the new term for snowman is snow person. Frosty the Snowman, the children's tale that familiarized America with the term snowman, was originally created as a Christmas song. ("Frosty the Snowman was a Tin Pan Alley novelty created by Jack Nelson and Steve Rollins in 1950".

Wikipedia online Encyclopedia web). It was not a story of a snow-woman. It was a story of a snowman. The name snow person suggests that it is unisex, and to consider Frosty as unisex would numb the creative aspects of our holiday song and children's stories of Frosty the Snowman. This is an overly sensitive effort to stop a word that has no offensive connotation and kill its creative and historical meaning. However, many groups claim that political correctness in society is justified in its efforts to sanitize offensive material created though years of oppressing minorities.

What was originally a noble idea, to remove blatant words of offensive meaning, has turned into an "over the top" effort to rid any words of possible controversy. We are regulating our ways of plain speaking, freedom of choice, and freedom of speech. Laws of restrictions on slander and public decency should be decided on the common law methodology and not by the interests of the liberal "mob". If plain speaking is not allowed, clear thinking is denied. Political correctness has been brought about to protect groups in society from possibly offensive terminology aimed toward them. For example, the previous use of nigger has been replaced by a more positive description, African American.

The word cripple has been replaced first by disabled and then by physically challenged. A man living on the street is not to be referred to as a bum any longer. A bum must now be referred to as a transient. These are all examples of taking names with negative connotations toward a person or group and subsequently replacing them. Our history is filled with biased words and phrases that sometimes label groups inferior. For this reason, I agree that political correctness is warranted.

What I do not agree with is the conversion of non-offensive words within our language. We are changing words that have no offensive value. For instance, because we as a society are so afraid of offending the super-sensitive, the word jungle is now referred to as rain-forest. Another example is brought up by S.I. Hayakawa in the essay, "Words with Built-in Judgments" [S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa]. He cited: "What about the woman on the softball team who insists on being called first base person? This term was not intentionally created to demean her as a woman; therefore, it should not be considered offensive and should not be changed".

Hayakawa asks another question in his essay: "What about the woman named Cooper man who wanted to change her name to Cooper person? [S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa]". He illustrates how we are taking the idea of sensitizing a bit too far. This determination to change the family name given to her at birth because of the "man" ending of the word shows the super-sensitive motivation. We need to stay within the original intention that political correctness was intended for.

Francine Fialkoff's editorial, entitled 'The Word Police' in the January 1993 Library Journal, makes a similar suggestion: 'Ultimately, however, we hope we use language that is more sensitive without enforcing strident political correctness or orthodoxy. ' We, as a society, are so concerned about avoiding confrontations that we are going overboard changing non-offensive names. The attempt to avoid possible protests of sensitive pressure groups by sanitizing our language is, in my opinion, censorship. Changing a man's career name from trash man to custodial engineer is an example that is justifiable and is why political correctness was brought about. It is the oversensitive effort to numb out historical content, which is neither offensive nor demeaning, which leads me to believe that political correctness has gone too far and needs to be stopped.

Bibliography

Fialkoff, Francine. 'The Word Police. ' Library Journal 118 (1993): 25.
S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R Hayakawa, Words with Built-in Judgments. Language Awareness, Readings for College Writers. Ed. Paul E scholz, Alfred Rosa, Virginia Clark. Bedford / St. Martin's: Boston, New York, 2004.
229-234 Wikipedia the Free Online Encyclopedia. web 2004.