Political correctness knows no statue of limitations
If Ralph Northam were to resign as governor of Virginia, it would be a great victory for the bullies of the left, writes JOSEPH EPSTEIN of National Review
The first time I heard the name “Ralph Northam” was late last month when he endorsed what seemed a radically dangerous abortion scheme for the state of Virginia, of which he is governor. I thought about how likely this was to stir up the country’s pro-life forces, adding to the nation’s already high GDP, or Gross Divisiveness Product.
But then, when a putative photograph of Ralph Northam either in blackface or wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood taken from his medicalschool graduation yearbook showed up, I began to feel sympathy for him. My sympathy increased as I heard people say that having this photograph revealed meant that Mr. Northam must step down from his office as governor.
Mr. Northam graduated from medical school in 1984, so the photograph was taken 35 years ago. The incident reminded me that political correctness knows no statute of limitations.
What may now be thought of as
“the yearbook ploy” surfaced last year in the egregious
Brett Kavanaugh hearings, where scribblings in Justice
Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook were used to suggest he’d been a sexual predator when he was a teenager. Why stop at high school, I wondered? Maybe he pulled a girl’s pigtails when he was in the fifth grade.
Many tend to find political correctness amusing in its absurdity. For instance, there was the politically correct person who objected to the vagina caps worn by women in a recent protest march on the grounds that not all vaginas, like the caps, are pink and, she added, not all women have vaginas.
On one occasion, one of my graduate students mentioned that a friend of his girlfriend was taking my course on Joseph Conrad. “I hope she’s not disappointed in it,” I said, fishing for a compliment. “Well, if you must know,” he said, “she thinks you’re sexist.” When I asked on what grounds, he answered that she notices that in class I call on more male than female students. “Tell her, please, that if I thought it had something interesting to say, I would call on an hermaphroditic armadillo.” But I couldn’t get out of my mind the notion of that young woman sitting there counting the number of male or female students I called on each day in class.
No humor allowed
Something not merely humorless but mentally dull there is about the mindset of political correctness. Complexity of character
is out. To be politically correct one must also firmly believe that people do not change: If they were the least racist, sexist or homophobic 40 years ago, they must still be.
For the politically correct, what someone says, as distinguished from what he does, is crucial. This precludes the many men and women who have harsh, even objectionable opinions but lead generous, honorable lives. H.L. Mencken was such a man. In many of his essays, Mencken referred to African-Americans as “blackamoors,” yet in his professional life, he praised and promoted black writers. Much more common are people with perfect sets of opinions — race, check; the environment, check; LGBT, check — whose actions are selfish, insensitive, even cruel.
At The New York Review of Books last year, Ian Buruma, the journal’s relatively new editor and a longtime contributor, was fired for printing an article by a Canadian radio broadcaster attempting to clear his name from charges of sexual assault of which Canadian courts had found him not guilty. Whether he was guilty or not, one might think he at least deserved a hearing, which could subsequently be attacked by his accusers.
Mr. Buruma no doubt henceforth will be marked permanently non grata in all the right places. The politically correct are merciless. And why not, they might argue: They have right on their side; to be politically incorrect is for them a euphemism for regressive, toxic, evil.
Political correctness is many ways the death of humor, too. No ethnic jokes are allowed, no nationality, no mother-in-law, no battleof-the-sexes jokes. The only humor in a politically correct world is the unconscious humor occasioned by the full-court humorlessness of the politically correct themselves. This past winter, for example, they discovered that “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was politically incorrect; it’s a song, you see, about bullying (”All of the other reindeers, laughed and called him names”). “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” turns out to be about potential sexual assault, so best not to be caught humming it, either.
Academe is ground zero
The American university is where political correctness flourishes most. Diversity is one of the leading goals of the contemporary university, except in the realm of opinion and point of view. Speakers with heterodox views, should these views even faintly smell of the politically incorrect, are shouted down by students confident they have right on their side, and are rarely censured by their professors for doing so. In the university, anything outside the realm of the politically correct is held to be dangerous, unsafe and the First Amendment exists in theory only.
Political correctness originated among the student revolutionaries of the mid1960s. Thinking themselves victims, they made victimhood a form of secular sainthood. The chief victims were African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians — later, Muslims. Among other minorities, AsianAmericans and Jews, not so much.
Many of these ‘60s students remained in the university as professors, and by the 1980s and ‘90s were in positions of power. And now, where else in but in English and history departments in American universities will one still find Marxists? Where else are so many subjects politicized? Fortunately, no way has been found to teach feminist physics or Hispanic chemistry or gay engineering, or the university would be an entirely worthless enterprise.
In going along with the program of political correctness, the university has greatly helped spread its doctrines. I recently complained to a friend at university where I had taught for 30 years about the waste entailed in hiring an associate provost for diversity at a salary I take to be around $200,000 a year. My friend replied that, without an associate provost for diversity on the staff, the university might not qualify for federal funds for science projects.
Rare is the university professor who is ready to speak out against political correctness. My own experience of this conformity bred of want of courage was when, in the middle 1990s, I was fired owing to political correctness from the job of editor of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, The American Scholar. The reason had nothing to do with politics, because I made it a point to clear the journal’s pages of all contemporary political content, but with my not running any articles on the subjects of feminism or African-American Studies. I didn’t do so because I received no articles on these subjects that seemed of any genuine interest, even after I had solicited some.
And now, in Virginia
This brings us back to Ralph Northam. The gangup against him has been nothing if not impressive. After the yearbook photograph was revealed, he claimed that he did not appear in it as either the man in blackface or the figure in KKK hood and gown. He did allow that, for a dance contest, in 1984, he dressed as Michael Jackson and used blackface. Again, this was 35 years ago. That he has apparently been a strongly liberal governor cuts no ice with the political correct.
The Democratic National Committee has asked for Ralph Northam’s resignation from the governorship of Virginia. The state’s two U.S. senators have done likewise. The Republican Party of Virginia insists that he no longer can govern and must go. Many black politicians across the country have muttered the usual phrases about “the pain he has caused,” that only his resignation will “help us heal,” that nothing less than his removal from public life will “stop the pain.”
Mr. Northam, as I write, has refused to resign — despite the bullying of the selfrighteous. A young man dressing up and doing an impression of Michael Jackson dancing is not, one would think, a big deal. But it is in the world of the politically correct, where human nature is judged incapable of change, humor is not allowed, any sense of proportion is precluded and virtue invariably resides with the accuser.