I saw a woman really embarrass herself on TV last week — a real woman at a real public event, and it wasn’t a blooper, prank, or reality show. BookTV on C-SPAN 2 had taped a question-and-answer session with author Sherman Alexie at the 2007 Texas Book Festival. Alexie is an American Indian, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian according to his website. He grew up on a reservation. He is also the author of a popular book for young adults called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I watched about 15 minutes of the session one day last week and quickly realized that this guy is hilarious. Who needs Jay Leno or the Writers’ Guild! Every question someone in the audience asked got an intelligent response — but only after it also provoked a funny joke or impression that had everyone in stitches. Really!
All that’s beside the point though. The embarrassing part was when a woman got up and walked over to the microphone in the center aisle to ask her question of Mr. Alexie. She wanted to know if his success had had an effect on the people he knew back at the reservation. A fine question. The whole problem was how she said it, something like this:
Mr. Alexie, has your success had any kind of positive effect on those people … OMIGOD, I’M SO SORRY! I apologize. … (she stares at the ground and wrings her hands) … Has it had any effect on those … on the … I’M SO SORRY! … Has it affected any of the PEOPLE you knew on the reservation? That’s what I wanted to say.
I don’t write fiction myself, so you can probably sense how badly I’ve just represented what she said, but hopefully you get the point. She caught herself saying “those people,” to an Indian, and all these people — sorry — all the PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE, and watching C-SPAN 2, saw her. She started, stopped, and re-started her question several times to try to find a way to express it without referring to “those people.”
What’s the big deal! This wouldn’t have been a problem at all if she hadn’t made a big deal about it. After all, “those” is just a demonstrative pronoun, paired with “these.” These people, those people, this person, that person, this book, that one — it’s just a way of specifying which thing you’re talking about to avoid confusion. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong or offensive — to anyone! — about saying “those people.” (I might add that if, perchance, anyone is offended, there’s only one thing for it: remedial grammar.) I suppose “those people” could be offensive if said by a certain kind of person with a certain kind of tone, you know, “thooooose people,” said by someone peering over eyeglasses perched at the end of a long, thin nose. If you mean it condescendingly, it’s probably offensive, but it’s the condescension that’s offensive, not the expression itself.
This goes to what’s good and bad about political correctness. I felt very bad for this woman as I watched her, not only because she was embarrassing herself and making a spectacle needlessly, but because she had the best of intentions. She was trying to be courteous, but not just courteous, she was trying to treat the people on the reservation with all the dignity they deserve as human beings. They’re not “thoooose people,” they’re just people like you and me. It’s commendable, in this sense, for people to observe the etiquette of political correctness, because it’s a way to show respect and promote peace.
As with everything, politeness and good manners requires us not to call attention to someone else’s breach of good manners. If people don’t observe that polite custom, political correctness can become a source of discord. It’s also a problem if you have people tripping all over themselves, like that woman did, because the customs aren’t well established and communicated from generation to generation. Political correctness is a recent phenomenon, most of us have picked up on it only through the media, not from observing our parents and other adults, and it finds its way into the media most often when some well known person says something tactless and gets into all kinds of trouble for it, usually as a direct result of the media’s making a big deal about it. Political correctness then becomes a set of defensive rules, to make sure you don’t get into trouble with the media, rather than guidelines for treating people with love and dignity. It does seem to me that the principles (if they can be called that) of political correctness apply only to life before the media, not in actual interpersonal relationships. In the world of real people interacting with each other, genuine courtesy, such as giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, usually still prevails. Maybe we ought to put social pressure on the media to observe the well established rules of etiquette themselves and not to report to us about some social gaffe that doesn’t involve us — that only amounts to gossip anyway, not news.
When we communicate with each other, we’re trying to communicate ideas, and the words and expressions we use are just ways to encode those ideas. That means that we should attend to the words only insofar as they help us understand the idea someone wants us to understand. What does the person mean by “those people,” or “Indian” or “Native American” or “black” or “African-American” or anything else? If you understand the meaning, and you don’t think the person intends to offend, then don’t take offense. Give someone the benefit of the doubt, just like you would want done for yourself.
Augustine gives some good advice that I think applies:
[W]hen there is agreement about the matter on account of which words are employed, then one should not dispute about the words. If one does that through inexperience, then one should be taught. If one does it through malice, then one should be ignored. If one is incapable of being taught, one should be advised to do something else than waste one’s time and labour in trifling. If one does not take the advice, then one should be abandoned to one’s fate. (c. Acad., trans. O’Meara, 3.13.29)
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