As a Human Rights Commissioner, I am a strong supporter of civil rights–which entails not only objecting to actual civil rights violations, but also objecting to actions deemed offensive when the objections go far beyond common sense–as do the article and video, below, in my humble opinion.
Political Correctness? Really?
terryclarke blog 
Info Wars, the hyperventilating, alarmist site of right wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones, is hardly a credible source for anything. But I will consider its cherry-picked concerns about the costumes permitted at schools’ Halloween parties when Alex Jones beginning to show some concern for real human rights violations. (He believes the UN is an organization out to violate American human rights!) Moreover, excessive zeal in trying to respect the dignity of insular minorities pales in comparison to actual violations of their dignity by the government and other powerful actors. The entire outrage over “PC GONE WILD!” is an attempt by those who have no interest in human rights or iindividual dignity to create a false equivalence. To me, if preventing a child from wearing a mariachi costume is the price to pay for heightened sensitivity to anti-Hispanic stereotypes, then so be it. Or do you think that it woud be acceptable for a child to come i a black-face minstrel costume? After all, that existed at one time.
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Your point is well-taken, and were the majority of the U.S. population as intelligent and attuned to civil rights issues as you obviously are, I would whole-heartedly agree with you. My Asian American daughter, however was called a chink, Commie (because she is bilingual, Russian–her first language, and English), gook, slant-eyes, etc. by her basketball teammates at her former school and the administrators thought I was too “sensitive” for raising these issues and her coaches said she needed to simply “toughen up and take it”– until an Asian American civil rights group filed complaints with the DOJ and Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, who accepted the complaint, but after 2 1/2 half years after accepting the complaint for investigation (for events stretching back over 4 1/2 years) has failed to complete an investigation. I guess my point is that we (in America, or at least in rural Appalachia have bigger fish to fry, but it may be that my own personal experience clouded my judgment a bit. Thank you for pointing out the potential fallacies in my reasoning. I created this site to promote an exchange of ideas and was delighted to receive your very well-reasoned comment. Because of a rare, progressive, irreversible lung disease (and, no, I have never smoked), I have been unable to post as often as I would like. Please feel free to prepare a post eschewing my position and championing yours, and I will gladly post it (with due credit provided, of course, to you). I very much like your rationale and your writing style. Let me know what you think, please, and thank you for commenting!
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Not to continue to beat a dead horse (and certainly not to blame you for the reporting, because I have been a long-time subscriber and generally agree with all you put up here), but because I suspected there had to be more (or less) to the story if it was such a big deal to Alex Jones (and Breitbart and other right wing outlets as well). You will recall that the narrator ominously tells us that “PC” is the attempt by government to control our minds. So I looked up where this nefarious school was and what government was attempting this control. It turns out, according to the story by MRCTV, a self-described non-profit “designed to broadcast conservative values, culture, politics, liberal media bias, and entertainment to a new and diverse audience on a social media optimized site” (where the right wing blogosphere picked up the story), that no U.S. government was involved in this nefarious infringement on a child’s constitutional right to wear costumes to school, because the school was located in Ontario (which, even in Alex Jones’s world I assume is still in Canada). And even there in the land that hates freedom (after all it has universal health care, which in the world of Alex Jones is equivalent to the Cambodian killing fields) it was not a governmental assault on freedom, because the school was a private , Roman Catholic school, St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School, in Brampton, Ontario. The school’s mission is “to be a truly Catholic community where the ideals of Jesus Christ are both taught and witnessed, where staff, students, parents and clergy are respectful and appreciative of each other’s gifts, where everyone is mutually caring and supportive, feels welcome, accepted, loved and challenged to live the Christian ideal.” I wonder why Alex Jones did not attribute the purported human rights violation of the student to the heavy-handed ideology of the Roman Catholic Church? Perhaps because Info Wars is a dishonest spin machine?
Thank you for the opportunity to get this off my chest. I think the entire “PC GONE WILD!” meme is simply a right wing attempt to cover up reporting of real civil rights abuses. If there were any doubt about that compare Info Wars, Breitbart and Fox News’s coverage of Ferguson, Mo. Who were the bad guys? Not the “government” whose police forces wielded US military heavy arms, but rather the residents and the “media” who supposedly harmed those defenders of human rights, the most prominent of which, according to these sources, is the holding of power and the unwillingness to give it up for any reason, least of all for social justice.
I am sorry about the experience of you daughter, which seems more typical of the abuse of power than excessive PC. In fact, as you describe it, I’m sure you and your daughter were chastised for being excessively PC (at least in private). Which is why (in addition to the tenor of your other posts) I wondered why you felt persuaded by the Info War screed.
Cheers
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Actually, I will admit that my research was not up to my typical standards regarding this issue–having just been discharged from the hospital for a recent case of respiratory failure. Thank you for doing the research I should have performed myself before posting. Maybe there is a silver lining in my lack of due diligence–you have explained the issue more appropriately than I possibly could in my weakened state. Thank you again, and please feel free to FULLY express your opinion on any issue I attempt to address.
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Get well soon. We all have a rooting in therest in your fight.
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