Meathead

One of the ways that I learned about prej­u­dice was Archie Bunker. Archie had a prob­lem with any­one who, well, who wasn’t him. All in the Fam­ily was not polit­i­cally cor­rect in its ver­biage, but it did more for strip­ping the veneer off sub­tle (and overt) prej­u­dice than all the arti­fi­cial restraints that vanilla-fy (not a PC term, obvi­ously) lan­guage and reduce it to hav­ing no mean­ing. If lan­guage is arti­fi­cially restrained with­out the sub­stance of belief in the words that we use then the lan­guage is full of lies. I guess we have decided that we pre­fer lan­guage with a neutral-dyed glaze rather than one that is allowed to be judged on its own mer­its or lack.
Maybe the use of pejo­ra­tive lan­guage was so wide­spread that uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ment couldn’t take it any­more, so they white washed the lan­guage and made it gender/sexual/race/height/etc neu­tral. This gets rid of the use of some hor­ri­ble words. Unfor­tu­nately it also gets rid of the out­rage that rises when those words are used.

When Meat­head (I used to really imag­ine that – a head of meat. I laughed almost every time) rose up to fight Archie each and every time he was him­self, I, as a watch­ing child, learned that out­rage is the proper response to prej­u­dice. Sim­ple, and true. With lan­guage hav­ing been bleached (sorry, I did it again), there is not the oppor­tu­nity for the appro­pri­ate response to the insane belief that there is an intrin­sic bet­ter­ness to one per­son over another. What is also lost in the clumsy lan­guage of PC are the words that describe us as being dif­fer­ent from one another. I am surely not a brown or black man. I am white, dif­fer­ent but no bet­ter than you or any­one else. I love that most black men dance bet­ter than me (by most I am think­ing of a num­ber well over 99%), and I love notic­ing that dif­fer­ence, but even as I do and even as I write this, some­thing in me is alarm­ing that the use of black man and danc­ing and white and me is not polit­i­cally cor­rect even though I am pretty sure I have my facts right. I would watch the black guys in my school at dances and the seri­ously effort­less way that they let the rhythm move through them and I just imi­tated them as best I could, which was pre­dictably humor­ous and, in ret­ro­spect, sweet. Some­thing arises in me as I write this that causes con­fu­sion to a part of myself that is still not 100% sure it isn’t a bigot maybe. It’s hard to know what it is, but writ­ing about it helps me work it out. Not writ­ing it, not say­ing it, is use­less, dam­ag­ing. PC robs us of the oppor­tu­nity to speak out and to know our­selves and our own muddy areas. I trust us all to get it right through more and richer lan­guage rather than through cen­sored and muted language.

I hope to teach my son that he is dif­fer­ent from that man over there and just as won­der­ful; dif­fer­ent and the dif­fer­ence is worth know­ing more about – it’s the only thing worth know­ing more about pos­si­bly; dif­fer­ent and thank god. A mil­lion of him or me or you is a bad idea. Even genet­ics knows this. Two peo­ple too close to each other genet­i­cally is a wicked bad idea. Two peo­ple widely dis­parate often makes a stun­ner of a new human. Find the dif­fer­ences. Use the words that describe those dif­fer­ences and cel­e­brate that.