By Danielle Williams
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
A diverse crowd of about 50 Towson University students congregated Wednesday on the third floor of the University Union to gain awareness about the use of language that either embraces or excludes the differences of people in society.
“It’s not about policing someone’s thoughts, it’s about equalizing and making it easier for people to be equals,” Towson student Aleks Jaumzemis said.
“A lot of power dynamics are based on language and because the fact that other people are able to dictate to others what to think and how to feel and what their status is based on the language that they are using, political correctness is trying to re-establish where the power truly lies and what the value of the power is,” said Jaumzemis.
The Communications Studies Department sponsored the discussion titled “Political Correctness: Policing Thought or Promoting Tolerance? Students and faculty explored debates about trigger warnings, macro aggressions and freedom of expression.
Department Chair Jennifer Potter stressed that people are going to make mistakes in the language they use to communicate so, instead of condemning them, the focus should be on helping them fix the mistakes.
“There’s a way to call people out by engaging the conversation and trying to learn from each other instead of saying ‘you said something I don’t agree with and I think it’s offensive so now we’re done,’” said Potter.
Jaumzemis suggested that political correctness may be more difficult for the older generation. He said that it is hard for elders to change their way of thinking because they have held on to the same ideologies for several decades. He said that the elderly tends to associate change with negative effects that are stronger than any proposed benefits because it doesn’t affect them.
“Yes, that is ageist of me to say,” he said. “However, I can repurpose that language to include communities that are not necessarily older but people who are surrounded by wealth and race privilege. Those communities don’t embrace changes of language because they are either hesitant to embrace the idea that the change could be positive or just associate the change to be negative because it harms their status or what they believe to be right.”
Michaela Frischherz, a department faculty member, said, “When someone says, ‘I don’t see race’ or ‘a person of color looks like a criminal’ or ‘you speak so well’ these are microaggressions that are often based on fixed structural racism, sexism and homophobia.”
Frischherz added, “All lives matter is a micro-aggression because it promotes this idea that your issue or your advocacy platform somehow doesn’t matter or matters less because there’s another issue that’s circulating at that particular time.”
During the session, the audience was asked to write microaggressions they experienced on one sheet and, on another sheet, write microaggressions they performed. Frischherz examined the results and found that more students wrote more about microaggressions they experienced rather than microaggressions they performed.
Frischherz explained that the reason for that response is a “social desirability bias,” which means that people are afraid to admit when they have done something that is not favorable by societal standards.
“Being able to evaluate and implement an effective policy that doesn’t trivialize the effect of a trigger warning but also seeks to validate the trauma that students experience would be the most effective option,” Jaumzemis said.
Assistant Professor Desiree Row said that when people take a value, such as valuing students as human beings, and make the value mandatory then it can be enforced and eventually lead to a slippery slope fallacy.
Jaumzemis said the slippery slope fallacy can be harmful because when a teacher is forced to implement trigger warnings, students may begin to disengage from the class and choose not to attend or not to do the work because it offends them. This takes the value out of the policy.
“When something turns into an institutional policy it turns into its own beast,” Rowe added. “Policies that were meant to care for a human can turn into something else.”
Rowe said that last semester the Student Government Association proposed a policy considered by the University Senate to mandate trigger warnings for every professor on campus.
Political correctness emerged in the 1960s and was influenced by the increase in diversity on college campuses, according to a documentary series titled “Explained.” By the 1990s, the white male demographic decreased on college campuses, while women and African American college students became more vocal on such topics as sexism, rape and racism on campus. Political correctness transcended from college campuses and into society to promote inclusiveness and create seemingly more respectful names for minority groups.