In 1991 I was teaching at the International School in Jakarta, Indonesia. A group of American parents who were about to send their kids to college in the US asked me to do a session (as a recent college grad) about the "scourge of Political Correctness" in the US.
https://twitter.com/beccalew/status/1289230809157648385
They'd read about it in that Newsweek or somewhere else & were terrified that their children were going to be put in a gulag or brainwashed when they went to college. Those "kids" are now in their mid-40s and, you're not going to believe this, but they're fine. They're all fine.
Don't remember what exactly I said at that session 29 years ago, but it was basically this. "The fact that students of color on historically white campuses don't want to have racial epithets yelled at them while they're trying to get an education is not the end of civilization."
I suspect this is why many people of my age (early 50s) are so bored by this most recent go around of the "free speech vs. PC" foolishness. There's just nothing new under the sun, just some new faces making old arguments.
Or I should say, those people of my generation who are on the side of the "free speech is under assault from the campus left like never before" pearl clutchers don't seem to me to have a very historically nuanced understanding of the times through which they've lived.
As I experienced it in the late 80s and early 90s, the anti-PC hysteria was mostly about entitled white people being pissed off that they had to decenter themselves now and then to take into serious consideration the experiences and perspectives of people who differed from them.
In the late 80s and early 90s this wasn't just about race, it was also about sexuality. The activism around the AIDS crisis definitely impacted how straight students were starting to think about what it meant to live as a queer person in the US.
And also the activism around apartheid in South Africa also began to raise people's awareness of the global history of racialized colonialism, and the US's connection to and distinctive iteration of it.
When people decried "PC-culture" in general terms, I always understood them to be minimizing or ridiculing all of that activism of that era...activism which most people today look back upon as being on the right side of history.
And just to prove that everything old is new again. One of the major voices in the anti-PC camp in 1991 was none other than DD himself. google.com/books/edition/…
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