: Is political correctness a challenge to clarity of communication and characterisation The Ugly Sisters were ugly, everybody knows that, and in visual media they portrayed that way. I'm not going

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Political correctness is not a challenge to clarity, it IS clarity, without your cruel and hateful or disdainful spin on it.

What you call political correctness is what I call not using language I know, on average, is perceived by others as hurtful. I don't use racial epithets because I know people of the race in question typically find those epithets insulting; with the possible exception of use by friends of their own race. I don't use epithets about homosexuality because I know homosexuals feel insulted by them.

Even if I wanted to insult a member of such a group, I wouldn't use those epithets because they'd have nothing to do with why I occasionally want to insult someone, which is exclusively about being a jerk, which has nothing to do with race or sexual orientation.

There is nothing wrong with avoiding language we know is hurtful to others, the only people that seem bothered by political correctness seem to be self-centered lazy-ass jerks that just don't care about the feelings of other people, and don't mind spewing hatred, probably because they don't have the intellect to remember terms that are not offensive.

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Political correctness—the term—is a distraction. It was coined in Nazi Germany to describe what would not be censored, and all applications since have been disparaging. Applied to race relations it’s used for the disparaging sense, to deflect mere criticism and conflate it with full censorship, the better to preempt critical content. Often this usage is reflexive rather than deliberate. Being consistently a misnomer, the term today means nothing accurate, only what its users fear it might mean for them.

As a writer, considering political correctness through the lens of fear is already a failure and makes one’s work materially worse, not better, both for those who shy away from the term, and for those whose reactions are feared. There is no positive for having “political correctness” in a writer’s lexicon. It offers no positive guide to improving one’s writing, only a turning away from unwanted ideas. It’s an erroneous theory of human relations. It is as harmful for a modern writer to either embrace or avoid “political correctness” as it is harmful for a modern scientist to devote any effort to either proving or disproving the theory of phlogiston. Engaging with the concept is a conceptual trap.

If “political correctness” is something that a nagging part of a writer’s being says must be faced, addressed, grappled with, that’s a start, but before setting foot to that path that writer desperately need a better map to navigate by than the conceptual dead end of “political correctness”.

Neil Gaiman suggests a better map:

I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

To apply this takes, well, the particular consciousness of a writer touching every word on the page in the images it weaves with its fellows.

Does the story respect its subject? If not, does it still respect its reader? If not, does it need to disrespect its reader? If it must, does this story need to be told?

Only the writer can answer that, when writing.

If the writer can’t answer that, doesn’t know how to answer that, doesn’t know how to tell how their text relates to their readers and what story it tells, then as always, the writer has work to do. After all, once published, everyone but the writer will answer.

But why “respect” instead of “political correctness”? It’s not just more accurate, it’s more freeing. It does not lead to sacrificing clarity.

A writer who can confidently answer those questions, in whatever mix, is miles ahead of considerations of “political correctness”. Where the latter is a crude, inaccurate straight jacket—and just as antiquated—considerations of respect for people, readers, demographics—whatever the story touches—allows a writer to navigate race with nuance and awareness. Navigating by respect allows writers to create more daring yet deft works of fiction. Navigating with respect as the guiding star allows works that “political correctness”, in its shallowness, would say should not be written.

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