(December 14, 2015 at 3:05 pm)paulpablo Wrote: You're a bit behind with the times, people of colour is already considered racist by people, check out this message board of diversityINC
That's the problem with political correctness. Ordinary folks going about their everyday lives cannot keep up with the preferred nomenclature of consciousness raising minority activists. Just with respect to race, the list of what whites are "allowed" to say and not say gets constantly revised. Why are there groups called the United Negro College Fund and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but it is racist for a white guy to refer to people with Sub-Saharan ancestors as negro or colored?
Some people are fat. "Fat" is a perfectly good word that more or less describes a value-neutral visible physical feature of some people. Some people are tall, skinny. These are still considered merely descriptive. They offend few. But in our fitness-obsessed super-model culture some people are self-conscious of their weight and when they are called 'fat' they don't interpret that as just a description, but as negative judgment. My point is that so long as a group feels disparaged then every adopted descriptive term for them will eventual be reinterpreted as an implied value judgments. Group activists will never be satisfied until they deal with their underlying insecurities about their group participation. There are really only two solutions: 1) abolish term because the group identity is meaningless or 2)accept the descriptive term with all its baggage.
Identity politics wants to have it both ways. On the one hand they want to be treated like everyone else because they say the descriptive term is irrelevant. Then on the other hand, they want everyone to accept the distinctiveness of their group.
