It’s hard to find the reason for the controversy when you look at the ad: Four young girls posing together for a Gap Kids campaign. The girl on the left is doing a handstand with her legs folded in the shape of a heart. The girl on the far right is holding her right foot above her head in an impressive standing split. The two girls in the middle are posing casually, and the taller of the two has her arm resting on the other’s head.
The problem? The shorter girl is black, and social media users managed to create so much outrage last week about this supposedly blatant racism that Gap apologized and pulled the ad. It didn’t seem to matter that the two girls in the middle, one white and one black, are sisters – and close ones at that.
Score one for political correctness run amok.
In the Sunday Monitor, columnist Katy Burns quoted an email written by Ted Tichy, chairman of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Commission, regarding the widespread opposition to the proposed reopening of the bobcat hunt: “I’m not going to be swayed by the politically correct movement on this one. If we do, we might as well kiss all trapping and hunting goodbye.”
How do you discredit thoughtful, compassionate people who happen to disagree with you? Dismiss their argument as nothing more than elitist drivel.
Score one for the “all criticism is driven by political correctness” crowd.
In a segment for the Big Think website this winter, comedian John Cleese said fellow comedians have warned him about performing at college campuses because students are too easily offended (Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Bill Maher are among those who share that view).
“When you’re around super-sensitive people,” Cleese said, “you cannot relax and be spontaneous because you have no idea what’s going to upset them.”
He rejects the idea that people should be protected from uncomfortable emotions. Political correctness has been taken from being a good idea (“Let’s not be mean”), he said, to a point where any kind of criticism can be labeled as cruel – and that’s a problem for comedians because all comedy is critical.
“If you start to say, ‘We mustn’t; we mustn’t criticize or offend them,’ then humor is gone,” Cleese said. “With humor goes a sense of proportion. And then as far as I’m concerned, you’re living in (George Orwell’s) 1984.”
Score one for Cleese – and for the late, great anti-PC crusader George Carlin – because they have it right. America has a political correctness problem, but it exists in many places and in many different forms.
Critics of the Gap Kids ad went out of their way to find racism where it didn’t exist, and in the process undermined the fight against actual institutional racism.
Tichy’s dismissal of bobcat hunt opponents as being part of the “political correctness movement” is the laziest of positions. It’s a technique Donald Trump is teaching his disciples: Why defend or explain controversial stances when you can just marginalize your critics with a catch phrase?
Too many people go out of their way to be offended. Too many others are seeking validation for their prejudice. In the middle is a wary America walking on eggshells and wondering if it’s okay to laugh at a world gone crazy. No offense.