redressing pc

So, I’ve been a little busy lately. That, and not knowing how to go about writing this next piece has kept me from writing for the past week or so.

The issue at hand is simply the phrase “politically correct”, and more specifically in relation to the different tribes of the First Nations in North America. I’m not exactly sure when the term “politically correct” was derived or more importantly when it became popular to use and/or “enforce”. I know that at one point in my life people began to say, “That’s not politically correct (or PC). You need to say [fill in the offensive word here].” It was a realization in the world that in the past 500 years since Columbus decided to “discover” America that what has happened since then may have not been all that good. Well, that time has seemed to pass. I’m also not sure when this started, but in the last five to ten years people have begun to say just the opposite; now it is wrong to say something PC. People now think that we should just say what we are thinking or that people are getting to oversensitive or overworked over small issues. I think for the majority of people this is a good thing. I am here to say this - that it is not.

Why? Let’s first look at what the phrase “politically correct” or P.C. means. It’s a language to correct other language. Dictionary.com states “politically correct” as,

“Showing an effort to make broad social and political changes to redress injustices caused by prejudice. It often involves changing or avoiding language that might offend anyone, especially with respect to gender, race, or ethnic background.”

The PC era was meant to do two things. First, to correct or avoid language that might offend someone. Well, we are no longer doing this because people have gotten tired of walking on eggshells with everything they say. The second part is to make social and political changes to injustice and prejudice. Do the first part and second part have any correlation? I’m not going to get into that.

However, I want to address why these two issues are so important, in the context of Native American tribes. The first part relating to PC language is simple: why we should continue to be PC. Simply put, we don’t call Germans French or visa versa and we wouldn’t call an Australian a Russian. So, why should we call a Navajo an Indian? They’re not from India. Why do we do this? There are a couple reasons I can think of. The first is we just might not know. The easy thing to do is to clump different ethnicities together like Asians or Latinos or to just name someone by the wrong ethnicity. The second reason and more at the heart of the issue is the historical context of the language and what it means.

Let’s talk about the historical context of Native Americans. By now most people know why people call Native Americans “Indians”. Because at one time people thought that they were people from India. Five hundred years later we know that Native Americans are not from India, but for some reason we still like to use that language. This is a really good example of how something such a long time ago is still affecting us today. This bring us to my point that if something as simple as continuing to use the wrong language is still common today, then something as difficult as racism and prejudice are even more difficult and influential in our lives today.

Just because people are tired of hearing “PC” doesn’t mean that we need to continue to redress the injustices that were done in history and continue today. I’ll give one great example and let you ponder from there.

Universities and high schools with Native American mascots for the past twenty years or so have been - by suggestion and sometimes by law - asked to change their Native American mascot to something non-Native American. For example, Eastern Michigan University changed their mascot from the Hurons to the Eagles in 1988. Schools continue to do this today. The University of Illinois, the Fighting Illini, began last year to stop using their mascot. Although, they will keep the nickname, Fighting Illini, they have stopped using an Illini as a mascot at football and basketball games. It seems that most people get upset over these changes and say that it isn’t offensive and that it is tradition.

But, when we begin to see where Native Americans were first begun to be used as mascots and such, we see a different story. Beginning around 1880 through about 1920 the United States began to erect statues of Native Americans around the country. Even some of the statue ideas were to be bigger than the Statue of Liberty. The statues were not to honor Native Americans or to remember them as a people. They were affected as a symbol of the nation’s past victories.1 They were a memory of a conquered people and a people that were deemed ‘backwards’ and unable to be civilized.

This history has continued on. And its memorial developed onto Universities, high schools, pro sports teams, and so on. Continued use is to keep the original intent alive. Being politically correct was an intentional effort to change and redress the injustices of this. We cannot stop being PC, but must continue to fight the injustices that still prevail today.

1: Hoxie, Frederick, Final Promise (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1984), p. 103.