Canadian Politics Today

Perhaps a better question for Phillips would have been whether the path to progress requires us to actually partake in the soul-searching that political correctness originally intended. Not to say, as Phillips did in his Daily Mail article, that because of political correctness, he was not surprised to be called a racist even as a black man. But instead to accept how deeply sad it is that as people of colour, we can hold racist views ourselves. That we, too, might make judgments about how much more “competent” a white candidate seems for a role, because the image of success we are so often fed is prepackaged in a white, male, heterosexual form.

The question is not whether political correctness is mad, but whether its binary distinction between “correct” and “incorrect” doesn’t allow us to have an ongoing discussion about all of the grey areas in between.