How Difficult Is It To Be Inoffensive?
“Everything is so PC these days! You can’t say anything without offending someone!”
That’s basically this meme’s point. We’ve seen a lot of discussion in the past couple of decades about political correctness, and it seems to have increased in the past two years as the 2016 presidential campaigns got underway.
The ever-mysterious group known as “the PC police” is accused of shutting down conversations, limiting which words you can use, and forcing us to be respectable against our will. I say “mysterious” because there is not actually a formal organization that formulates or enforces anything, nor are there any actual rules or laws¹ in our country that limit how “politically incorrect” you can be.
On the other side is a pushback from the anti-PC crowd, who sometimes label themselves “politically incorrect”. Perhaps notably, many (though not all) of this group self-identify as conservative, sometimes including the alt-right. Like the “PC police”, this anti-PC group is ill-defined — again there is no formal organization, set of rules, or even a list of words that they want to say.
The ambiguity surrounding both groups forces us to generalize when discussing the issue. Being specific divides each side into smaller factions. For example, ask multiple anti-PC people whether the N-word is acceptable, and you’ll get multiple answers. Some will insist there’s nothing wrong with it, others will say “under certain circumstances”, and still others will say it’s not acceptable. And a few will deflect the question by saying: “If black people can use the word, then we can too!”
But today I’m not primarily writing about the PC/anti-PC debate (if I was, I would say “the answer is probably somewhere in the middle”). I’m writing about the meme pictured above. The idea is that too many people today take offense at the smallest things; they should grow thicker skin; they shouldn’t be offended at every joke, every phrase, every discussion.
I will counter this idea in two ways.
First, I think it’s a strawman — a misrepresentation of the situation. I don’t think people are suddenly getting offended by things that used to be acceptable. It is not accurate that “50 years ago, no one was offended by [word/phrase/idea], and now everyone’s crying about it.” Instead, it is true that some people were always offended by the word/phrase/idea in question. Often, they didn’t have a public voice. What has changed isn’t how easily people are offended, but that those who take offense now have the ability and will to make it known and ask for change.
Ethnic minorities (again, I’m forced to generalize) have always been offended by racial slurs and poor treatment; today the difference is that they have a greater voice in mainstream culture. Religious minority groups have always been marginalized by the de facto recognition of a few larger groups; today there is a greater voice for inclusion and non-discrimination. Other “fringe” demographics (including, but not limited to persons identifying as LGBTQ+, atheists, those with physical or mental development issues, people struggling with mental health, people who struggle with obesity, and so on) have long been the butt of jokes, victims of discrimination and socially-acceptable violence, and worse; the difference is today that more of us are advocating for them, and more of them are in positions to describe their experiences publicly.
Secondly, I must ask: How difficult is it, really, to avoid offending people?
If we acknowledge, as I do, that the victim of the offense is the one who gets to define the offense, rather than allowing the offending perpetrator to explain: “you shouldn’t be offended by that”, then we vastly expand the number of things that can be considered offensive. As an inane example, classmates made fun of me for being skinny when I was a teen. My feelings were hurt; I didn’t want to be so skinny, but couldn’t fix it. Do they get to determine that it’s not offensive to me, or do I get to determine that what they said was offensive? By definition (the second one listed), it’s the victim — and her circumstances — that determine what constitutes offense.
And if we assume, as I do (based on empathy), that these are real and hurtful offenses, then it behooves us morally to avoid them. The alternative is a savage and brutal world in which we take “freedom of speech” as a license to freely insult and psychologically bruise every person we meet. There are some who freely admit they want to live in such a world. I do not not.
It’s not actually that difficult to avoid offending people. This statement directly contradicts the meme pictured above. If you find that people often claim your speech is offensive, the likelihood is strong that you are regularly saying offensive things. Check yourself.
Most of the things you say that others find offensive were designed to be offensive, to put down others. This is the crucial clue that the anti-PC crowd is missing. The very first time you heard such a term, you knew it was a way of denigrating a culture, a nationality, or a particular ethnic group. But you used those terms anyway, until it became a habit. Now it bothers you that you’re asked to say “Asian” instead of [redacted], “Hispanic” instead of [redacted], and “gay man” instead of [redacted].
Part of the problem is that we’ve learned to describe people by what we think is wrong with them rather than what we think is right with them.
We insert demeaning descriptors into our conversations for no other purpose than to demean. We say “girl” when describing an adult human female, because it infantilizes her, instead of saying “woman”, which actually means adult human female.
There are other examples of words that were not originally meant to demean or marginalize, but now it’s clear that they do. “Firemen” or “policemen” were not, I assume, originally intended as misogynist labels, but today is it really that difficult to say “firefighter” or “police officer” in order to be inclusive?
So the next time you’re tempted to complain about “safe spaces”, people being “butthurt” or getting their “feels” wounded, “trigger warnings”, and the like, please think on these things. Do you want to be intentionally offensive, or do you want be the person who intends kindness toward others?
