If you speak German or have a good translator software, read the article http://www.uni-duisburg.de/DISS/Internetbibliothek/Artikel/Kampfbegrif
f.htm about Political Correctness. It was published May 1996 by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (language and social research). It's mostly concerned with PC in Germany, but also with PC in the US.
Rough translation, with some omissions, of the paragraph about the US:
"PC was termed in the US in the late 60s by the left, blacks and feminists. The goal of the minorities was equal rights on a semantical level and less rhetorical discrimination. [...] The Anglo-Saxon male mainstream culture began to be questioned.
Since the end of the Reagan era a counter-movement to the PC culture has been forming.
Neo-conservatives bemoan the fall of old values (family, nation), individualism is claimed to be the cause of the social problems; ressentiments and fears of the white middle class are conjured. The loss of the communist enemy picture has intensified the look towards the inside.
The ardent reaction to PC in the US serves to replace the loss of self-security and the lack of external threats to achieve a new enemy picture.
PC is used in the US, and also in Germany now, as a diffaming "Kampfbegriff" (term of fight, attack) to caricature and misrepresent the efforts of the liberals, left, feminists, representatives of minorities and advocates of multiculturality for an opening of the society, an investigation of overcome (traditional) taboos, imaginations and stereotypes.
Today PC is used to express derision of these views and aims.
In the US media and the public debate PC is one of the most inflationary used terms." |
