1970s[]
In the 1970s, the American
began using the term
politically correct.
In the essay
The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970),
said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a
, too." Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical
. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left,
, and
... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts."
PC is used in the comic book
Merton of the Movement, by
, which was followed by the term
ideologically sound, in the comic strips of
.
In her essay "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992)
said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the
's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality'."
suggests one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one:
According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', Comrade!"
, in 1992, commented that a number of
who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former
members, and, as a result, familiar with the
use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic".
During the 1990s, conservative and
politicians, think-tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies – especially in the context of the
about
and the content of public-school curricula.
, in
Tenured Radicals, endorsed
view that PC is best described as "Left Eclecticism", a term defined by Kimball as "any of a wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought from structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, and Lacanian analyst to feminist, homosexual, black, and other patently political forms of criticism".
Liberal commentators have argued that the conservatives and reactionaries who used the term did so in effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination – such as
,
,
, and legal inequality – against people whom conservatives do not consider part of the social mainstream.
wrote that "that phrase was born to live between scare-quotes: it suggests that the operative considerations in the area so called are
merely political, steamrolling the genuine reasons of principle for which we ought to be acting..."
Commenting in 2001, one such British journalist,
, said "the phrase is an empty, right-wing smear, designed only to elevate its user", and, in 2010, "the phrase 'political correctness' was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say
,
, or
".
Another British journalist,
,
wrote in 2001:
Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid–1980s, as part of its demolition of American liberalism.... What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism – by levelling the charge of "political correctness" against its exponents – they could discredit the whole political project.
—
, "Words Really are Important, Mr Blunkett", 2001.