Political Correctness on Campus

I've actively had my eye out for Political Correctness on campus for about three years. Subconsciously, I've had my eye out for it for much longer. In the media, particularly the right wing blogosphere, the common villian is the liberal faculty who instills politically correct values upon the students - sometimes against their will.

Although most faculty is liberal, in my experience, they are mature enough to recognize students for their aptitude, regardless of the students political persuasion. And generally, faculty is open to being questioned on their sometimes silly political beliefs. In general, they are able to have conversations and defend their beliefs, and generally are open to hearing points of view they don't share. After all, that's part of their job.

But where I've noticed a startling lack of originality and sometimes an obtuse political correctness is from the students. Particularly in my interaction with undergraduate students at USC. They seem incapable of discussing some topics for fear of being considered politically incorrect. They sometimes resort to using terms such as racist in complete seriousness to describe what at best, might be a stereotype. Because we are in film school and working with characters, throwing around the term racist to describe a bad character description is not only foolish, but almost purposefully malicious - particularly when it's clear the author did not intend anything hateful.

It is as if these students have never come face to face with real racism in their lives and think mispoken words or poorly crafted characters constitute racism. It's absurd.

A couple of examples:

We were talking about race and I said something like there are five races. This undergrad looked at me like I was crazy. I said "what?" He said, "Dude, that's like, racist." I said, "Why?" He said, "There are totally more than five races. There are all sorts of mixed races and ethnographic distinctions, and blah, blah, blah." And I was like, "Are you kidding me dude: there's white, black, brown, yellow, and red." Those are the basic racial categories. Look at the census." He was like, "Dude, I can't even have a conversation with you, you're ignorant."

Ignorant? For admitting there is such a thing as race? Jesus Christ.

Then there's the example of resorting headshots in our production office. Some students were completely against sorting headshots based upon race because it seemed old fashioned and stupid because no one cares about race anymore? Hunh? The fact is, sometimes people are looking to cast Asian actors. And that, in and of itself, is not wrong. Some students felt like it was our job to encourage people to look at casting outside the race that their characters were conceived as. Hunh? Why would that be our job? The silliness and general jitteriness students have with respect to discussing and breaking down race is absurd.

Anyhow, beware...it ain't all the faculties fault, it's a large part of the students too scared to be perceived as insensitive, too scared to weigh other values than diversity, too scared to think and question those silly red politically correct flags.