I was traveling on a Greyhound bus enjoying the 36 hour voyage home from college. A mother and her small son were sitting behind me. The little kid suddenly looks up at me in my big ugly cowboy hat through the space between the seats and asks if my hat was brown because I was brown. She instantly sputtered an apology. I wasn’t upset because the child didn’t call me anything offensive. He just made an innocent association. If he had been a grown man, however, I would infer he was trying to be provocative. Unlike children, we expect adults to take some time considering the effect of their words before speaking. Most of us are socialized to do our best not to piss off other people unnecessarily.

But when people rail against Political Correctness, they are saying that being courteous to minorities, homosexuals, or women is way too much trouble. Being polite to Black people is a terrible burden. Want to call undocumented immigrants murderers and rapists? Why not. Need to compare Black Lives Matter, an organization dedicated to restraining extreme state violence, to terrorists like ISIS, an organization that routinely beheads people on video tape? Go ahead. Every society has certain standards of civilized behavior. It is not wrong to consider every citizen in these standards.

The American media has said PC is costing the Democratic party votes with white working class voters. First, this assumes the Black, Latino, female, and homosexual working class doesn’t exist. Second, it gives the Democratic party permission to ignore some of their most loyal supporters. Third, this gives people permission to insult people outside their tribe.

It also assumes only white people need to monitor their words and behavior. Baloney. I can’t say and do whatever I want either. Although I am not above the off color joke or double entendre, I try to make my speech match the situation. In general, Black people have been holding their tongues for a long time, especially when the penalty for saying the wrong thing in the past was death. Consider the tragic case of Emmett Till, a Black child punished for allegedly disrespecting a white woman in 1955:

Till was from Chicago, Illinois, and visiting relatives in Money, a small town in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till’s great-uncle’s house and abducted the boy. They took him away and beat and mutilated him before shooting him and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till’s body was discovered and retrieved from the river. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

If I had to choose between the norms of yesterday and the PC of today, I would would gladly choose the milder restrictions of today.