The College Fix

Laying the groundwork for her own censorship

Criticizing opinion articles by college students is like shooting fish in a barrel. The main difference is that fish haven’t learned anything by the time the shooting is done.

Harvard Crimson editorial writer Laura Veira-Ramirez got a crowdsourced education (a long moderated comment thread) in response to her poorly argued defense of political correctness last week, though it’s not clear she personally availed herself of the debate.

Her basic argument is that stopping people from saying subjectively offensive things has no tradeoff, that “being politically correct doesn’t hurt anyone.” It’s based on Veira-Ramirez’s own experience at a conference for the nonprofit group Best Buddies, which advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities:

I reveled in the amount of strength and talent that could be found in people with disabilities when given the right spaces to showcase them. After spending so much time defending the humanity of the friends I had grown to love in my school, I finally got a glimpse of the kind of world we could live in.

So she set to work implementing that world in the form of a campaign at her high school designed to eliminate use of the word “retarded”:

People use it in place of words like stupid, dumb, ridiculous, crazy, and countless other negative words. This implies that people with intellectual disabilities are all these things.

The only problem for Veira-Ramirez is that campus activists at elite schools like hers have moved on to designating those “negative” words – which unlike “retarded” she reprints sans asterisks – as unfit to use at all.

Smith College’s campus newspaper, for example, went so far as to replace every use of “crazy” in an event transcript with “ableist slur.” Its editors weren’t content to even faithfully convey what people said in public, shirking their obligation to readers.

My identity and mental health is at risk

Veira-Ramirez believes the limited goal of encouraging polite behavior toward people who have been clinically diagnosed with mental challenges can be easily expanded to regulating how all of us talk to each other, in every social context:

Best Buddies gave me my first real introduction to political correctness. It provided me with the proper language to help ensure my friends were being treated with the respect they deserved. Never in a million years would I have thought that being in favor of it was a sign of weakness or coddling. The whole thing is quite reasonable. If something you say makes another person uncomfortable or feel less than others, why would you continue to say it?

If you suddenly saw one child hit another, you wouldn’t yell at the child who was hurt for being upset. You would tell the other child to stop.

MORE: University writing center combats ‘unjust language structures’

Dear Ms. Veira-Ramirez,
Your claim that PC culture is good is hurtful to me. I demand your speech be silenced.https://t.co/l4zl3Ds5gu pic.twitter.com/qWq4JDScVc

— I'm a woman, and I'm mad as Hell (@nowhere_nh) July 31, 2017

This privileged Ivy League word-cop – a self-described female minority and activist for undocumented immigrants like herself – seems to think that a society can authentically debate ideas while censoring the very words that a person can use to express those ideas, if those words are subjectively interpreted to attack a person’s identity:

Why should we welcome opinions that intentionally discredit who we are? …

These hateful words are bullets that slowly tear down at our humanity with every shot fired. …

Do you know what actually has a direct effect on a person’s ability to perform academically? Their mental health.

She admits it: Making arguments that include verboten words is violence.

If that’s her standard for harm, Veira-Ramirez took a veritable hail of bullets in the comments.

‘Hilariously bad straw man’

One commenter said the editorial writer set up “a hilariously bad straw man” by reducing PC culture to being nice to people with diagnosed mental challenges, while another predicted Veira-Ramirez will “quickly come to appreciate the value of protecting ‘offensive’ speech” when her own views face official disapproval.

Yet another challenged Veira-Ramirez to recognize that “the most marginalized human beings within the university world are conservatives” who are being “slandered, harassed, suppressed, punished, terrorized, [and] fired” because they value truth more than “polite lies.”

Op-ed page for @thecrimson having quite a summer. No expl. here on how to–or who gets to–define "hateful speech":https://t.co/TEMGvdDvGj

— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) July 31, 2017

When a commenter asked the editorial writer to consider the possibility that PC might actually mean “actively punishing or silencing those who say insensitive things using the power of the university administration, or through tactics like shouting speakers down … demanding resignations and firings, and so on,” another defended Veira-Ramirez:

Political correctness is not about censorship. It’s about recognizing the marginalized human beings that exist behind the words you use.

Asked how a university should respond when students do not act in that subjective way, Veira-Ramirez’s defender recommended … censorship. At the university’s “discretion.” Not like that will ever be abused!

One day, it will be our privileged young journalist who realizes at an inopportune time that she has argued away her only principled defense against the censorship of her own speech.

MORE: If you say ‘crazy’ at Smith, student paper will replace with ‘ableist slur’

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