Pitts on Political Correctness

I like syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, jr. and usually find his columns both interesting and edifying.

Sunday’s column published Sunday in papers around the country [including the DPP] did a splendid job demonstrating how we are allowing language to lose its precision and, therefore, losing its ability to decry what needs decrying.

I have posted an excerpt below and I commend the entire article to everybody’s attention.

[Political correctness] struck me as among the signature excesses of touchy-feely liberalism, this effort to purge the language of all terms that were, or could be perceived as, exclusionary, undignified or objectifying.

Over the years, I’ve made peace with much of it. I say “African-American” even though I find the term cumbersome and imprecise. I say “letter carrier” instead of “mailman” because yeah, not all postal workers are men. I say “person with AIDS” instead of “victim of AIDS” because no one wants to be defined as a victim. And so on.

But some of it I’ve never been able to buy. I dismissed admonitions to say “differently abled” in place of the perfectly adequate “disabled.” I laughed off a PC Bible that omitted all talk of sitting at the “right hand” of God out of deference to the tender feelings of the left handed.

Such excesses make me fear PC will fatally neuter the language, robbing it of clarity, vigor, frankness. So I’ve always had a tender spot for those outlaws unwilling to sacrifice directness for correctness.

To put it another way, if you say “black” instead of “African-American,” I ain’t mad at’cha.

The problem is that over the years, so-called political incorrectness has become less about restoring clarity to language than about providing cover for offensive words, ideas and actions. Language should let you say what you mean, but if what you mean is mean-spirited, we ought not diminish that by calling it simply “politically incorrect.”