In Defense of Political Correctness

Word Choices are Signals to Others about What Type of Human Being You Are

On a recent episode of Lovecraft Country on HBO a female character named Hippolyta time or dimensionally travels through a machine she discovers and encounters an afro-female presenting-android-alien race that gives her the ability to name herself whatever she chooses. Using their technology, she travels the multiverse as a backup dancer for Josephine Baker, a warrior, an explorer, a wife, and finally back home to be a mother. It was an awe inspiring romp that examined the freedom power and possibility of words and self-declaration. No one and nothing exists in the space she has found who can diminutize her choices through their use of words — there is no one to say “you are,” and the entire freedom experience is rooted in the absence of contradiction to her self-naming. She is who she says she is.

This immense power this self-naming embodies deeply captures the aspirations of marginalized people pushing back against old ways of categorization and seeking newer more progressive ways to be identified both on an individual scale as is the case with the Trans community and on a broader scale as we’ve seen the evolution of Black identifiers as derogatory terms have been patently rejected and we move from negro to colored to African American to Black over the last century. Language shifts, ideals change, justice advances and we are confronted with new opportunities to both hone and perfect the ways we names…