Political Correctness or Plain Politeness?
A number of years ago my sister and I took our parents to a rather elegant restaurant for lunch. It was a converted old manor house with beautiful old rooms and quiet carpeted floors; utterly unlike the hard-floored echo chamber of a typical Melbourne café. The gentle clink of cutlery and quiet conversations were the only sounds. I note this because at a strategic moment when everyone in the restaurant went silent, my father dropped the n-word. Nigger. It was like all the oxygen was sucked out of the room. “Dad!!!! You can’t say that!!!” my sister said in horror. “What did I say? What’s wrong with that?” he replied. My father was born in 1916 in country Victoria, and in his mind describing someone of African origin as a “nigger” was descriptive. In this embarrassing context, my sister and I tried to explain that the n-word is considered a highly offensive racial slur. Political correctness means “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perc...