When an Asian-American man named Robert Lee isn’t allowed to broadcast games at the University of Virginia, we all know political correctness has gone too far. ESPN didn’t ask him to go by “Rob” or “Bob”; they were so afraid that they just moved him.
Did they really think someone was going to mistake him for a Confederate general or that he was trying to honor the general with his name? To quote a sports phrase, “Come on, man!”
What’s worse about this whole situation is that irrational oversensitivity like this is killing our nation’s ability to be rationally sensitive at all.
Conservatives and average Americans get so fed up with oversensitivity and the “PC culture” in Hollywood, on college campuses, and in the media that they have built an instinct to oppose any sensitivity (or just human thoughtfulness) just as a reflux. The so-called “Word Police” and “Thought Police” have become so influential that any consideration for how others feel is considered to be weak and caving to these radicals.
American culture — conservative, liberal, and non-political — moved on from calling black Americans “negroes” in order to be considerate. American culture moved on from calling the intellectually disabled “retarded.” American culture moved on from calling LGBT Americans “fags.” American culture moved on from calling Native Americans “savages.”
These changes weren’t made to be politically correct; these changes were just correct. They follow the Golden Rule, a creed universally followed by all faiths and cultures: treat others as you would like to be treated.
The Golden Rule would also dictate that people shouldn’t be silenced for fear of offending someone; I don’t want to be silenced, therefore I won’t silence you. This approach requires forgiveness, good communication, and relies on the idea that the answer to bad free speech is more good free speech. Censorship is not kindness.
Unfortunately, ESPN and the far-Left may have slowed any future advancements to how Americans treat each other. Furthermore, the great irony is that ESPN may have just put the nail in the coffin of the movement to remove or relocate Confederate statues at government locations.
One of the chief reasons so many Americans are opposing the removal of Confederate statues is their fear of the slippery slope. If our culture caves to this, what other statues will be banished and what other things won’t we be able to say?
And, unfortunately, ESPN is proving their argument by taking this absurd stance. Soon, defenders of the statues will start to ask ‘can we not say the names of Confederate generals anymore?’ ‘Is Robert E. Lee’s name so offensive that it needs to be wiped from history books?’
Those sorts of questions will further dig people heels into defending statues, frankly some of which deserve to be removed or relocated.
Should Seattle’s government-maintained statue of Vladimir Lenin, who killed countless people during his communist regime, really stay as-is ‘to remember history’?
Should the statue of Lee and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, dedicated in the city of Baltimore by Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi’s father) in 1948 to push against the Civil Rights movement and celebrate the “sacred institutions” of slavery, really remain unaltered?
Statues are not just history; they are celebrations of that history. But instead of having reasonable discussions about how to deal with statues erected for demonstrably racist or hateful reasons, many Americans are rejecting these discussions outright.
It would be correct to remove or relocate provable celebrations of evil, but unfortunately, political correctness over the past decades like what we’ve seen from ESPN has totally skewed the ability of our nation to judge correctness.
‘Fighting political correctness’ has become an end to its own and a clear political goal of the Trump movement. Any capitulation is weakness and leads to a slippery slope of no return.
If ESPN and others on the Left would stop proving them right, maybe we could actually make some progress.
