[URBANTH-L]politically correct--YES

[Dr. Virginia Cornue]

I come out 40 years as an activist, advocating for integration starting 
as a high school school student in the segregated south, working for 
women's issues, civil rights, homelessness ( forever it seems) and other 
people and earth oriented issues. When I hear the term politically 
correct used as a a slur, I steam, since that is a semantical move to 
retract the line of inclusion and acceptance and empowerment further and 
further back. In the late 1980s, when I was doing course work for my 
doctorate studying new women's organizations, gender and social change 
in marketizing PRC, Dinesh Desousa came through Rutgers expousing a line 
of conservatism, sexism, racism and disempowerment. His slant was to 
name and classify everything that I and hosts of others had spent years 
working on  as "Politically Correct." In other words, if you step over 
this line of inclusion we were working to expand, you are entering the 
land of "Political Correctness" peopled by weirdos, feminazis and 
radical freaks who are destroying the country, if not the world. And an 
effective move it was as we have seen the PC line drawn further and 
further back, excluding more and more people.

I have always proudly claimed my stance as a liberal, feminist, civil 
rights worker and am even more ardent in demonstrating to my classes how 
disparaging analyses and actions dealing with (Em)power (ment) are in 
themselves forceful strategies to dominate and uphold if not reinstate 
existing and excluding forms of power. So, call me PoMo and PC. I say, 
YES! and proud of it.

Virginia Cornue.