The Tyranny of the Media Correct

Laura Fraser

Extra! (5–6/91)

The latest trend in intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) magazines, lest you have been asleep, is a widespread denunciation of the Tyranny of the Politically Correct. Featured on some half-dozen magazine covers, this new "crisis" on American campuses has taken on as many catchy new labels: "The New McCarthyism," "New Fascists," "New Orthodoxy," "Thought Police," "The Cult of Multiculturalism" and "The Hegemony of the Politically Correct."

The idea is that the academy is under siege by leftists, multiculturalists, deconstructionists and other radicals who are politicizing the university and threatening to undermine the very foundations of the Western intellectual tradition. These radicals, the theory goes, are the left-wing graduate students of the '60s who sneaked into tenured positions in the '90s and are now promoting an agenda of cultural relativism. Armed with affirmative action admissions and hiring, as well as new French literary theories, the politically correct hope to transform the university into a den of multiculturalism— silencing everyone who would dare dissent by calling them "sexist," "racist" or "anti-deconstructionist."

This critique of the politically correct was fathered by writers on the establishment right, notably Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), Roger Kimball (Tenured Radicals) and, most recently, Dartmouth Review editor–turned–Heritage Foundation scholar Dinesh D'Souza (Illiberal Education). It was nurtured by such organizations as Accuracy in Academia (an offshoot of AIM), whose President John LeBoutillier and several board members were members of the World Anti-Communist League (an organization that, as Sara Diamond reports in Z Magazine (2/91), was "one of the most important coordinating bodies for death squad activities in Central America and else-where"). Only recently have mainstream magazines, including The Atlantic, New York, Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, as well as several newspapers (led by the New York Times' Richard Bernstein), followed suit to attack the multicultural movement with haughty condemnations of the "politically correct."

Despite this mad rush of publicity, the term "politically correct" is hardly new. When I was in college 10 years ago, the term "politically correct" was used to gently poke fun at someone who had gone a little overboard in their particular worldview. When another feminist would tell me, for example, that you had to be a lesbian to be a real feminist, I could shrug and say she was being a little "too PC" for my tastes, which ran toward men.

Thus the political communities (whether feminist, anti-racist, gay, ecologist, etc.), with all due respect to each other, kept themselves from taking "PC" too seriously.

There were, however, serious issues that weren't considered "too PC." It wasn't being too PC to suggest to the administration that when a woman was sexually assaulted by a drunken frat guy, it wasn't just a case of boys being boys. Nor was it too PC to raise the consciousness of a white male professor of 20th Century American intellectual history who neglected to put any blacks or women on the syllabus. And it wasn't too PC to wonder if the hierarchical structure of a text made it inherently male-dominant. It was just interesting.

Ten years later, admittedly, things have heated up on campus. The president's office at my alma mater was recently fire-bombed by a student who, according to the New York Times, was concerned with "minority interests." At Harvard Law School, a faculty member who supported a sit-in demanding the hiring of more minority and women professors was recently stabbed to death (though the possible connection to "majority interests" was not made explicit in newspaper accounts). Clearly, as the academy's predominantly white male history clashes with the increasingly multicultural present, people are going overboard on all sides. A respectful and lively debate is indeed in order, and should eventually result in a more tolerant academy that has incorporated a broader range of human arts and experience.

Unfortunately, as things stand, only one side of this debate has made its way into the national media. From all the talk about the ideological hegemony of the multiculturalists, you might expect it would be the PC side that was getting all the print. But no. All the articles are by none-too-liberal men, usually white, defending the traditional academy. In these articles, the PC point of view is only described in caricature, without the kind of depth that might count as either "objectivity" (highly valued among the anti-PCs) or honest intellectual inquiry. Most of the arguments follow a very similar line, drawing upon the same body of outrageous cases. The orthodoxy of the anti-PC articles is, in fact, quite remarkable.

It's the new Tyranny of the Media Correct.

The Media Correct (MCs) have painted a diverse group—New York's John Taylor (cover story, 1/21/91) defines them as "multiculturalists, feminists, radical homosexuals, Marxists, New Historicists"—with broad strokes, lumping them together because of their "conviction that Western culture and American society are thoroughly and hopelessly racist, sexist, oppressive," as Taylor puts it. Then they are given a name—in New York's case, "new fundamentalists"—because after naming them, it is possible to write about them monolithically, no matter how diverse their views. "They believe that the doctrine of individual liberties itself is inherently oppressive," says Taylor, as if there were a they and that they all shared such a belief. He seems to be safe in making those assertions, because he never interviews or otherwise presents an honest view of what any of them really think.

