To be able to fully take away from this article, we first need to clarify two terms: white supremacy and white privilege. While these are often confused or used in place of one another, they are actually quite different.

White supremacy is in reference to the racial hierarchy where white sits on top. The United States was founded on this system of white male upper class supremacy, legally, culturally, economically and politically, and remains that way today. Of course there are white people, such as women, or the impoverished, who do not feel they benefit from this system, while they might not benefit as heavily as the upper class, because they are white, they still suffer much less than people of color. White men do not experience the wage gap present among people of color, and while women do experience a wage gap, because they are white, it is not as large as that of women of color.

Now, white privilege is "a set of advantages and/or immunities that white people benefit from on a daily basis beyond those common to all others. White privilege can exist without white people's conscious knowledge of its presence and it helps to maintain the racial hierarchy in this country." White privilege is the fact that all my bosses at work look the same as me. Or the fact that in the popular books and shows I grew up with, like "Harry Potter" and "Lizzy McGuire," almost all the characters looked like me. It's a system built out of white supremacy.

It’s white privilege to walk into a room and be interviewed by someone who looks like me. It’s white supremacy that made it so this is a routine occurrence.

Hatred toward being politically correct (PC) is everywhere, but a huge target is liberal arts colleges. Take, for example, Scripps College in Claremont, CA. A highly ranked, very respected institution, and also the most racist undergraduate school in the country? Front Page Mag wrote an article last May which dragged Scripps through the proverbial mud, and over what? White racism.

The author, Matthew Vadum depicted Scripps as an "all-female, ultra-politically correct" school that is ruining society because of it's educational, and reasonable courses, that discuss real societal issues, like white privilege, how to become a trans ally, and why reverse racism is not a thing. All reasonable topics, and ones I've discussed in courses and extracurriculars on my own liberal arts campus in Western NY. But to the author of this article, these concepts are centered around man hating, anti-white agenda.

As the Unofficial Scripps College Survival Guide states, “reverse racism cannot exist because white people maintain power over people of color” and “because there are no institutions that were founded with the intention of discriminating against white people on the basis of their skin [color].” This is a true statement. You cannot be racist against white people due to the fact that they hold supremacy based purely on the color of their skin, but you can still be prejudiced. This is an important differentiation that some forget to make. So why are we critiquing and criticizing the truth? It's because, in some people's eyes, this is only the politically correct truth, and therefore it's untrue.

There has been extreme backlash throughout election season toward people commonly referred to as PC or politically correct. This backlash comes mainly from the Republican side with Presidential hopeful Donald Trump advertising that, “I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”

The aggressive attitude toward those of us labeled PC has been simmering for years. The whole concept of political correctness is centered around the idea that we as a culture need to be more sensitive toward other people's lives and personal challenges. Amanda Taub of Vox understands as she describes political correctness as "a sort of catch-all term we apply to people who ask for more sensitivity to a particular cause than we're willing to give, a way to dismiss issues as frivolous in order to justify ignoring them."

While Taub's explanation is perfectly sensible, the more conservative Americans feel like PC people are coddling our country. The thing is, we aren't, we are promoting the same concepts that have changed society's perceptions prior. For example, you wouldn't call a gay man a fag because we now understand that that is insulting and rude. You wouldn't walk up to a black man and call him colored because that terminology developed in a time pre-civil rights, and its use is more appropriate for a slave owner than a 21st-century adult.

People still break these simple rules of civility, and why? To benefit their own needs to be right? If I introduce myself to you as Carrie, when my full name is Caroline Anne, you wouldn't question it; you would respect my decision to be called Carrie and we'd move on, no discussion necessary. So why discuss someone's gender or their choice to go by they/their pronouns? Why question the removal of racial terminology from our society? We are developing for the better, not worse, and it's time people realized this.