Mapping Political Correctness

Don Brash, the Leader of New Zealand’s conservative National political party has created a new portfolio in his shadow cabinet reshuffle following his recent electoral defeat. Amongst the duties assigned to Dr Wayne Mapp is that of Political Correctness Eradicator. New Zealand has an enviable history of pioneering social reform. One thinks of its early introduction of universal suffrage and the welfare state. But while these are generally regarded as progressive moves by leftist governments, in the creation of the office of Political Correctness Eradicator, which must surely be unique in modern history, we find the Right conjuring up its own unique political innovation.

When Dr Brash was questioned by a newspaper reporter about what political correctness is, and what Dr Mapp will actually do, he appeared foggy on the details and referred the media to a speech Dr Mapp delivered on June 22, 2005. In that speech Dr Mapp defines political correctness as a person, institution or government ceasing “to represent the interests of the majority” to “become focused on the cares and concerns of minority sector groups” and goes on to criticise instruments like the Waitangi Tribunal which adjudicates on Maori land claims, the Human Rights Commission and the Privacy Commission which as their names indicate, were established to protect the rights of individuals and groups. Mapp’s basic argument echoes that of other right-wing critiques, that political correctness runs counter to the basic freedoms of society.

Dr Mapp’s own political convictions lie revealed in the examples of political correctness he refers to in his paper. He makes it very clear that the Maori people, for so long an oppressed group within their own country, are being given in our age of political correctness far too great a degree of favourable treatment. Thus he complains about the custom of powhiri (traditional Maori greeting ceremonials) now incorporated into much of New Zealand’s political and administrative life and belittles it by such claims as “the commencement of a motorway project should not require a 40 minute powhiri within a 50 minute event” because this leads to “private frustration” and “disregard for other cultures”. He likewise attacks the Government’s “promotion of the Maori spiritual world view” and within state documents the “recitation of Maori myths and legends”.

One of the bugbears of those who campaign against political correctness is multiculturalism which they regard as a form of social engineering aimed at giving different cultures equal standing and respect in the community. Their argument typically runs that multiculturalism is built on the premise that different cultures are compatible, but this is demonstrably untrue and those opposing multiculturalism are unjustly branded as prejudiced or racist. While one can detect elements of this position in Dr Mapp’s argument, his base line appears to be that, while Maori may have suffered injustices in the past, under the mantras of political correctness they are being too generously treated, and it is high time that the pendulum swung back in favour of the dominant white settler community’s culture and values. What his argument fails to take into account is that the racism which was for so long a feature of the settlers’ relationship with Maori, has by no means been eradicated from settler life.

Other examples he highlights are equally disturbing. He is opposed to proposed legislation on offensive ‘hate speech’, to the legislation already passed to create healthy smoke-free work and leisure environments, and the establishment of civil unions, in fact all those things which involve “promoting minority and alternative causes”. As might be anticipated, he includes within this umbrella the gay community’s lobbying against homophobia. As an example of the latter he cites the case of a right-wing Christian organization, Living Word Distributors, who were banned by the New Zealand film censors from distributing two US videos, AIDS, What You haven’t Been Told, and Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda. These videos are opposed to the idea that homosexuality might become respectable and in particular to the way that countries like the US are enshrining affirmative protection for the gay community in human and civil rights legislation. What Mapp doesn’t tell us, possibly because it doesn’t suit his argument about the unbridled power of political correctness, is that four years ago the New Zealand Court of Appeal overturned that video ban on the grounds that informed public debate within a democracy requires a free flow of information and ideas.

It behoves us to remember that ‘political correctness’ emerged at a time when minority groups were subject to all manner of racial and other stereotyping. Blacks felt demeaned when they were called ‘niggers’ or ‘coons’ by members of the dominant group. Immigrants felt the same when called ‘wogs’ or ‘wops’; gays when they were referred to as ‘faggots’ or ‘poofs’; people suffering disabilities when they were called ‘cripples’ or ‘mongs’. The so-called Political Correctness Movement, which never was a movement until invented by the Right in the 1980’s, tried to change our stereotypical and often unconscious attitudes by challenging and changing our use of language and terminology. The focus became the merits of the individual rather than perceived membership of a particular group.

This linguistic approach has not been without its problems. I used a variation of the word ‘disabled’ above in order to avoid the pejorative term ‘crippled’. In this instance the terminology has undergone several changes from cripple to invalid to handicapped to disabled to differently abled to the current physically challenged. In terms of health, education and social care we tend to use terms like special needs and learning difficulties instead of earlier terms now considered demeaning to human dignity. Nor has religion escaped with the terms BC and AD now replaced by CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) and hospital chaplains in the UK now referred to as Spiritual Care Providers (or worse, Managers).

Personally, I reject some of the overtly political and ideological manipulations of language justified under the guise of ‘political correctness’. But I don’t want to lose sight of a very basic principle: that it is not for social engineers to decide what people should be called, but for groups within our communities to decide for themselves how they prefer to be addressed. While Dr Mapp is right to raise sensitive issues about culture and language, in New Zealand’s case by leaping on to the bandwagon of a white settler backlash he is advocating a dangerous political ploy. And to me, the creation of his post as Political Correctness Eradicator smacks too much of Stalinism.

