A recent interesting (and depressing) article over at Reason on the culture of victimhood mentions overstratification as a phenomenon of the modern PC culture. A writer over at The Daily Beast discusses sexual racism, the idea that having a sexual disinterest in people of particular racial or ethnic origins is a manifestation of racism rather than mere preference.
The common theme is, of course, political correctness (or as Stella Morabito over at The Federalist calls it, propaganda compliance). PC is well described by the old Arabian proverb about the camel’s nose under the tent. There is no end to the PC march. Every concession, every “well, that’s not unreasonable” yielding to the speech police results in further demands and further encroachments. The fact that they’re running out of new territory to conquer hasn’t sated their blood lust, either. Their battles are growing internecine. That is to say, they’re starting to eat their own.
Consider some of the goings-on in the LGBT community. For the unaware, LGBT refers to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. Presumably, those who fall into these categories would naturally band together under the broad alternative lifestyle umbrella. When heavy oppression was the norm (i.e. laws banning gay sex, routine police raids on gay bars, the constant threat of physical violence, etc) and only a relatively few non-LGBT folks were accepting, there was a great deal of benefit in strength in numbers. Now, things are a lot better in the nation for LGBT people (though certainly not perfect – there remains a lot of discrimination), and that need to band together against danger isn’t a fraction of what it used to be. That has freed up energy for other fights, and one of those fights has gone internal. Among cis-lesbians, (cis- is a prefix that refers to people whose gender self-identification matches their sex at birth i.e. the opposite of trans-), there is a movement, dubbed TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) by some, that wants nothing to do with transgender women. Since some transgender women are themselves lesbian or bisexual, this becomes an issue. This is an example of the overstratification that the Reason article referred to. When there’s a tough fight and a big enemy, banding together with others facing a similar sort of oppression yields strong benefits. Once that fight’s calmed down, though, the focus can shift to the differences between allies, and people who are used to fighting turn their energies on those allies.
The Daily Beast article raises the question of whether having a sexual preference that disfavors particular ethnicities can be considered racist. It, too, focuses on the LGBT community, but the question certainly carries through to straight folks. If you aren’t as attracted to, say, Vietnamese women as you are to Iranian women, does that imply your worldview is racist? Folks who don’t spend big chunks of their lives worrying about some stuff are likely to simply vent their exasperation and say, “don’t be ridiculous,” but this sort of thing is as serious as the plague to the folks who think it up.
These examples both point us at the PC movement’s empowerment through victimhood, which is the real purpose behind the microaggression theory. For those not familiar with microaggression, it’s about perceived insult (typically racial or sexual, but can be of any discriminatory type) contained in or discomfort felt from everyday, casual and seemingly innocuous comments or situations. Microaggression theory is insidious in that it does not require intent and is entirely in the opinion of the aggressed. This makes it unquenchable. Someone can choose to feel aggressed by anything – your height (don’t loom over me!), your halitosis (you’re creating an uncomfortable work environment!), your plaid shirt (you’re degrading my Scottish heritage!), your weight (you make me feel unhappy about myself by being thinner than me! OR your fatness is unsettling to my aesthetic!), your choice of beverage (sweet tea is a Southern thing, and the South is where the confederate flag is, and that’s racist!), and so forth. Your intent is irrelevant, and that represents a paradigm shift in the PC culture wars.
Imagine you are a student in a math class and ask the student sitting next to you for help. That student happens to be asian. He might presume you asked because he was asian and asians are stereotypically good at math. You might not have even noticed his features, or you might not have thought to yourself “let me ask the asian student,” yet under microaggression theory, he is justified in feeling aggressed, and you are delinquent because you didn’t assess the situation thoroughly enough before opening your mouth to ask the question. In other words, the onus was on you to make sure that, before you spoke, you carefully considered all the ways that which you said might be perceived as insulting.
Some will argue that I’ve chosen a deliberately mundane example, that microaggressions are usually more overt in their demonstrations of ignorance (Buzzfeed lists some presumably less mundane examples). Yet it remains that intent is nowhere of relevance, that the most honest and simple questions, asked with no malice aforethought, will be deemed insulting. Moreso, the microaggressed feel entitled to be insulted, granting themselves or herself the power to demand rather than request that you self-censor, that you not ask your question inartfully (or in many cases at all). Some of the examples in the Buzzfeed list are particularly galling to me. I grew up in Brooklyn, and it was routine as a kid to find out, early on, what the ethnic background of any new kid we met was. Once we knew, we knew, and if we liked the kid it didn’t matter to us beyond that. Today, even asking, no matter how phrased is considered insulting by some.
No, not just insulting. Aggressive, as in I’d be causing harm by merely asking the question. That’s how the social justice warriors break past the argument that people aren’t entitled to a life free of insult or offense. They’ve transformed offensiveness into assault. People who are tired of political correctness aren’t going to be as easily cowed by claims of offensiveness nowadays. It’s gotten so bad that people are fighting back with a too bad response. If, however, the insult is reconfigured, if it’s presented as something that might intuitively feel more “physical,” they might trap a few more people with it.
Why? What’s the purpose of all this? What is to be achieved by all this propaganda compliance? It’s simple, really. The goal is to get us all to think the same way, to view the world through a particular set of filters and to live our lives according to a particular set of rules. Any sense of individuality is not only subordinate to identity group dynamics, it’s to be quashed if it conflicts with anything that comes out of those dynamics.
The process is ongoing and will be endless. Every concession will lead to the next level of overstratification, the next slicing of a group into subgroups, with an associated declaration about which group gets hierarchical aggrievement precedence over the other. Thus, even aggrieved groups are not immune from being bent into PC submissivness. In the earlier examples, cis-lesbians are asserting, by being exclusionary, that they are more entitled to feeling aggrieved or aggressed than trans-lesbians are. Every success in stamping out a particular form of microaggression will lead to new, more picayune perceptions of insult and aggression. We see it in the excoriation of those who voiced their ethnic preferences in potential sex partners, and we’ll see it any time someone has a preference for something that might be insulting to someone else.
People will not be permitted to have any thoughts, ideas or preferences that don’t conform to the specified guidelines. It won’t be long at all before your preference for ice cream flavors, what you put in your coffee, or your favoring one fast-food joint over another will somehow be determined to be racist and therefore unacceptable behavior (indeed, some already consider patronizing a Chick-Fil-A to be an expression of homophobia). The goal is to homogenize our very thoughts, to cow and intimidate us so much that stray ideas don’t even pop into our heads any more, and that our behavior around others is so timid, so careful, so measure and pre-judged, that we’ll have no fervor or independence left. We’ll be good obedient little sheep, and we’ll vote for whom we’re told.
Orwell would be impressed.
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