If Donald Trump succeeds in stamping out political correctness, Americans will come to miss it.
“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” said Trump way back in August, before the first primary. “I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”
At the Republican National Convention this week in Cleveland, his son Donald Jr. confirmed that his father would be “a president who speaks his mind, and not just when it behooves him to do so…who will give the hardworking men and women who have built this great country a voice once again.”
Political correctness is a euphemism, and a very bad one, so it’s an easy target. It’s a catch-all for notions of civility, tolerance, respect and understanding. But years of snarling talk-radio criticism has made it an insult, and the Republican nominee very effectively turned it into a populist rallying cry.
I grew up in Florida in the 1960s and have uncomfortable memories of the casual Southern racism of that era. A wealthy family might like their maid, but most African American citizens were dismissed with crude epithets — “those people,” “the slums,” “niggers” and worse. We weren’t constrained by political correctness, and it showed in any gathering of young Southern white males — especially if beer was involved. I wish I could say I always spoke up; sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t.
And it wasn’t just African Americans. Jews, Cubans and the very few Asians came in for casual criticism. We didn’t think of this as hurtful; we were just speaking our mind, as Trump’s son urges us to do today.
The problem is that we stereotyped individuals. We didn’t give them a chance. They were defined by their race, religion or heritage.
In such an environment, without political correctness, the stereotype — pun intended — trumps all else. A Mexican immigrant small businessman becomes a rapist and murderer. A young African American artist is a potential cop killer. A Chinese American graduate student is an anchor baby. A Guatemalan refugee is seeking a free handout. An Indian American entrepreneur is stealing our jobs.
The African American author and Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison understood this very well.
“What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define,” she said in 1994. “The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”
White Southerners were the definers in 1960s Florida. Fifty years of progress with political correctness has largely taken away their ability to define. A victorious Donald Trump might bring it back, and we’ll all be worse for it.
Chris Jennewein is editor and publisher of Times of San Diego. He was a reporter and editor for newspapers in Florida, Tennessee and Georgia in the 1970s and 1980s.