Bird's Eye
By Karl Zinsmeister

Political Fashion Can Hurt, Even Kill

Just as we were assembling this special issue of The American Enterprise on political correctness, the Associated Press transmitted a story across the nation about the latest fashion in marking tests and homework at public schools. For generations, teachers have corrected answers and offered suggestions in red ink. "But that approach meant the kids often found their work covered in red," the story noted. And some parents objected. "Red writing, they said, was 'stressful.'" So schools have put red on the blacklist.

 

Red has become so symbolic of negativity that some principals and teachers will not touch it…. Joseph Foriska, principal of Thaddeus Stevens Elementary in Pittsburgh, has instructed his teachers to grade with colors featuring more "pleasant-feeling tones" so that their messages do not come across as derogatory or demeaning…. At Public School 188 in Manhattan, 25-year-old teacher Justin Kazmark grades with purple, which has emerged as a new color of choice for many educators, pen manufacturers confirm. "My generation was brought up on right or wrong with no in between, and red was always in your face," Kazmark said. "It's abrasive to me. Purple is just a little bit more gentle."

 

Toward the end of the story, we get a glimpse of the deeper issue: The disillusionment with red is part of a broader shift in grading, said Vanessa Powell, a fifth-grade teacher at Snowshoe Elementary School in Wasilla, Alaska." It's taken a turn from 'Here's what you need to improve on' to 'Here's what you've done right,'" Powell said.

 

In other words, educators have become more interested in helping students feel satisfied with their output than in prodding them to produce better work. This is a shining example of political correctness gone silly. An exaggerated timidity about challenging students for fear of making them feel "inferior" is reducing the chances that the next generation of Americans will become competent adults. A preference for helping people "feel good about themselves" instead of becoming excellent and commanding is one classic marker of politically correct thinking.

 

On page 32 of this issue we talk with Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, who have written a new book on this subject. Big chunks of our educational, health care, family life, criminal justice, and mental health sectors are now coddling Americans rather than guiding and strengthening them. This does no one any good, the authors note, and often takes "victims" and victimizes them even further.

 

In some sectors, political correctness is more than just silly or ill advised. It is cruelly destructive. Our cover story describes the slow evisceration of the Los Angeles Police Department--one of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies, and historically one obits best, but now badly damaged by years of political correctness on matters of race, immigration, "police brutality," "reform vs. punishment," and so forth.

 

The liberal elites who have indulged every politically correct attack on policing are mostly insulated from the effects of their campaigns. They tend to live in wealthy neighborhoods, and don't have to walk streets owned by gangs. Instead, it is the less affluent citizens who are paying the piper (as is often the case when P.C. bites on society).

 

A thousand people are murdered every year in Los Angeles. If even one percent of those crimes took place in Brentwood or Malibu or the Hollywood Hills, you would hear a lot less claptrap in the L.A. City Council and Los Angeles Times about how cruel it is to chase down criminals. And if those same public figures had to send their children to schools more wrapped up in softening ink colors, promoting bilingualism, and nursing self-esteem than in teaching the stiff lessons that prepare a child for success in life, then many of today's P.C. fads in education would also disappear.

 

Another unwholesome aspect of political correctness is that it often leads to tyranny--unpleasant mental tyranny, or even out-and-out physical tyranny. On page 30 of this issue, and also in the collection that starts on page 26, we illustrate some of the ways that liberal orthodoxy shuts off, clamps down on, and punishes varieties of thinking that stray from current definitions of political acceptability. It is a great irony that university liberals--who advertise themselves as avatars of open-mindedness--have let themselves become censorious and intolerant in these harsh ways.

 

What is most pitiful is when political correctness causes liberalism to betray its own principles. Our story on the tragic destructive spiral into which Robert Mugabe has thrown the entire nation of Zimbabwe is one example. Mugabe is a conventional bullying strongman. He enriches himself at the expense of his country, refuses to share power, and brutalizes all dissenters. He is a far greater threat to human life and happiness than even the unrepresentative white minority government he drove from power.

 

But while the forces of political correctness mobilized with every ounce of their pith to overturn the illegitimate government of Rhodesia, they refuse even to condemn the successor gang that is now running the country into the ground. Why? Mugabe is a black man of the Left; as a dethroner of colonialism, he is a P.C. hero. And so he has been given a lifetime pass from any serious accountability for his cruel actions. Sanctimonious P.C.-ifiers may feel better about themselves for pushing their blind utopianisms onto society. But citizens who have to live with the real-world results often suffer a terrible price. The irony is that a more balanced and hard-headed realism would actually be more humane.