Hello, Internet people! How are you all? So glad to see you all back here. Anyway, last night (UPDATE: about three months ago when I wrote this) my roommate and I were having a conversation about how incredibly easy it is to offend people these days. He gave me a great example of a discussion back at the beginning of the year. He and some of our neighbors were talking about something and he happened to mention that he likes fried chicken. A girl in the group immediately called him a racist. His reply, which is amusing in context (neither he nor I are actually racist in the least) and insanely offensive out of it, was to say that racism would be if he had suggested that they get some fried chicken and watermelon and go watch the lynchings. Now, look at that statement, which is intentionally beyond the pale and extremely insensitive if he meant it. That is, yes, a great example of racism.
However, saying you like fried chicken is not racism at all. Fried chicken is good. I don't actually know anyone, vegans aside, who dislikes fried chicken. It's great. If you haven't tried it, go get some now. Seriously. You'll thank me for opening your eyes to this reality.
So why is it racist to like this wonderful food product? The best answer I can come up with is this: people really like to get offended by stuff these days. Being offended is a great way to avoid having to actually talk about anything meaningful, share anything personal, or think about anything that might in any way disagree with your personal worldview. It functions as a combination of a shield against anything you do not want to think about and, simultaneously, an excuse to dismiss and insult people. We're not allowed to do that these days. If you don't like someone, it used to be that you could find some excuse to stab them repeatedly with a rapier. Nowadays, society frowns on that sort of thing. Society even frowns on getting angry and verbally assaulting someone for insulting you personally. You can't take out your personal issues on anyone anymore. Call them a racist/sexist/one percenter/religious oppressor/YouTube commenter, though, and suddenly you have a blank check to do what you want. There is nothing deemed too extreme to apply to a white supremacist, abortion supporter and suspected liberal.
The problem is, being a racist/sexist/Nazi/what have you is in fact a bad thing. Discrimination is bad and should be rooted out. However, it has been my experience that most of the time when people cry discriminatory language, there is nothing actually discriminatory being said. Going back to the first example, what is racist about liking to eat fried chicken? Similarly, I once said in a discussion on affirmative action that we needed to recognize that neither competence nor incompetence in a job are race-dependent qualities. This is, I'm fairly certain, the opposite of racism, since I said all races are equally capable, but the overwhelming sentiment of the class was that I was some kind of heathen misogynistic beggar-punching child-raping Communist-Nazi hybrid and probably a Christian (I grew up with some remarkably radical and mildly psychotic left-wing folks). Most of those insults, you will note, have nothing to do with each other, contradict themselves and each other, and have nothing to do with the topic, yet I swear to you I didn't make any of them up.
The roots of this issue lie in two distinct but intertwined problems. First, deciding what is and is not discriminatory language is very difficult to do. Some terms are agreed upon to be offensive, certainly, but most of the time people do not use those, or use them as an intentional joke. As a result, you can say something in a crowd that neither you nor anyone you know finds offensive and still have a brigade of people forming up to tar and feather you in seconds because they have a different set of offensive words. Second, though, as I said earlier, people love to be offended. Aside from giving them the excuse to vent their personal frustrations on whoever is the target of the moment, it has another, much more powerful quality: it creates common ground. Politics, culture, religion, even movies and television, these things are all individual things and one person's choices may not be reflected around them. However, the overwhelming majority agree that discrimination is bad. That makes it an easy target for creating a small version of an angry mob, a whole group of people who can band together through the common bond of beating down the newly designated common enemy.
The most prevalent modern example of this is the Social Justice Warrior, an Internet phenomenon in which people jump on the bandwagon of feeling offended and proceed to dogpile someone with an unpopular opinion for being offensive. This does not require that it be offensive to the SJW in specific or anyone at all really. In fact, it does not even require the target to say anything. One person posts something, another disagrees and quotes some popular excessively simple and only superficially understood philosophy, and a whole swarm of other SJWs appear out of the woodwork to support and amplify the statement in an instant mutual admiration society. Few to none of them actually understand what they're saying, but they pretend to for the sake of popularity. The same effect plays out in the real world when one person pretends to take offense and most of the room agrees with them for the sake of agreeing. Usually one of them knows what they're talking about and actually is offended (why they are getting offended and believing in whichever philosophy is currently being spouted is another issue entirely), but the rest jump on to be part of the group. It's the same mentality that leads to going along with genocide, going along to be part of a group, and while it is inarguably on a smaller and less lethal scale, the psychology is the same.
So how do we fix it? The answer is quite simple: Have your own opinions. Think about them. Learn them. Express them eloquently, and don't be afraid to be the only one disagreeing. I suspect that most of the time you will not be on your own, since personal beliefs are rarely as monolithic and pure as those expressed by the Social Justice Warrior. Think about this effect and the Social Justice Warrior the same way you think about witch hunts and the townspeople watching their neighbor burn to death on the stake because the mayor wanted more land for his cows. Then feel the same way about joining the SJWs as you would about burning an alleged witch at the stake to give the mayor more pasture land. If enough people do this, maybe we can finally get over the touchiness and intentional ignorance that plague society today and get something positive done.
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