Standards in Public Life

Red Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, is in the thick of controversy again. I’ve been a fan of his since his heyday as Leader of the Greater London Council when he lowered London Tube fares so that those of us living in that city could afford to travel to work. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in order to put the fares back up again had to dismiss the entire Board of London Transport and replace it with a quango comprised of her Tory cronies. Her long-term strategy under the pretext of restoring power to the people, was to get rid of the Greater London Council altogether and I imagine she thought that by so doing she was consigning Red Ken to the dustbin of history. But years later, with Baroness Thatcher herself consigned to history, Ken bounced back, having been expelled from the Labour Party for refusing to toe the party line. He stood as an Independent mayoral candidate for a newly created London-wide political authority. He won that election, and when it became clear that his popularity would carry him to a second term of office, the Party enthusiastically reinstated his membership.

Red Ken, as his nickname suggests, always seems to generate conflict. This has been in part due to his socialist understanding of inclusivity, and his celebration of diversity often through gigantic riverside parties, which have provided both a space and a voice for many of the city’s minorities. Such behaviour was bound to get up the noses of Conservative leaning elements of the media, none more so than the right wing Associated Newspapers group which has persistently and often quite unfairly hounded him. A few months ago, confronted late one evening by an aggressive reporter from The Evening Standard, Ken likened the man’s behaviour to that of a Nazi concentration camp guard. It turned out the reporter was Jewish and that’s what sparked the latest controversy.

All this happened a few days before the Olympic Committee arrived in London to assess London’s bid for the games. Red Ken was placed under enormous pressure from folk like Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologise for his offensive remark. He refused to do so on the grounds of personal integrity. He has suffered years of abuse from the newspaper group in question, and said he would not apologise as a political gesture if he did not feel the need to apologise in his heart. The controversy was referred to the Commission for Standards in Public Life which has the power to exclude people from standing for public office and sounds remarkably like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. The Commission has yet to conclude its deliberations and announce its decision.

Many of the public reactions to the affair have been couched in terms of any talk about Nazis and concentration camps being always offensive to Jews. But lurking somewhere in the background is the suggestion made by some that Ken’s remarks were anti-Semitic. And that is worrying.

Of course the form of anti-Semitism which was manifested by Nazi Germany, and which many Jewish writers suggest is based upon centuries of Christian teaching, and which saw millions of people perish in the holocaust because of their racial origin, needs to be vigorously opposed. That such attitudes and practices remain a threat to humanity has been manifested in various recent attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ in places as different as the Balkans and Africa. Ken Livingstone's record on opposing all forms of degradation and violence on the basis of race, class and gender is unparalleled in contemporary British politics.

But there is something more subtle than this at work here, something of which I became acutely conscious while living and working in Israel in the 1970’s. And that is the way in which the label of anti-Semitism has also become an ideological and hegemonic tool employed manipulatively in some circumstances to prevent the development of any critique of Jewish values and behaviours. While most of us in liberal democracies are aware that there are good Christians and bad Christians, good Muslims and bad Muslims, good Jews and bad Jews, and want, usually on the basis of our own values, to make differential judgements upon the way in which people behave, in the Israel I lived in, this had become impossible. Any criticism of individual, let alone national behaviour, and any critique of Israeli government policies was automatically branded anti-Semitic.

And this form of ideological manipulation was not restricted to the State of Israel, for communities of Jews in Diaspora were also given to employing this tactic. Thus in New Zealand in 1978, addressing a conference on the issue of land rights, I tried to develop the theme that the alienation of people from their traditional land had become a global problem. Amongst the illustrations I gave was the way in which traditional Bedouin nomadic communities in the Negev were at that time being resettled in permanent villages by the Israeli government. For employing that illustration in an academic context I was immediately labelled as being anti-Semitic in a vitriolic and abusive response in the Jewish press.

Judging by the letters to newspapers about Ken Livingstone’s brush with the reporter, many of them from members of the Jewish community, I suspect that things have improved over the last thirty years, and this manipulation, although it still exists is less crude these days. The knee-jerk claim that one’s opponent is anti-Semitic seems to me to do humanity a disservice. Not only do we all need to cultivate the ability to both offer and accept criticism in an international environment characterised by mutuality, honesty and maturity, but we also need to be vigilant to ensure that wasteful tragedies like the holocaust and ethnic cleansing never happen again. Both trivialising anti-Semitism and employing it as an ideological weapon, leave us at the mercy of evil.

A Word for Africa

In an earlier blog I raised the question of whether the critical dialogue between the Anglican Communion’s Global North and Global South had become one-way traffic because political correctness or racism awareness training, and possibly both, have rendered the North loath to be critical of anything African lest this be hailed as racist. But unless there is a framework for mutual critique and constructive dialogue, we run the risk of projecting grotesque caricatures of one another.

This week my attention was drawn to two instances of Anglican leaders in the Global North being willing to be critical of the theology and politics espoused by self-styled and cavalier leaders of the Global South like Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria.

