Muzzled by Juan Williams Read Free Book Online

movement. People began to refer to the chairman of a group as the “chairperson” or simply “the chair” in recognition that the chair could be a woman.
    Comedians including Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin lampooned America’s hypocrisy in banning from radio and TV the same vulgar epithets and profanity that were being used every day at home and on the street. Carlin became famous for his routine “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” He skewered the American acceptance of euphemistic language that obscured reality, from sexual practices to racism, that Americans did not want to talk about.
    The people jiggering with the engine of popular language used by news correspondents, politicians, and comedians in the sixties succeeded in making everyday people more aware of racism, sexism, and stereotypes of all sorts. This could be described as the post–World War II era of the opening of the American mind. The big idea was increased awareness leading to empathy, a new conception of how America could improve its practice of democratic ideals and finally effect real change in the form of civil rights laws and equal opportunities for women in the workplace. Discomfort in the nation with racial segregation and the government’s questionable conduct of the Vietnam War provided a fertile environment for these ideas that challenged the established political order to take root. There was a superficial feel to some of these linguistic changes, but anyone who dismissed them as a passing fad had it wrong. The changes in popular language soon became changes in our textbook accounts of history; literature was scrutinized for its “Eurocentric canon” promoting the “white male power structure.”
    In a burst, universities agreed to create whole new academic departments, such as Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Women’s Studies. “Critical theory” courses also became prominent during that time, essentially teaching that the transformation of Western society can be achieved through unremitting and deconstructive criticism of every institution in Western society. Critical theorists did not view institutions in the traditional sense as just business, government, education, and the like. They viewed these institutions as representations of social inequality when it came to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and politics. To left-wing intellectuals,this new “critical theory” approach revealed major American institutions as defenders of the status quo—protecting the wealthy, the powerful, and racial majorities. The animating idea behind “critical theory” is that these institutions should be deconstructed in the name of achieving genuine equality.
    David Horowitz, a sixties campus leftist turned conservative writer, has written extensively about this period of history. He became a conservative because he was repulsed by the ever-widening constraints of politically correct behavior that made it impossible for him to express a different point of view to his fellow left-wingers without being dismissed as a sellout working for “the man” or an “Uncle Tom.”
    Horowitz was just one voice in a brewing backlash that extended far beyond the American campus. Conservatives began to point out that the culture of political correctness was a hammer to bludgeon national politics and news reports into conformity with a liberal point of view. The right wing felt the left wing had co-opted the debate by finding a way to shut up people who defended American traditions and conservative principles. As a result, the political right wing began to fight politically correct campus “speech codes” and “hate codes,” complaining that American colleges and universities basically indoctrinated top students in leftist thinking. Nobel Prize–winning writer Saul Bellow told
The New Yorker
that political correctness was “free speech without debate.” Novelist Doris Lessing, another Nobel Prize winner, called