Wow. This semester has flown by. I can’t believe this is my last post dedicated to tackling the restriction of free speech disguised as “political correctness.” This week, I just want to talk about political correctness in general and how it affects us all daily.

In my first post, I mentioned that there are all sorts of problems facing America today. We perpetuate these problems with arguments ad infinitum. Problems dowsed in “political correctness” make it hard to reach a solution. While I have grown this semester to appreciate some amount of political correctness, I still maintain that the central problem is respect. To discuss a topic covered in political correctness and respect issues, I will be talking about Black Lives Matter today.

My favorite music artist is Lecrae. He is a Christian who is also a rapper and his faith shows through in almost all of his songs. He has a very complicated and involved backstory about how he came to the faith, but he really convinced me to give the Black Lives Matters movement a second look. His most recent album, Church Clothes Three, has a track named Gangland. This track mentions the brutal history of racism in this country and why gangs originally were formed. It was interesting to me because I didn’t know much about gangs prior to listening to this music. Gangs were originally formed as a sort of neighborhood militia, or police force to protect families of the same ethnic group, usually black. I can say this because gangs are different from the mob and the mafia in that they usually don’t try to turn a profit. After the majority of gang leaders were shot and killed, gangs started to get away from their original intent. They terrorized people in the name of “protection.” This is where political correctness enters the scene. People will try to justify their actions with rhetoric and faulty logic. Gangs who claimed to “protect” people were just being politically correct. It is much more polite to say that a person is protecting someone than to say that a person is murdering someone else. We see this argument in both the “abortion” movement and the “assisted suicide” movement. Obviously, both “abortion” and “assisted suicide” are murder, but it is more politically correct to say that you are “protecting” people from pregnancy and pain, respectively. That is to say, regardless of the topic: gangs, abortion, assisted suicide, or Black Lives Matter, it is easy to make it sound like a good thing.

After a second look, I stopped thinking that BLM was a black supremacist group. At first glance, they seem to advance black people over all other people and burn stuff. Those are pretty heavy similarities to the KKK. Then, when you actually research the BLM movement and realize the influential people who believe in it and what the leaders are doing, it makes much more sense to say you are protecting people. Sure, burning cars and grocery stores and beating people up and smashing windows are all poor representations of character, but the leaders of this group are quietly and under the radar going back and helping pay for insurance claims, window repair, and hospital bills. It is important to stay true to your true goal, not to get caught up in a mob mindset.

This is related to political correctness because if I were being politically correct, I would not mention any of the negative actions taken by BLM members. I would be focusing on what they hope to accomplish through their actions and who they are representing. After all, anything is easy to support with a good, healthy dose of political correctness.

I want to close the blog on this thought:
No matter who you are or what you believe, if you look past yourself to help as many other people as possible and work to bring society together instead of focusing on yout differences (religion, ethnicity, race, secxuality, gender, sex, height, weight, eye color, favorite brand, number of limbs, et al.), the world will get better.
We ALL need to work TOGETHER.