Can you explain to me what constitutes "political correctness"?

From where I stand, it just means treating people equally and not being an asshole.

ETA: In considering all the worries of modern living, I have never once been concerned with using the wrong words for a group of people. Am I really the exception? It seems easy to call people by the terms they prefer. Not sure about which terms to use? Then I just ask.

I am struggling to see the burden of being "PC".

It means conforming your speech to current political trends.

Can I have an example?

Whitelisting/Blacklisting.

Change of innocuous and unrelated terminology in source code and documentation without any technical justification. No shortage of those examples throughout the industry and open source.

So you are saying people have a problem with the term "blacklisting" ? I guess I live a sheltered life then. Nothing like this has remotely ever come up and I live in a major metro.

Yes. You can find PR's on Github and if the maintainer rejects it, accusations of racism and hate crimes.

The acceptable term is something like allowlist/denylist/blocklist.

I've seen the discussion come up about changing these terms and whether it was worth doing. Not once have I seen it turn into an "accusation" of racism against a person, much less hate crimes, so I don't think that paints an accurate picture.

Many codebases are moving away from that term. Here's two large efforts that I am familiar with: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styl... https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1o9zxsxl

Changing terminology:

* whitelist/blacklist * slave/master

The poll didn't define it, so not all respondents necessarily understood it the same way, but in my experience it's generally used to refer to speech codes requiring people to take great care in how they speak and write to avoid accidentally giving offense. The recent controversy about the USC professor who said 那个 in class, for example, would be a typical example.

Which makes all of the claims you and the others have made as to what that data actually means basically useless. All we know is that a lot of people think some definition of political correctness is some definition of problem. That's barely information.

I have no idea what your example means.

As far as speech codes, they seem very mild. I would not even call it an inconvenience. Are people mad that certain phrases are now considered slurs and not welcome in polite society?

Ex. it is no longer appropriate to call someone a "retard," even in jest. Is this a problem?

I'm still not understanding the meat of the objection to "PC".

Most people are against it. Around 80% for each racial group. A bit less for blacks at around 75%. It’s like the 1 thing a super majority of us agree on.

However, slice it up by income and education. Middle and especially upper-middle class people are generally for it much more than everyone “below” them but even they don’t like it.

From politics, republicans hate it a lot and democrats mainly hate. Except 1 group. Progressives love it with about 30% of them against it. They are the only group that likes it.

It is elitist and no one likes it. Except the far left. Yet we are all forced to live with it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

> It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.

I'm still struggling with the objection here, but this is ridiculous.

It's ok to say "black". Is that hard to figure out? Ask a black person and they will say it's fine. The term "african-american" seems more nonsensical than anything -- not all black people identify with Africa.

As to the rest, I don't care about popular opinion, that doesn't inform my world view. Still waiting to hear about the burden of "PC" because I have yet to hear a compelling case.

And I have never once wondered whether or not I should call someone a "jew".

Here's the report: https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf

Political correctness doesn't appeared to be defined. I assume if you asked people their opinions on concrete events versus a nebulous concept the results would be quite different.

You didn’t even write “black person” with a capital “B” as in “Black person”. In many places you’d be jumped on for this recent development.

Actually as far as I'm aware, the current politically correct term is "person of color" specifically so "person" is first instead of "black", and "color" instead of "black" so middle-eastern/etc aren't excluded.

No you’re totally wrong here. From Kimberle Crenshaw herself (Pioneer of critical race theory) there is a difference between a “Black person” and a “person who happens to be black”. It’s important to understand what this means and how it guides this philosophy and the activism we now see in the workplace.

This is all intentional. “People/Person of color“ is an entirely different thing. You need to understand the hierarchy here and why it’s important to concepts like intersectionality and thus social justice.

You should read the actual work and come to understand they mean what they say and the “language game” being played isn’t really a game as critical theory understands the power of language quite well and is ready, willing, and able to indoctrinate useful idiots to propagate it.

It’s all in their literature. I’ve read it.

It’s also frowned upon to prefix with “the”

Very much doubt that.

You won’t for long. Read this from the paper of record. Life comes at you fast.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/black-african-american...

The article explains different perspectives. The author uses lower case when they have a choice. Who got jumped on?

