| Jaicee said: I believe in color-blindness. I try to treat everyone the same. If that's not enough then, well, sorry. And I've also lost a lot of faith in some of the more shall we say pronounced demands we've seen emerge prominently from the 'anti-racist' movement of late, like proposals to de-fund local police departments. Those sorts of policies have, in fact, been enacted in many U.S. cities since the murder of George Floyd just over a year ago now and the main consequence has been a sustained uptick in violent crime, not the emergence of more social peace. I'm far from alone in these sentiments too, I might add. Violent crime is now the leading issue of public concern in this country and the share of the population describing race relations as a "very big problem" has dropped from 54% a year ago to 41% today. I don't feel that I'm particularly out of touch here. It's in senses like these that I find political correctness dangerous. It can cost people their lives. To that end, I think it deserves to be mocked. |
There is nothing wrong with treating people the same. The issue with the idea of "color blindness" is that if you are blind to color, then you are unable to see the ways in which certain minorities still face discrimination and mistreatment. This doesn't seem to apply to you, as you do seem to recognize that, for example, our criminal justice system still operates with a degree of baked-in systemic racism.
It is things like this which routinely frustrate me about these conversations. More often than not, people don't disagree with what is at the heart of these discussions, they just don't fully understand what is being said, so they fill in the blanks with their imagination and lash out when that imagined conclusion seems out of line. This isn't entirely the fault of the people making those assumptions (though people should generally figure out what they are talking about before they complain about it). The left (and especially the academic left) has a tendency to talk to itself, so someone outside of that bubble will need to do a lot of catching up. Personally, I hate this about the left and I think it is imperative that we do better.
Anyways, largely the same thing can be said of "defund the police". Defunding the police reflects the idea of shifting funding to long-term crime fighting initiatives such as improved education, housing and wages. Look at the police budget for just about any city and it will be hard to not see that decades of "tough of crime" policy has left our social systems starved for funding, and look at the actual outcomes of policing (e.g. Imprisonment increases the odds that an individual will commit further crime) to see that this "solution" is actually pretty garbage. As for the uptick in crime across the country, there is currently little evidence connecting this to changes in police funding, so I think you would be wise to either source your claim of a causal relationship, or dial back your rhetoric a touch.
That said, this likely isn't the place for discussions about how to best allocate funding to reduce crime (and even if it was, making "Defund the Police" a stand in for "political correctness" is somewhat bizarre).
All I'm really trying to say is that most of this hand-wringing about political correctness is largely empty of substance. It is just outrage culture. People want something to be mad at which aligns with their biases and political correctness seems to have drawn the lucky lot this year...
