Political Correctness?
Wonder Cabinet
Wonder Cabinet Productions
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2015
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is it ever possible to be too racially sensitive or tolerant? This hour, a look at how we talk about touchy subjects -- whether political correctness promotes safety or censorship. Is Political Correctness a Form of Censorship?; Political Correctness Is About Safety; The Limits of Tolerance; Racial Paranoia; Dangerous Idea: Trauma; T.C. Boyle Talks "The Harder They Come".
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It's to the best of our knowledge. Today, political correctness. I'm Anne Strange Champs, |
| 0:09.3 | and here's a scene that might be familiar. You're at a party, talking to somebody you just met, |
| 0:14.4 | everything's going really well, and then you ask what seems like an innocuous question, |
| 0:19.8 | maybe about favorite restaurants or music or where |
| 0:23.0 | they're from? And then it starts, that terrible inner monologue. Did that question sound racist? |
| 0:29.6 | Was it racist? Or sexist? Or homophobic? Should you apologize? Or would that just make it even worse? |
| 0:37.0 | By the time the evening's done, you're so exhausted, |
| 0:39.2 | you just want to go home and curl up in bed. So we've all been there before, right? Afraid something |
| 0:45.7 | we said offended someone or could be misinterpreted. Some people would call this sensitivity. |
| 0:51.6 | Others call it political correctness. It's exhausting. I mean, I quote a lot of other writers |
| 0:57.0 | who talk about how exhausting the rules of PCR, how draining it is, how it drives people |
| 1:03.1 | out of the movement and causes them to stop being political. So in that sense, it's quite |
| 1:08.0 | self-defeating. Jonathan Chait is a staff writer for New York Magazine, and he recently published a takedown of political correctness that caused a real stir on the Internet because he sees PC being used as a tool to silence debate. |
| 1:21.9 | I saw a movement in certain parts of left-wing culture that has been resurgent in the last year, year |
| 1:29.9 | and a half after having been mostly dormant that reminded me of the political culture I experienced |
| 1:35.8 | in college in the early 90s, which was also a moment that went away fast. So I wanted to define |
| 1:41.0 | and explain what was going on and make an argument to liberals that they |
| 1:45.3 | shouldn't be celebrating or participating in this movement, but should oppose it. |
| 1:49.0 | So you're talking about a community on the far left and a kind of language in which people |
| 1:55.8 | are incredibly sensitive to linguistic usages or arguments that strike them as not just the big ones, |
| 2:04.9 | racist or sexist, but heteronormative or other terms. |
| 2:11.1 | Right. It's a lot of sensitivities, you know, race and gender being the main ones, but like |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wonder Cabinet Productions, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Wonder Cabinet Productions and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.