Can Political Correctness Go Too Far?
By: Ekalavya Chaudhuri
Tags: Academia, Political Correctness, Politics, Free Speech, Tolerance

“I was looking at your website a few minutes ago,” Congressman GK Butterfield said to Mr Mark Zuckerberg during a testimony-giving related to Facebook, “and it looks like you list five individuals as leadership in your company, but none of them is African American. I was just looking at it — not only you and Sheryl, but David (sic), Mike and Chris — that is your leadership team. And this does not reflect America. Can you improve the numbers on your leadership team to be more diverse?”

One needs to sit back and think for a moment here. According to Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2016 (published August 2016), the percentage of STEM bachelor’s degrees conferred to African American students was 11%, quite lower than the average. In five individuals selected from among that part of the total population of educated people that is qualified to be in a senior administrative position at Facebook, what exactly is the probability that an African American person would necessarily be among them?’

Perhaps a rejoinder to Congressman Butterfield’s statement could be that this actually does reflect America, and very aptly at that. Perhaps it might be asked if it would not be more fruitful in the first place to look at passing policy in Congress to increase funding for making quality education affordable to African Americans, if it is not important that such legislation comes into being before making a statement that can only be seen as an attempt at tokenism and smacks rather of politics targeted at a certain bank.

Consider the following: why precisely only African Americans? If the intent is to reflect America racially, are not many Asians, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives or Pacific Islanders citizens of the country too? What I am doing here may perhaps be read as an instance of taking a case to its logical extended limit, yet it is precisely such divisive questions that may start occurring as fallout due to a move that seems to gesture at an excessive political correctness that is, on the face of it, a trifle childish and silly.

Childish and silly though it may sound, however, there is evidence to suggest the possibility that there might be significant problems with this excessive political correctness that our world is slowly beginning to tip over into. But it seems that we are travelling into it with our eyes sewn shut.

Whatever the details of the story behind it, the brouhaha over students at the University of Pennsylvania removing a picture of Shakespeare and putting up a picture of Audre Lorde, the black feminist poet, put me very much in mind of certain calls I had heard of in English departments in India, where I completed a Bachelor’s and Master’s in English, to do wholly away with Shakespeare. Certainly it is inadvisable that any literature department attach too much importance to a single writer or, say, a few ‘classic’ writers seen as classic because of the canon, but one wonders if this other thing is not a bit too much of going to the opposite end of the scale.

The argument here is generally along the lines that Shakespeare was used as an instrument of empire or is a marker of a certain kind of past. This is all true, but does what is being demanded ( a sort of #ShakespeareMustFall) follow from that? Can we ignore the historical and symbolical reality of the fact that Shakespeare has been a tremendous influence on much of postcolonial writing, even if we say it happened only because of the arbitrary set of circumstances that determined his being the foremost playwright and poet that many postcolonial writers were introduced to in their own formative years and in their own literary curriculum?

Studying in an English department in India, I have seen works ‘after Shakespeare’ dealing with issues of empire and postcolonial anxiety. I have encountered numerous voices speaking from perspectives that enter into contestation, or parody, or dialogue with Shakespeare, as Bakhtin would put it. I do not think the nuances of these can be understood without due knowledge of what it was that Shakespeare himself wrote.

Let’s look at something else. In economics we do not usually think that a market, say, is inherently good or inherently bad; one looks at markets keeping in mind the relations they operate under and the relations between them and studying all of those to arrive at a decision. Contra such a thing, the new age we are entering seems to feel that there is an inherent ‘good’ness or ‘right’ness in taking, for instance, the narrative of any person at complete and total face value without affording another person, say one being accused, a chance to defend themselves. It is a fact that certain sections of the world’s populations have faced historical marginalisation for centuries, but to detail that it follows from that that this state of affairs is what must happen as a species of compensation seems a trifle bad logic. If there are

already countless billions existent all over the world who possess the qualifications to criminalise an individual on the instant and sign the attestation certificate, then it seems rather moot and pointless in the first place to have committees who possess, and guidelines and detailed systems which provide, the qualifications to hold an alleged accused guilty after due process of investigation.

A counter-argument that is commonly raised is that the benefits outweigh the costs even if some people do get unjustly accused. Yet this is fallacious logic. One may not like it, but the primary burden on law above all else is to ensure that no individual of whose guilt there is cause for reasonable doubt faces punishment. Such a result is a disproportionately bad cost on any cost and benefit analysis.

All of this is not to say that political correctness is not important. It cannot be gainsaid that every individual on the planet is not on the same level or plane to begin with. Some have entire mountains to scale before they can even aspire to be at a level. Quotas, reservations, protection for instance: affirmative action, in my opinion, can be a very good thing and is worth fighting for if acts taken under such action are to be properly implemented in certain quarters and there exist proper policies for the said implementation.

However, overall, we cannot afford to have our eyes sewn shut. We need to self-reflexively critique our political correctness and adjudge for ourselves through personal analysis if there are limits where we are taking it too far. Failing to grasp opportunities for this kind of self-reflexive analysis will mean, ultimately, unavoidable trouble.