Accusations of "Political Correctness" and Being an "SJW": Some Observations

Political correctness has become an interesting term, especially in recent years, and particularly in the United States during this presidential election year (2016). It is typically seen as a term of derision. If you are politically correct, you are conforming to some sort of hypersensitive policing of language, according to the general understanding of many people who use the term in this way. And such policing of or hypersensitivity about language is dangerous, they say, because it threatens to cripple American society. Indeed, some people claim that it has already crippled America from a supposedly once great state, and it is imperative to “make America great again,” at least in part by avoiding being politically correct.

Similarly, the abbreviation SJW (social justice warrior) has also begun circulating in the parlance of certain circles as a pejorative. SJWs are purveyors of this nasty political correctness, as some ideologues claim, as they are concerned with petty issues that demand too much of the free speech of a person out of silly concerns about sensitivity to the feelings of people who are taking on a supposed victim mentality.

It is interesting to see how these terms are applied to our culture today. Some who identify as politically conservative will claim that free speech is being suppressed or limited in some way. To be politically correct, then, according to such conservatives, is to fall in line with some group’s understanding of what is the correct way to talk about politics, and this way that is deemed correct, they say, is the way of overly liberal niceties, catering to excessive sensitivity on certain subjects (especially in relation to how one might talk about minorities, the disabled, and women) and suppressing views that do not conform to this liberal sense of politeness.

For example, people might say that the politically correct thing to say when it comes to Muslims is that Muslims are not all bad and that to say Islam is inherently violent is a politically incorrect thing to say. But the very fact that it is politically incorrect makes it a wonderful exercise (according to some) in being allowed to be frank about how one feels about something without fearing that one will be shouted down for failing to conform to the unwritten rules about niceties in how we talk about certain issues.

But it is interesting that the term politically correct has been used even by liberals to talk disparagingly about certain practices that conform to self-censored language about sensitive topics. Bill Maher once hosted a show in the 90s and early 2000s called Politically Incorrect. On this program, Maher would host discussions that rarely bothered with censoring speech out of politeness, whether it was speech from a conservative guest or a liberal guest, or even from Maher himself, who considered himself then and now as liberal.

The etymology of the word politics might be a good place to start with discussions on this subject. It comes from the Greek word πολιτικός (politikos), an adjective meaning “of, concerning, or related to citizens.” It is related to πολῑ́της (politēs), meaning “citizen,” a word that is in turn related to πόλις (polis), a “city” or “city state/country.”

In fact, a work written by Plato that many people today would recognize under the name Republic goes by the name Πολιτεία (Politeia) in the original Greek, and that Greek word πολιτεία was a general word used by ancient Greeks such as Plato to discuss what we today call politics—that is, πολιτεία had a range of meanings, among them “citizenship” or “community of citizens in a city or city/state.”

Therefore, one could define politics broadly as that which relates to citizens and how they are to relate to one another in a city/state/country (involving how they are to be governed, what laws should be put into place to help them function together in a society, etc.).

So back to the term politically correct. There are two words there: politically and correct. The first word we have already defined as having to do with how citizens relate to one another. The presence of the second word, correct, means that to be politically correct is to relate to one another as citizens in the correct way, if we accept the definition of politics offered above.

But the question is, then, what is the correct way to do this? Whose politics are the correct politics, and how does this work? In the context of ancient Greek society, Plato has Socrates debate citizenship with some other citizens, trying to determine which way is correct, or best. The term that is used in Plato’s Republic is δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynē, meaning “justice” or “righteousness”).

So determining what justice is should perhaps be the goal of all political discussions, as they deal with how citizens ought to relate to one another, how they must treat one another if the society is to be a just (δίκαιος; dikaios) one.

So a social justice warrior (SJW) might want to promote a certain idea of social justice. If people can agree that it is just to stand up for oppressed peoples, and if they can agree on who is being oppressed and on how to best liberate them, then perhaps so-called SJWs who participate in this sort of thing are not taking on a victimhood mentality (as those who use the term SJW pejoratively claim) but are simply honestly describing situations where people are being victimized simply because they might be black and are facing prejudice for their skin color, for example.

