When the Museum of Fine Arts put on an interactive event that let visitors try on a kimono, protesters — primarily student activists — denounced it as “orientalism” and “cultural appropriation....
Typical of the genre was a recent NBC News opinion piece by writer Noah Berlatsky, who argued that the First Amendment is too broad and that hate speech should be legally restricted ..Publishers now employ “sensitivity readers” to prevent offense — which doesn’t always work.
Two years ago, Oberlin College was briefly at the center of a PC-gone-mad story when some students complained about culturally insensitive ethnic cafeteria food. Earlier this year — after an outcry against “culinary white supremacy” in the online press and social media in Portland, Ore. — two women (one white, one part Chinese) felt obliged to shut down the burrito shop they had started after a trip to Mexico. Their handmade tortillas, it seems, were too oppressive.
How do ideas like “culinary white supremacy” make it off university grounds? Partly, it’s because professors who marinate in campus politics enjoy intellectual authority in the outside world, and their opinions appear in the national media. Partly, it’s also because a huge generation of students who have absorbed the “social justice” creed of the campus left, often promoted not only in class but in mandatory workshops, take that outlook with them when they graduate.
Among other things, this trend is evident in the recent conflicts over #MeToo, the movement against sexual abuse. As the list of accused men has grown, even veteran feminists, such as Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, have criticized the movement for equating accusation with guilt and boorish come-ons with rape. The call to “believe women” — instead of waiting for evidence and due process — was a campus protest slogan before #MeToo adopted it.
Recent graduates, and the cultural politics they bring, also influence corporations that want to maintain a progressive image — including the tech giants that set the tone for much of the social media. One popular code of conduct for digital communities, cited as a model by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, stresses that “marginalized people’s safety” must be prioritized over “privileged people’s comfort.”
What’s more, left-wing campus politics also feed and empower the right. Stories of political correctness run amok, gleefully picked up by conservative media (and in some cases overblown), boost the perception of rampant hypersensitivity, speech policing, and anti-male and/or anti-white bias. New research by Georgia State University Ph.D. candidate Zack Goldberg confirms anecdotal reports that many Trump voters were at least partly motivated by concerns about political correctness.