Essay 2 rough draft

While political correctness and speech code have earned some criticisms from scholars and students, both ideals do win praises from experts on the other side of the political spectrum. In Racial discourse, hate speech, and political correctness, Linda Greene argued that political correctness is what the society needs nowadays and that “the foes of political correctness want to privatize the question of the liberty of the individuals to speak freely, while the historical victims of racism bear the cost of this privatization policy”. The consequences of defending the privacy and liberty of speech of a wrong person or group can be serious, especially when they abuse their right and intentionally attack another individual verbally. History has shown readers what extreme tolerance and inadequate political correctness can bring, examples such as Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis groups, other white supremacists and so on. In this case, Green pointed out that “arguments framed in terms of political correctness become arguments against public responsibility of transformation of institutions and the end of institutional racism”. The current court cases and news have reported incidents arguing about political correctness, and at some point, the arguments ignore the need of preventing racism or any type of discrimination by enforcing political correctness.
Besides racism, general harassment is one of the reasons why scholars and the general public support political correctness. In Slogans, amens, and speech code, Thomas Grey stated an intriguing viewpoint – “if you are going to prohibit harassment, you are going to regulate speech”. Almost nine of 10 cases of harassment are verbal incidents, which is why it is a very strong piece of evidence to support necessary political correctness and speech code. Thomas Gary is also an advocate of establishing speech code at Stanford University, and explained “Stanford’s regulation was an attempt to reconcile two existing university policies: first, our prohibition against discrimination n the provision of educational services on racial or other grounds; and second, our guarantee of free speech and free debate on campus.” Although speech code supporters are often viewed as opponents of free speech, the reasons provided are in fact very valid and considerable.