Political Correctness

There's a history to this. I'll be brief. 

 The social constructionists in general, in particular one of the originators of this approach, the sociologist, Erving Goffman, have revealed clearly what everybody already knew anyway, but hadn't seen it systematically as a major aspect of the processes of social stratification and the enforcement of existing stratification regimes. What was pointed out is the fact that how you talk about someone, how you talk to them, is a major means of exerting social control over them. Particularly, to insult a person is to demean them, to tell them that they are "less than" and to interactionally maneuver them into the position of subordinate to you. Insult a man and he's either got to fight back or accept the insult, accept a position in the interaction of less respect and less power than you who insults him. This is not a matter of “feeling insulted,” but a matter of self-defense in something like micro-class warfare. (That’s why “political correctness” is a defense against “micro aggression.”) 

 Someone you might see as being over-sensitive may actually be rationally self-defensive. After all, those who are not in the categorically subordinate position into which American culture has traditionally placed minority group members may naturally find it difficult to empathize with such “sensitive defensive minorities." 

 The use of "slur words," is insulting, right? To insult a person is to "put him down." It is to claim advantage for yourself in any interaction or relationship with him. It's natural --and right-- to object to being referred to with a slur word. 

 What "political correctness" really is is simply being polite and not using insulting language. (Or that’s how it started out until the rightwing publicists successfully used sarcasm to spin it into a snide insult itself.) 

 Erving Goffman (e.g., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) has analyzed the process of stigmatization, as have the social constructionists who followed him. . . . "Inducing people to feel the stigma." . . . What has been called "political correctness" is a strategy for preventing that from happening. . . . To fail to be politically correct is typically to stigmatize some category of persons. "Don't use slur words about people" implies "don't stigmatize people to make life even harder for them." 

 The internal dynamic of being stigmatized is to apply the socially disvalued category to oneself, to see oneself as a member of the disrespected group —of one’s group as disrespected— to define oneself as "lesser than" because of "who" one is. "Black pride" and similar "identity movements" are undertakings to overcome this. . . . When such "reverse identifications," though, institutionalize (socially "lock in") into identity politics, it can become self-defeating. But the origins of identity politics, if not their sclerotic development in an over-institutionalized political-economic system, are authentically liberatory.