Kareem scores on Trump, misses on PC

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tends to be one of the more thoughtful commentators from the Left side, so his Time editorial about political correctness, "Political Incorrectness Is Just a Strategy", does make some very good points. However, it is overall a hit-and-miss.

While politics does influence culture, and vice versa, culture should not be a reason for political choices. As Kareem says:

When Donald Trump and others lambast [political] correctness, they're just distracting from real issues.

Mind you, I think Kareem minimizes the corrosive nature of overly politically correct actions and rhetoric on our culture. Even Kareem recognizes the silliness of some people:

Right now, this understandable but misplaced angst is directed at incidences of political correctness that seem to go to new extremes to avoid insulting, offending or marginalizing anyone. We all get that. It seems as if every day there’s another report of some public officials’ overreacting to a perceived insensitivity. A survey at Yale University had 63% of students wanting professors to issue “trigger warnings” before saying anything that some might find offensive or could cause painful emotions. Many critics have described this new avoidance of microaggression as coddling students, who should expect their opinions to be challenged in college to better prepare them for the real world outside. That “coddled” assessment seemed confirmed when 25 students at UCLA staged a sit-in because a professor had corrected the spelling and grammar errors on graduate-level essays. They accused him of creating a “hostile campus climate” for students of color. Students at the University of New Hampshire were issued a list of resources to help them avoid offensive language such as American (because it suggests the U.S. is the only country in the Americas), homosexual (PC version: “same-gender-loving”), elderly (“people of advanced age”) and healthy (“nondisabled”). Comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have said the climate of political correctness is so restrictive that they have stopped performing on college campuses. Comedian Bill Maher has complained of “political-correctness Nazis” who “hound me to censor every joke and apologize for every single slight.” 

For many Americans, the abuses of political correctness extend to beloved social traditions. Saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” seems to some a sinister attempt to restrict religious expression rather than a way to include non-Christians in the holiday spirit. A school in Connecticut attempted to ban Halloween costumes out of concern that some children might feel “excluded from activities due to religion, cultural beliefs, etc.” Angry parents quickly forced a reversal of that policy. 

The problem which Kareem misses is this kind of silliness pervades American culture and politics. Every criticism of President Obama inevitably ends up with somebody accusing the critic of racism, regardless of the nature of the criticism. And in America today, once accused of racism, the accused risks gaining pariah status. This is why there is a backlash against the abuses of political correctness, and why Donald Trump has been able to use this as a dog whistle to so many supporters.

To be honest, this is the greatest fear in American culture for white people. To be labelled a racist is every bit as heinous for whites as it is for a black person to be called the "n"-word, and possibly worse, since there will be no public sympathy for the white person, even if they are innocent of the racist charge.

This is why Trump can use political correctness as a political point, even if there is nothing he can do, even as president, to solve this cultural problem. This is where Kareem gets it both right and wrong: This is a bigger problem in American culture than Kareem recognizes, but he is right that Trump's rhetoric won't fix it. In fact, Trump's rhetoric covers for a lack of seriousness about real political issues.

If nothing else, Trump's popularity should serve as a wake-up call to the Left about their abuses of political correctness as an anti-white tool. And if they don't recognize it quickly, they may wake up to a President Trump in January.