Political correctness in any language is a debated topic. Politicians resign after using racial slurs. Popular children’s books are being rewritten to take out politically incorrect words. And on the other side, politicians and ordinary people complain about the negative consequences and ridiculousness of political correctness.
It is important for me to state, that I am not promoting or opposing political correctness in any way. As always, I believe that the most realistic and pragmatic solutions lies somewhere in the middle. It is also important to consider the variety of languages and cultures across the world. Each comes with its own particularities and connotations.
However, there is one aspect of political correctness, which has gotten “worse”, as polarization in media and politics has grown. Communication between polarized political and social groups has been made almost impossible by bad faith. I came across this Video (yes, it’s tiktok) and it describes the issue very well:
https://www.tiktok.com/@txwatson/video/6853048946307222790
Constructive Communication requires “good faith”. We need to be willing to understand an opponents argument and not purposely misinterpret the argument for our own argument’s sake. This would be “bad faith”. The statement ‘de-fund the police’ can be interpreted as:
- Reduce the funding for the police by some amount and redirect that money towards more productive services, such as mental health and social services (good faith).
- Abolish police departments completely and have militias enforce security (bad faith).
This deliberate misunderstanding in communication occurs not only on one side of the political spectrum.
Political correctness shows a similar problem. When you use a politically incorrect word, the bad faith recipient is immediately offended by it, because they assume that all the bad connotations are implied. The good faith recipient will consider how it was meant not get offended, if the word was used out of carelessness, ignorance, or in a context, in which it is not politically incorrect, at all.
My favorite example of this is the USC professor, who got in trouble for saying a Chinese phrase, which just happens to sound like an English racial slur. The phrase in question is a Chinese filler, which Chinese have used for as long as they can remember. In a Chinese context, there is no way this could have been offending anyone. So how can anyone be offended by this?
By showing bad faith, the Chinese term was compared phonetically to the English slur. If you really look for trouble, it is easy to make that connection. However, there is absolutely no indication or reason to believe that the Chinese phrase was used with any negative connotation or intent. The good faith recipient would recognize the Chinese phrase and not even try to make the connection to the English slur. Why would they?
While I believe that language has an impact on society and our lives and that it is important to update language as society progresses, this should lead us to reconsider our outrage over some of the things said in this world.
A world, dominated by people listening in bad faith, is impossible. It makes communication and discussion, and thereby progress, impossible. Instead, we should constantly ask ourselves, what is it that they meant? This could save us a lot of trouble and energy we agitated over someone’s political incorrectness.