Political correctness is fraught with debate because what some would see as extreme censorship of attitudes and curtailment of freedom of speech, others would consider as sensitivity to difference and responsible speech. Still others might view political correctness as a powerful tool to foster critical thinking, while some would label it as radical, insulting, or divisive. And when political correctness is decried as yet another incantation of frivolous intellectual discourse, the opposite point of view considers it as yet another form of anti-intellectualism whose stakes involve the role of universities in a democratic society.
Debates about political correctness first occurred on university campuses and later in national media and political circles. As campuses became more diverse in the 1960s owing to the efforts of the civil rights movement and movements for women's rights, ethnic and racial nationalism, anti-imperialism, and gay and lesbian liberation, alternatives to traditional Eurocentric forms of knowledge and ways of thinking began to sprout. Guided by a growing interest in multiculturalism, academics started to produce scholarship that challenged Western, white, patriarchal, and heterosexual bias in subjects and objects of study. Teachers and educational administrators encouraged additions to, and sometimes reformulations of, traditional canons and perspectives in the humanities and in courses in history. A principal aspect of these transformations was the movement away from the teaching of American immigration history that depicted the supposedly neat amalgamation of different cultures within a melting-pot framework, toward teaching that appreciated cultural diversity while recognizing power inequalities, consensus as well as conflicts over resources, and the persistence of group stratification in American society and the collective struggles against it.
However, multiculturalism was quickly met with widespread (and continuing) resistance, despite its not having gained much dominance over the more entrenched historical traditionalists in universities. Charges claiming dilution of scholarly standards, indoctrination of students with radical propaganda, relativism and useless deployment of jargon, as well as the overall destruction of higher education and the invalidation of Western culture seeped into places outside of campuses largely through the publication of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987), Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990), and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (1991). Central in these instances and in later discussions regarding political correctness are questions addressing the power relationships involved in knowledge produced and disseminated about culture and society in the United States, the ways in which such knowledge is produced, and the people who produced it.
American Institute for Managing Diversity
Affirmative Action and Diversity Project
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Political Correctness" (by Rick Bonus), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=410 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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