Sometimes that makes me wonder if Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been callously labeled with the term SJW if he were living today. Something tells me that those who complain about SJWs would insist that MLK was different, that he was not like the oversensitive people today.

Now, in fairness, might some people truly be behaving like opportunists and victims? Sure. There are undoubtedly people out there who are whining about how things are unfair but have no justification for doing so. But the term  SJW is frequently being used against people who are merely writing about real concerns, such as the fact that racism against black people is still a major issue in this part of the world, as is racism against other minorities.

So here are my questions. Given everything we have talked about above, why would we not want to be advocates for social justice? What makes social justice a bad thing? Why would we not want to seek good or righteous or just ways for citizens to relate to one another (that is, what people pejoratively label as being politically correct)? Perhaps not all aspects of these questions are easy or simple to address, but I think it is important to think about them. Social justice as a concept is not a bad thing, as it has to do with the right way to treat others in society. I fully recognize that figuring out what that looks like may not always be easy, but I think treating others with basic respect, regardless of where they come from in life, is probably a good place to start.

And because the name of this blog is Combating Hate with Love, that already reveals my position that just ways of interacting with one another ought to be informed by love. Unless we treat one another with love, we will descend into a cacophony of angry voices trying to silence one another. 

UPDATE: In an effort to be clearer and provide a bit more balance to this post, I can see why some people may in fact earn the pejorative social justice warrior because of the way they go about addressing topics of injustice. They themselves might, in some cases, actually be an opportunist (which I have alluded to above) or someone who wrongly sees themselves as being victimized where they are not. Or perhaps they are fighting for a cause that is real, yet they fail to substantiate their claims with facts and rely simply on emotion to make their case, which does not work either. Or perhaps they fail to treat someone outside their perspective with love and prefer only aggressive, militaristic tactics (hence the warrior part of the phrase social justice warrior).

I fully acknowledge that the title of my blog (Combating Hate with Love) uses the word combating, a term with military or aggressive associations to some. I have actually considered changing the title of my blog to Responding to Hate with Love to avoid such associations, as I do not want to give the impression that I want to be in a fight with hateful people. This is something I need to do more thinking on.

But just as such people who are wrongly seeing themselves as victims do exist and might hide behind a social justice cause in order to do so, people also exist who use the pejorative social justice warrior against, for instance, black people who are simply pointing out real (not imagined) injustices against their community.

So while some people might only use the term SJW to describe someone who really is fake victimhood opportunist, I prefer to avoid the term, as it seems to have been co-opted by others who prefer to call people SJWs or politically correct as an excuse to be total jerks.

UPDATE #2: I changed the subtitle of this post from "What Is Behind Them All?" to "Some Observations," as I think this other subtitle fits better with the modest goal of this post, which is not really to give a full academic treatment of the recent history of the term SJW (though that may be left for some future work, and perhaps a future post), but rather to list some of my observations over how unhelpful rhetoric online has been escalating over the use of terms such as politically correct and SJW. I also want to clarify that it is not my intent to say that censoring speech is a good thing (quite the opposite). Nor is my intention to defend the phrase politically correct (also quite the opposite). I understand that hypersensitive censorship is what most people mean by the term politically correct. Such hypersensitive censorship undoubtedly occurs. My goal was only to deconstruct the term politically correct as it is commonly used in the rhetoric today and show that it may not be useful.

For instance, whose politics are we talking about when we use the phrase politically correct? Again, most of the time, the politics meant are far-left hypersensitivities, which undoubtedly exist, but so do alt-right and far-right hypersensitivities (which are rarely if ever called politically correct), so can this phrase not be applied to any political group depending on the politics a person may have?

The problem comes in when a truly just cause (such as spreading awareness that black communities do in fact face prejudices other communities do not) is dismissed as political correctness (i.e., hypersensitivity) run amok. There is a real cultural current running right up to the present moment where black lives are being undervalued, and to claim that black people face no oppression today is to stick your head in the sand and to prove yourself to be an ideologue without empathy or a desire for dialogue.

So as I said, my only goal in this blog post is to challenge the rhetoric of the phrases politically correct and SJW, and how throwing around such phrases without thinking about them may actually shut down conversations rather than start conversations.