On Feb. 12, Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the students’ union at India’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested by the Delhi Police. The arrest followed protests in the university of the hanging of Afzal Guru, a terrorist responsible for the attack on the Indian parliament in 2011. Accusations emerged claiming students were shouting anti-national slogans at the protest, and Kumar was arrested under the charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy.
I was confronted with Kumar’s story right as Stanford’s Undergraduate Senate discussed a bill to rename Stanford property named after Junipero Serra, out of respect to the Indigenous and Native American community.
On campus, that sparked a conversation around P.C. culture — and in India, Kumar sparked a conversation about freedom of speech. Renaming the building was seen by many as giving in to a new P.C. culture of censorship, yet I believe it is a very respectable move. The renaming of buildings commemorating Serra is a statement that we, as a community, no longer accept the erasure of the Indigenous and Native American community from discourse and historical reckoning; that we will no longer judge an individual’s’ achievements separately from his actions towards oppressed communities of their time. And that rethinking is a part of what has been labelled as the “P.C. culture” on campus — and I stand entirely in support of a culture like that.
But on the other hand, I also believe that Kumar’s imprisonment is worrisome sign of government infringing on freedom of speech in India.
To many, those positions seem contradictory. But I don’t think those values are incompatible: I believe we need to divorce the idea of government censorship and oppression from the idea that there is simply a new, evolving absence of people willing to listen to or propagate certain views. That decision by people to change what they consider to be moral and their decision to fight for their position is not censorship; it is discourse.
As citizens, we owe it to society, and to better political and social discourse, not to allow the government to censor opinions, and that is why Kumar’s imprisonment is wrong. But as individuals, we don’t owe it to society to stand in silence while individuals or organizations say things that are offensive — which is why I love the P.C. culture at Stanford.
The arguments made against P.C. culture stem from many demands — but the dominant demand is not for the protection of the right to free speech, but to protect the right to offend. And even that, in my opinion, is permissible to a large degree. But what is at the heart of these demands is not just that — it is the right to offend without being challenged.
Kumar, in his speech at his university, said, “If your notion of justice does not accommodate my notion of justice, then we won’t accept your concept of justice. We won’t accept your concept of freedom.” And that is what P.C. culture is: It is about challenging our collective ideas of justice that have for so long ignored the voices of women, people of color, minorities and other people who have been discriminated against.
What is called “hypersensitivity” or “Leftist domination” by scholars berating P.C. culture is, in fact, a show of defiance — defiance from people who no longer censor themselves.
And this whole idea that we are moving into a P.C culture — that we are becoming more intolerant — is based on those new acts of defiance, and the fear that their novelty generates. The fact is that before, it was acceptable for people to say things that are offensive to minorities, and they didn’t face resistance for it. But now, these acts are called what they have always been to these groups: wrong.
Not “politically incorrect,” but simply “wrong.” “Politically correct” carries with it the implications of a facade – that it is not genuine. But that is a misunderstanding of what these movements are about — at least to me, what P.C culture demands is not self-censorship. To me, P.C. culture is about thoughtfulness.
In a lot of ways, we are molded by society and its implicit biases and all its crude hatred before we have the ability to critically examine it, which means there can be a disconnect between what we intuitively feel or say versus what we know to be the right thing to be. P.C culture is that extra step to evaluate what you’re going to say — and if that is what you want to mean. That is not too much to ask for — in fact, it greatly improves the quality of discourse.
Jonathan Chait’s accusation that, “Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender” rests on the assumption that a political plurality existed before. But that is not true, and what is happening now is that a hegemony of elites is being broken, and voices with more legitimacy — voices who have lived the experience of the issues of race and gender — are emerging.
Society will keep evolving, we will always reevaluate our values and every generation will have to readjust to new morals — and they will all lament the good old days when they didn’t feel like they were stepping through a minefield. But the good old days were only good for a few, and the new day, even if it is challenging, is one worth stepping into so larger parts of society can receive the basic respect they deserve. That, to me, is the embodiment of freedom of speech — not the right of someone to make an insensitive joke.
Contact Rhea Karuturi at rheakaru ‘at’ stanford.edu.