The reason I hate the complaints about "political correctness" is they generally only apply to the way social dialogue is policed for overt bigotry--as opposed to social pressure against saying impolitic things that are actually true. The implicit premise behind this complaint is that the world is now built to privilege undeserving minorities and women, who could not advance but for massive preferential treatment encouraged by the government--because social traditions that privilege white men don't actually count. This has only gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected, and the GOP decided to make the overt political pitch that the U.S. is being ruled by an iron-fisted racist who hates white people.
Then every once in a while, you read an article like this one, that puts it all in perspective. The unemployment rate for black men aged 16-24 in this country reached 34.5 percent in October:
Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions -- 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in the District, home to many young black men, rose to 11.9 percent from 11.4 percent, even as it stayed relatively stable in Virginia and Maryland.
Of course, someone prone to blaming the ills of the world on "political correctness" could simply deploy a stereotype or two and rationalize the whole thing away. You could go intellectual, citing incarceration rates, or you could go old school, citing "work ethic."
Except the problem is this:
"Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men," said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. "Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison."
Obama or no, if you're black in this economy you better have a tight grip on those bootstraps.
Look, I don't doubt that this has little to do with malice. I think that's part of the reason people don't want to acknowledge the role that racial bias continues to play in American life--it's not easy to tell where it begins or ends. But it's easy to see the results.
-- A. Serwer
