[lbo-talk] ] Fwd: [Pen-l] "Today, We are all Norwegians?"

[// ravi]

On Jul 25, 2011, at 6:12 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> <snip happens>
> 
> The praxis was largely, as far as I could tell, a matter of 
> policing diction -- certain words and phrases were disapproved-of, 
> including a good many ancient vernacular expressions.
> 
> Ideologically, notions like "identity" and "sensitivity"
> loomed very large, and distinguishing oppressed groups
> from oppressing groups seemed to be a fundamental heuristic.
> 
> This all seemed very shallow, moralistic, un-structural, 
> and ahistorical to me. As such, it seemed like an awfully 
> easy target for reactionaries, and so it proved to be.  
> 

I don’t contest any of that, and in fact I was about to mention myself that the typical use of the slur “PC” seems to be address at liberals (their positions) rather than left ideas. Perhaps, during pomo (until what I like to call the pomogroms), there was a brief period when some overlap could be found between hippie, liberal and [academic] left centred around some form of relativism.

But I entered the American campus when the reactionary phase was at its peak, and the term PC was hurled at anyone unwilling to accept the status quo as naturally ordained. And what I did see was the point raised by Carrol i.e., who/what gets harmed in the use of this term. It would be sad even if the fallout was limited to well-intentioned “shallow” liberals, but really what was being achieved through the popularisation of the term of opprobrium was a blanket dismissal of alternate starting positions to explain the same empirical outcomes.

	—ravi