The perils of political correctness

(politically correct note: much of what follows will seem offensive at first, so if you don't have time to read the whole thing, you might want to skip this post ;-))

I started listening to an interview today on a great Canadian public radio series. In the introductory montage, there was an excerpt from an interview with an advocate for the homeless in Calgary who said something to the effect of "Our language determines how we see people. I work very hard not to refer to those without a place to live in Calgary as 'the homeless'..." As I listened I had one of those moments of anxiety that are familiar to many who live in societies where political correctness is the norm. "Uhoh... I'm in trouble. I've been using the wrong word - it must be insensitive, perhaps even downright prejudiced. What's the right term??"

This constant game of catch-up is a feature of public discourse in Canadian culture. The usual rationale for such change is a definitional or linguistic one. As the gentleman above argued, the language we use indeed shapes how we see the world. The message here is that by changing the words, we can change how we perceive certain groups and perhaps alter our approach towards them. While this is certainly true in some cases, it seems to me that the change in terms often reflects a flight from accumulated connotation rather than a definitional clarification.

Let's take the example of the change from 'Indians' to 'natives', then 'aboriginals', and now 'first peoples'. The change from Indians to natives is a definitional clarification. People living in North America when European explorers/invaders/settlers arrived were certainly not Indians. (This, we're told in grade school, was an error stemming from a miscalculation of the circumference of the earth.) Natives has a very different meaning from Indians, and changing the word moves us to a more accurate view of reality.

However, the subsequent changes in the term applied to first peoples are not definitional changes. Check a thesaurus and one finds that native is a synonym of aboriginal. And first peoples is a term that describes the idea of being native or aboriginal. So why change these words? These changes are less due to the way in which language affects our view of reality, and much more due to the ways in which reality (or our perceptions of it) affects our view of language. These changes are a way of running away from the accumulation of connotations to a particular term.

A connotation, in this context, is a meaning that is acquired by a term that is not explicitly indicated by the term's definition. To continue with our example, the term 'native' has, in Canada, acquired a number of connotations, many of which are unfortunately negative. Due to a long and complex history of social exclusion, aggressive cultural assimilation, health problems, economic subjugation and then dependence, and a variety of other issues, Canada's native populations suffer rates of poverty, substance abuse, homelessness, imprisonment, and child mortality much higher than the overall average. Over the years, the word 'native' has acquired these connotations. And so we change the term not because it means something that is untrue, but because we have attached to this term stereotypes and ideas - and perhaps even realities - that we wish would go away.

On the one hand such changes do have value. They refresh our view such that we can perceive groups in a way that will allow us to treat them differently. But, despite the ethos from which political correctness has grown, perceptions only go so far to create realities. Should these realities not change, we can continue to create one term after another, and they will each be dragged down by the connotations they will acquire. Political correctness is valuable when it can refresh our views of reality, but dangerous when it helps us ignore it.