Political Correctness In The United States

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Now in the modern era, The U.S. as well as nations around the world are struggling the battle of political correctness. Political correctness has been a term used to indicate the excessive attempts to avoid language, policies, or actions that are seen as offensive, no matter how minutely, to groups of individuals. Political correctness has been trying to provide comfort to all groups of society while taking the minds of nations away from the larger issues at hand. After a long grueling reign in the minds of presidents and foreign ministers alike, it’s time to push political correctness aside and focus on the issues at hand, because no matter how hard people try, someone will always be offended. The history of political correctness is still…show more content…
With movements such as gay rights, feminism, and other ethnic minority movements on the rise, identity politics - which focuses on topics in which groups of people identify with - adopted the term. The term that was previously, widely unknown and unheard of became a staple in American society. With this term the conservatives changed teaching methods and curriculums in the secondary schools and universities in the U.S. Because of this, at a ceremony for a graduating class at the University of Michigan, in 1991, President H.W. Bush spoke out and said political correctness is a, “...movement [that would] declare certain topics ‘off-limits,’ certain expressions ‘off-limits,’ even certain gestures…show more content…
This view can sound quite racist but if an individual is truly allowed freedom of speech in the United States what the professors are explaining is the loss of their rights to that freedom. Later Kors and Silverglate established the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). This foundation campaigns against the suppression of rights and against speech codes. While on the opposed side people felt that even though it restricted speech the term and speech codes also added more diverse aspects to the academic life. Usually political correctness is used to label terms and policies on the left, liberal side of politics, but now in the modern era there have been attempts to mold the term and use it against the right side of politics. In 2012 Paul Krugman wrote, “the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which – unlike the liberal version – has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established

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