When people say they're concerned about political correctness, they're generally disputing your assessment that modern speech codes are very mild. Many people feel that modern speech codes are quite intense - that it requires significant study to identify all the terms and phrases that currently aren't welcome in polite society, and that complying with the list once you've studied it severely restricts the ideas you can express.

Retarded was invented to be a “kind word”. It’s humorous looking at records from Ellis island and seeing records describing people as “idiots” “imbecile”, and “morons” as actual terms to describe different levels of intelligence. We use these words outside that context now. But they were actual classifications. Words like “retard” came into being to cover those terms which became derisive slang that is today considered harmless. But retard isn’t.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/moron-idiot-im...

Obviously teasing an actual mentally retarded person by calling them a “retard” or the above terms is cruel and in poor taste, and worse. I don’t believe almost anyone would though.

Would you like to provide an example that's in english?

Sure. One example would be that many companies (including my own) are now instructing engineers to avoid any public usages of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist". Obviously this isn't the most important thing in the world, but it requires pretty significant mental effort on my part, since the terms had no racial connotations at all until a couple months ago.

It's telling that the only concrete example in english, though only from two of you, is the same one.

It seems like there aren't a lot of examples to choose from.

I have personally never heard of this concern, and as you mention it doesn't seem particularly taxing. I would like to understand better the consequence of misusing (or using) blacklist/whitelist. I very much doubt the fallout would be severe.

Other examples:

- "master"/"slave" terminology in databases and such; most recently, even the "master" branch in source trees was deemed impious, and GitHub will be renaming it by default to "main" on new repos starting tomorrow

- there was a recent case where the author of RuboCop (a linter for Ruby, a pun on RoboCop) faced a lot of pressure to rename it because, I guess, cops are now considered verboten (!?): https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-dram...

- adding codes of conduct to all public-facing projects, most of which are taken directly from the Contributor Covenant (a safely orthodox choice); this isn't a naming thing, but is pushed for in a similar way by similar people

For the people who have not watched the movie, the hilarious thing is that RoboCop is anti-police, anti-corporate, anti-autoritarian and anti-dystopian.

But since woke people are corporate, authoritarian and dystopian, I can see why they would object to the name.

Holy shit. That was a wild ride, and in the worst way possible.

Here’s the full lost of banned words at twitter and other woke companies / opensource projects. https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656?s=...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/realestate/master-bedroom... ‘Master bedroom’ is racist now.

It's the most recent and thus the most salient one for a lot of people in software. There are many other examples of neutral terminology that's become politically charged: "all lives matter", "color-blind", the OK hand gesture...

I completely agree that none of these rules are individually taxing and that the consequences of breaking them are unlikely to be severe. But when taking everything in aggregate - the sum of all the rules I know about, the concern that there could be new rules I don't know about, the tiny but not unprecedented chance that I could face severe fallout - the net effect is stifling. Again, not the most important problem in the world or even the most important problem I personally face, but still a problem.

"All lives matter" is not and has never been neutral.

"All lives matter" is a natural English sentence expressing the idea that every person's life matters. This is not a particularly controversial idea.

I recognize that it's also a non-neutral political slogan, and that modern speech conventions require people to avoid saying things that sound like controversial political slogans. But that's precisely the problem! I have to keep up to date with all major partisan controversies, a task I generally find quite miserable and pointless, in order to know which new phrases I should avoid!

If that isn't, what is?

non sequitur.

You just don’t ever know how it will interpreted against you forcing an apology or more recently a written declaration that you are sexist/racist/etc and that you will “do better”.

What are you no longer allowed to say at work?

Do a search for USC communications professor to understand the previous example.

It's hard to defend insulting a person's intelligence, regardless of the word used. A better example would be referring to something inanimate like a company policy as "retarded". Even better is the purging of words like "master" from software. Or actors having to apologize for their Halloween costumes. It seems like every major comedian is complaining bitterly about political correctness lately, save perhaps for certain partisan ones.

That's because "political correctness" is a somewhat vague term with intensely negative connotations. It's like asking if people are in favor of "government overreach" - people may have very different ideas about what that specifically constitutes but saying you oppose it is an easy nonspecific way to connect.