These days there's a lot of talk about "political correctness." It's a common term in high schools and colleges; people have started employing PC language in academic papers, and a lack of political correctness is a large part of Donald Trump's presidential campaign platform. There's debate over how much it should apply to everything from movies and books to hairstyles and Halloween costumes. Every time the subject comes up, there are inevitably objections from people of all different backgrounds about how annoying PC culture is, how it's destroying freedom of speech, how they're so tired of having to police every word that comes out of their mouths so they don't offend people, and on and on and on. But there are two problems with these kinds of protests against political correctness.

First of all, it's easy to think that PC terms and PC culture are annoying and unnecessary when you just see it as words that you aren't allowed to say and jokes that you aren't allowed to make. Political correctness isn't about things that majority cultures aren't allowed to talk about, it's about respecting people. If it's less tolerated now to use the n word, call gay people "fags," or use flagrantly sexist racist or language and practices, that's because that behavior is offensive and dehumanizing. It's no different than refusing to answer to an offensive nickname or simply asking to be treated with basic human respect. That's what this is about. However, that's not to say that political correctness can't be taken to too much of an extreme, which brings us to the second problem with current critiques of political correctness, the conflation of political correctness with pluralism.

Political correctness isn't what's damaging freedom of speech and public discourse, pluralism is. In a nutshell, pluralism is the idea that everyone's opinion is equally valid and correct, and to say that you are right and someone else is wrong is arrogant and intolerant. Those principles can have their place in the world, at least in the sense that most if not all points of view should at least have an equal chance to be heard, but everyone can't be equally correct. By definition, if two people contradict each other, if one is right the other must necessarily be wrong. When we decide that isn't the case, we make it impossible for anyone to even express an opinion without it being "intolerant" toward those who might hold other opinions.

Political correctness is about respect; it's pluralism that is about silencing opposition and obsessing over avoiding conflict.