It’s not about a rule that society formulates to restrict you, but rather about a rule that you come up with to guide yourself, based on your own moral code. I have chosen a moral code that includes “be kind” as its leading precept, and I encourage others to do the same.
¹ Technically, there are laws — at state and local levels — that ban certain words, “profanity”, or certain types of speech. This isn’t what the anti-PC crowd is complaining about, however.
Comments From Original URL
Michael Zeiler, 2016.09.24 at 10:35
Without being able to read minds, it’s simply not possible to avoid offending. Take your case. I walk up to you and I’m thinking (I wish I were skinny) so I say, “You’re so skinny.” . My intended result: compliment. But when you hear, “You’re so skinny.” you think (I’m bony and gangly). My actual result: offended.
I’ll cite another example. Many centuries ago I was on a date. I said “I like your hair.” She thought, “I spent an hour working on my eyes and he didn’t notice.” Result: she was offended by the absence of a compliment.
Surely you are right about avoiding being offensive by avoiding being abusive. But even silence can be offensive. Isn’t that to a large degree the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement?
Wil C. Fry, 2016.09.24 at 19:20
“Without being able to read minds, it’s simply not possible to avoid offending.”
Of course not. No one has the ability to guess every possible thing that might offend someone. But we can’t use this as an excuse to commit ALL the possible offenses, can we? Most of them are known, or easily can be. It’s easy enough to avoid most of of them. That alone would make the world a better place, by far.
“I walk up to you and I’m thinking (I wish I were skinny) so I say…”
To be fair, I did say my case was an “inane” (silly) example. :-)
But also, I didn’t say that classmates “noted” I was skinny, as in describing a fact. I said they “made fun of me”. There was no way to misinterpret the ways they said it, just like there’s no way to misinterpret the ways people make fun of those who are obese, or have a certain type of hair, or have an obvious nervous tick, etc.
“I’ll cite another example… I was on a date. I said “I like your hair.” She thought, “I spent an hour working on my eyes and he didn’t notice.” Result: she was offended by the absence of a compliment.”
That’s unfortunate, but I think we’ve all been there at some point. (I know I have.) And I think that falls into the category of “No one has the ability to guess every possible thing that might offend someone”, as discussed above.
This is not really what’s under discussion, though, is it? I’m obviously not talking about things we say or don’t say that we don’t know could be offensive. If I regularly use the word “humongous” to describe large things, and my best buddy has a problem with it because a girlfriend once told him disappointedly: “Oh. I expected it to be humongous”, but he never tells me about it, then I can be forgiven. But if he tells me about his hangup, and asks me to look for another word, I posit that it’s then on me to look after my buddy’s emotional welfare.
“But even silence can be offensive. Isn’t that to a large degree the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement?”
If I had to guess, I think the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement was more about the fact that the silence had ended — it was finally getting coverage — and still much of white America disagreed or remained apathetic.
***
One last thing, which maybe I should have said first, is: EMPATHY. I don’t quite have to be a mind-reader to know possible things that someone else might feel. I can, most times, if I try, put myself in their shoes, emotionally. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than not trying at all, which is what so many do.
Richard R. Barron, 2016.09.26 at 15:26
Is it too late to blame all this on the Irish?
Wil C. Fry, 2016.09.26 at 15:34:
“Is it too late to blame all this on the Irish?”
Of course not. Those damn Irish. As Gerald of Wales wrote in 1188 (Topographia Hibernica), the Irish lack industry, are lazy, are a “truly barbarous people” and “live like animals”. Even more modern researchers of the Irish, such as Benjamin Disraeli wrote (1836) that the Irish are a “wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race… Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”
Knowing little else about this (apparently) sub-human group, I think it’s safe to conclude that we shouldn’t have anything to do with them.
(It’s okay; some of my best friends are of Irish descent.)
GRD, 2018.09.02 at 16:54
Nowadays I think it’s very difficult to be inoffensive as people seem to cause me offence/offense all the time when they did not intend to do so. The use of the word “handicapped” caused me to do a double-take and is a word that threatens to make me have a serious reaction to it. I at least stumbled in my reading momentarily after I saw that word and thus took a different path to a word that would have been totally neutral for me, even though I tried not to let it anger me and, so far, I have managed to succeed in doing that. The word therefore is potentially offensive, even though it hasn’t, so far, caused me actual offense/offence on this occasion. In addition, now I think about it, the use of “the” mentally ill immediately afterwards is itself a phrase that could be objected to as being offensive, because it paints mentally ill people as an homogenous group by using the collective “the”. People are not “the” mentally ill; they are “mentally ill people” or “people who have mental illness”. It’s failing to satisfy my political correctness, which may be offensive to you.
Wil C. Fry, 2018.09.03 at 09:52
Dear GRD: Initially I assumed at least part of your response was sarcastic (not only is it notoriously difficult online to detect sarcasm but I am particularly bad at being certain). However, on closer inspection, I realize that some of what you said surely isn’t sarcasm and that I can probably do better. I have edited a couple of lines in my entry above to reflect that. Thank you.
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