Political Correctness

From good intentions to bad construction

As with most new ideas that evolve from a need, this was a right idea, simplistically so.

Don’t call people slurs. Don’t mock someone’s disability. Don’t reduce a person to their race, their sex, their sexuality, their body. Treat people like human beings regardless of who they are or where they came from. That’s not radical. That’s not leftist. That’s just basic decency, and for most of human history, we were pretty bad at it, and in many parts of the world this is still to this day a foreign concept.

So when political correctness emerged as a cultural force - pushing back against language that had been used for generations to demean, dehumanize, and diminish entire groups of people - the premise was solid. Good, even. The problem isn’t where it started. The problem is where it ended up.