censorship of a specific kind
Over at Smart Bitches Candy has a longer post on the appropriation (or, hijacking, as she puts it) and manipulation of the term politically correct.
She's right about this, of course. Linguists have been watching the evolution of the term and writing about its semantic shift for a good while. Deborah Cameron provides a great deal of information on this in her book Verbal Hygiene: The Politics of Language. She's got some great examples of how the term has been overextended in the oddest ways. One I remember, from a woman calling into a talk show on dieting: "I know that salt is not politically correct, but..."
And of course there's Bill Maher, who gleefully proclaimed himself politically incorrect, and made a successful television talk show out of that. Really, what he was saying was rather simplistic, and it went like this:
I'm going to say what I think, and I don't care who it offends. I won't be censored.
But even so, there were restrictions on what he could -- and did -- say. He couldn't slander or harrass (because the law would stop him), and he chose not to use racial epithets (I would guess because he had no wish to use them, but also because the television station would have stopped him). He could say things like: I think all this stuff about racial profiling is hogwash -- which he did, in a limited way. That caused a lot of discussion, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He could have said (but didn't, to the best of my knowledge): Minorities have it too easy in this country. That would have offended and enraged a lot of people, but he would have been within his rights.
Maher seemed (and still seems, on his HBO show) to be focused primarily on political issues, and taking unpopular positions in a devil's advocate kind of way. This went well for him until he said, post 9/11, that it was wrong to call the hijackers cowards. Whatever else they might be, he said, it took some courage to fly a plane into a big building for your convictions.
He lost his show over that statement, which underscores nicely what I set out to say here: political correctness is an overly simplistic term for a very complex set of rules set up to regulate the way we conduct ourselves in public. If somebody breaks the rules (in this case, the rule Maher broke was something like: never show understanding of, or interest in, the underlying factors that motivate people who attack the US).
Another thing to consider about what we call political correctness is simple courtesy. People have a right to name themselves, and to have those names acknowledged. My father took offense at being called a Guinea (unless another Italian was using the term). I've heard someone say she wants to be called a Lakota Sioux rather than an Indian or a Native American. Where I'm aware of what people want to be called, I will certainly do my best to honor those wishes.
Except. When I was teaching at Princeton I had a student who took great joy in reinventing himself. Every few days he'd stand up in class and declare himself newly minted. Today he wanted to be called James Elroy, tomorrow Mombera Ato something or the other. If I forgot and called him Steven, he'd correct me. Finally I had to take him aside and ask him to settle on one name a week, as it was becoming disruptive. He was not pleased, but then this had more to do with exhibitionism than some deep need to claim an identity.
Finally, I want to say something about the discussion of political correctness and historical fiction which is going great guns in response to Candy's post. As somebody who writes historical fiction I'd like to point out something: it's impossible to be completely accurate and true to the historical record sometimes. The best way I have to demonstrate this is with a really disagreeable, horrid word: nigger. This is not a word I use in conversation. It is so fraught with historical baggage and pain that it is best simply avoided. And yet, there was a time when the term was in common usage and wasn't so weighed down with terrible associations. To try to understand this, think of the word Oriental, which was once common usage but which is now slightly out of tune. These days Asian is the preferred term. Oriental makes some people wince. Now, imagine two hundred years from now the word Oriental getting the name reaction in conversation that nigger gets today. If you were projected forward in time and used the word Oriental in conversation, you'd be mystified at the reaction you got.
So torn between the demands of historical accuracy and simple good manners and courtesy, what can an author do?
You know the answer. You simply can't use the word nigger, or have a character who is supposed to be even vaguely sympathetic use it. There are other questionable things you can get away with by appealing to historical accuracy -- a widely loved character can give his wife a light beating to make a point in th 18th century (if you handle it just so) -- but that same character could not talk casually about a man he ran into on the street and call him a nigger.
So my take on all this is that these discussions tend to skirt the underlying, more complex issues. They are certainly important and need to be discussed, but I don't think it's possible to resolve them in any functional way.