After creating this strange monolith of PCs, the Media Correct describe a broad range of issues which the PCs seem to threaten. Freedom of speech on campus is allegedly being threatened by changes in the literary canon, affirmative action, discussions of date rape, and, most improbably, new literary theories. Included, really, is anything that threatens the status quo; anything, as Time put it (1/1/91), that is a "reversal of basic assumptions held by the nation's majority." It's difficult to under-stand how a group whose sole purported unifying characteristic is diversity could be so orthodox in its beliefs. Nevertheless, as Newsweek put it (cover story, 12/24/90), "PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy. No aspect of university life is too obscure to come under its scrutiny." It's also hard to know how a philosophy that supposedly rejects hierarchy can be totalitarian, but leave that to the MCs.

The MCs then display their evidence of this new fascism—bizarre, isolated incidences that in themselves may be troubling, particularly ones limiting free speech on campus, but in total don't add up to a multicultural conspiracy. A lot of these examples are meant to be outrageous, but don't strike one as such. Dinesh D'Souza, in the March Atlantic cover story, writes that students at Holyoke College, University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and Cleveland State University all have ethnic course requirements; this is evidence that the "core curricula...are now under attack."

He seems scandalized that a Duke English class studies gangster books and movies and finds that organized crime is "a metaphor for American business as usual." (Time also uses that example; examples of the "new totalitarianism" seem to be scarce.) D'Souza, along with Time and Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, makes much of a Duke English professor's paper called "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," without ever giving a hint about what the paper's about. (I'd love to read it.) The point of this exercise is to mock anyone who deviates from strict readings of, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and mark them with a big scarlet PC.

The idea that new multicultural texts might be included in the canon is also made fun of, by juxtaposing venerable texts with ones with silly titles. This game is played in almost all the MC articles. D'Souza writes of Plato's Republic and Machiavelli's Prince being replaced by I, Rigoberta Menchu, the political odyssey of a Guatemalan peasant woman, and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, "a passionate argument for violence against colonial oppression." John Taylor in New York frets that "instead of models of clarity like E.B. White, essays such as 'is not so gd to be born a girl,' by Ntozake Shange" are assigned. Time imagines a literature class that "equates Shakespeare and the novelist Alice Walker, not as artists but as fragments of sociology." And Newsweek worries that Rabelais is being dropped for Toni Morrison. None of the articles quotes any real live professor who would actually make these swaps, or gives any respect to multicultural authors, or the idea that our understanding of humanities may be broadened if we include more of humanity.

Many of the articles decry affirmative action in admissions or hiring, describing how blacks with lower SAT scores are getting into school over whites and Asians with high scores, and how black, Latino and women professors are increasingly sought by schools. There's no nod to the idea that SATs might not be the only indicators of ability, or that they are biased toward whites (as has been argued extensively).

The articles also dismiss Afrocentric theories—which claim that much of Western culture was borrowed from African sources—out of hand, and characterize their existence as the "most problematic" aspect of PC, as Time put it. Nowhere is there evidence of right or wrong, or a confidence that if wrong, other academics would debunk the theories. Both affirmative action and Afrocentric materials are described in tones that could only be used by someone who feels his culture is inherently, perhaps genetically, superior.

Finally, in decrying semiotics and deconstructionism, the MCs lament that PCs "deny the notion of objective reality," as D'Souza puts it. Richard Bernstein sees this as the worst the PCs have to offer—"some even question the very notion that there is such a thing as disinterested, objective scholarship." But before there were PCs, did academics always agree on the objective meaning of, say, James Joyce's Ulysses? Has there always been one way to interpret a book? One truth?

The MCs seem to think so. That truth is the truth of the white male establishment, which, incidentally, still holds the reins of power in the universities, and is scared of giving even a little bit away. MCs must also believe that their articles—which are full of generalizations, one-sided accusations and paranoias (not to mention racism, sexism and anti-deconstructionism)—are also objective, also the truth.

Hegemony? New McCarthyism? New Fascists? Hmmm.

Laura Fraser is a freelance writer whose media criticism appears regularly in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

SIDEBAR:

The "Myth" of Racism

The movement against the "New McCarthyism" often treats discrimination as a PC myth. "Students and university administrators often behave as if the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and '70s never existed," wrote Amanda Foreman in a New York Times op-ed. "Every setback, every racist or sexist incident is seen as proof that intolerance is pervasive."

That intolerance is pervasive in our society was documented by a survey released early this year (Washington Post, 1/9/91). In the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center survey of racial attitudes in the U.S., non-black respondents showed widespread prejudice: 53 percent thought African-Americans were less intelligent than whites; 51 percent thought them less patriotic; 56 percent believed them to be more violence-prone; 62 percent said they were lazier; and 78 percent said they were more likely to "prefer to live off welfare" and less likely to "prefer to be self-supporting." Majorities expressed similar prejudices against Latinos, and sizable numbers held the same views about Asian-Americans.

One might expect such dramatic confirmation of racial prejudice in the U.S. to be the subject of extensive commentary, including an examination of the media's role as the main source of information about minorities for most whites. But the study did not spark a major discussion in the press—commentators as a group seem more interested in denouncing calls for multicultural curricula as the "New Tribalism" than in criticizing discriminatory attitudes as the same old racism.

—FAIR