jennypenny wrote:I don't think people should be under any obligation to sanitize their language, but they should realize that by not doing so, they might be unintentionally reinforcing harmful attitudes and stereotypes.
Whereas, I think that pointing out how others should sanitize their language propagates the harmful stereotypes.
I'll explain further, first with a particular analogy and then more generally.
Case in point, prior to this thread, I had no idea that watermelons had racial stereotyping implications. Thanks to this thread I now do. Hence the watermelon-meme has been spread to me. If I spread it onwards, it'll keep propagating. How is propagating "how-to" information about racial stereotyping possibly good?
Conversely, if the watermelon had been comprehended as it was intended (here's a gift). The meme would not have spread to me (and others).
It's similar to reporting on school shootings.
Telling everybody that school shootings are bad does not stop school shootings. What it does is to spread the concept of school shootings being bad to people wanting to do bad things thus resulting in more school shootings. PC policing has exactly the same nasty side-effects. Wanna bet that sales on watermelons will now go up as some jokers now realize that they can use the produce department to make insults based on race?!
In this case what is smart for one (the self-righteous parent), is stupid for all (kids who now have to suffer watermelon bullying because some kids learned how to insult and other kids learned how to be insulted).
Aside from the "school shooting"-syndrome, I think the PC warriors miss one very important point: Not everybody in the world is a racist, misogynist, etc.---That the world is divided into more groups than just us and them, namely
1) People whose intent is to offend with watermelons. (They are racist because they operate under racial stereotypes.)
2) People who are offended by watermelons. (They are also racist because they also operate under racial stereotypes.)
3) People who aren't aware of the watermelon issue. (They are not racist and will likely be offended by being accused of being a racist.)
(similar with other issues, mailman, Nazi, angry, he or she, ... )
I think ideally we want everybody to be in group 3? Agree?!
Yet PC-warriors seem to see everything in terms of either 1 or 2. IOW, what they say is that if you're not 2, then by law of the excluded middle, then you must be 1 regardless of intent. As a result, if you give a gift basket with a watermelon in it, you have to have had racist intents. If you write an entire book using the word mailman instead of letter carrier, your primary reason for writing the book must have been to oppress and insult women. And so on.
By ignoring 3 (and by focusing on words) PC fails to consider intent---the crucial part of communication. In that regard, PC suffers from a perniciously and deliberately poor listening/reading comprehension being seemingly unable to view any form of communication as anything but assigning people into either box 1 or box 2. And as a side-effect of doing this, they propagate the memes by pointing them out to group 3 people who want to join either 1 or 2.
Systemically, that strategy is precisely a case of what is smart for the one (the PC-crowd) is stupid for all.
Note that this is not always the case. If most people do belong to groups 1 and 2 and 3's are very rare, then PC-warriors definitely have their place and function. However, when the majority belongs to level 3 for a given case, here watermelons (and clearly these kids had no idea about watermelons and thus all belonged to 3) ... then all PC contributes is further damage by adding new fuel to a fire that's mostly embers only.