The first was a statement made last month by Anglican Bishop John Chane of Washington writing in his Diocesan newspaper. Chane was willing to tackle Akinola directly describing him as "one of the most outspoken of this small group of men who presumes to speak for the entire global Communion."

The Bishop went on to say: "If the Church is to really focus on the issues of the Bible's teaching and the core teachings of Jesus Christ, why does this Archbishop spend so much time on human sexuality issues while so many of his countrymen and women are oppressed by poverty, illiteracy and violence? Where is the strong voice of the Nigerian Anglican Church in opposing the continued neglect of vulnerable women and children, or in advocating on behalf of the poorest of the poor? Jesus was very clear in his hard teachings that one could always tell the righteous from the damned by whether they (were) feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger and visiting those who were in prison."

The Bishop might also have added to the Archbishop’s catalogue of faults the fact that while appearing to discuss nothing but sexuality in his pronouncements about the West, he constantly and deliberately avoids addressing the troubling issues of sexuality within African culture including those of polygamy, widow inheritance, widow cleansing, and HIV/AIDS.

Secondly, I was reminded that we now have an African Archbishop in one of England’s ancient Sees, that of York, when last week Archbishop John Sentamu signed the documentation which confirms his appointment. Archbishop Sentamu was born in poverty in Uganda and, a judge by profession, had to flee his country during Idi Amin’s reign of terror. An articulate Evangelical, his appointments first as Bishop of Stepney in London Diocese, then as bishop of multicultural Birmingham and now as Archbishop of York and Primate of England, have been hailed as visionary. He brings all that is good in vibrant African culture, faith and practice to a Church that many regard as lacking vitality.

In an exclusive interview with Dr Sentamu last week in The Guardian, he told his interviewer that he disapproved of the language in which the gay debate is being conducted ‘particularly by some African Archbishops who have spoken of homosexuals as a third sex threatening social unrest and have warned they will sever connections with the Church of England’ and the Anglican Communion.

Archbishop Sentamu continued: “Some of our disagreements are not Christian really . . . it seems to suggest that all of the great evils of the world are being perpetrated by gay and lesbian people, which I cannot believe to be the case. What is wrong in the world is that people are sinful and alienate themselves from God and you do not have to be gay to do that. To suggest that to be gay is to be evil, I find that quite unbelievable. Is somebody saying a gay and lesbian can’t live in Christ? . . . All of us are sinners, all of us have baggage. Why should my baggage as a heterosexual be more acceptable than the baggage of a gay person?” Here at last, is an African who is willing to both confront and respond to the biblical fundamentalism emanating from Nigeria.

Whether Africa will take any notice of course, is an entirely different question. To many of the people who raise the question of the future of the Anglican Communion with me in direct conversations in the University’s staff room and at a distance by students scattered around the world, the die already appears to be cast. Under the leadership of Peter Akinola many Anglicans will leave the Communion to establish a new ecclesial body.

It is often argued that we live today in a post-modern world where people adopt a consumerist ‘pick and mix’ approach to religion. People are joining and leaving churches for all kinds of reasons. But this has always been the case throughout the history of Anglicanism. One big exodus, at least in terms of leadership, spirituality and devotion occurred in the nineteenth century at the time of controversy over the Oxford Movement when John Henry Newman and many others reluctantly parted company with Anglicanism. Although his own brothers were also to make that journey Romewards, ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, son of the great social reformer, who would later become Bishop of Oxford, remained. He wrote in some anguish at the time:

“The glory of our beloved little church is departed. The heavens weeping over us, and the trees dropping round us, seem acted parables of our thoughts”.

But the Anglican Church’s ministry and mission were not compromised by these severe catholic losses or indeed, by the loss of the evangelical Methodists, and a vibrant church emerged from what David Newsome in his marvellous book called “The Parting of Friends”. And while there will be similar grief to see Anglican brothers and sisters of the Global South leave the Anglican Communion, for they have made a notable contribution to it, I confidently expect that Anglicanism with its unique vision, ethos and theology will survive and prosper.

Messages From God

Soon after I was ordained to the priesthood the chaplain at the large mental hospital near my parish asked whether I could cover Sunday services for him while he took his month’s holiday. This chaplain was given to saying that if he weren’t chaplain to the institution he would certainly be one of its patients. He kindly warned me in advance of some of the more unusual features of celebrating mass in the secure unit. This included loud applause when I processed to the altar as if the mass was some kind of theatrical performance, which in a sense of course it is. It’s just that not many priests get applauded for their role in it. Then there was the young man who served as the altar boy. Having been trained to hold on to a corner of the celebrant’s chasuble and follow him everywhere, he did precisely that, even standing beside me clutching my chasuble as I delivered the homily from the lectern. I later learnt that this young man, barely into his twenties, had killed his entire family because he had received direct instructions from God to do so.

This experience taught me to be very wary of people who claim to be acting upon messages that God has given them. Many such people, particularly when they commit violent acts on the basis of heavenly inspired instructions, are deemed by society to have lost their grip on reality and are placed for their good and ours in institutions. Of course we have to be careful in reaching judgements about such cases. I well recall the psychiatrist R.D. Laing whose views on anti-psychiatry became very popular in the 1960’s arguing that in general those who are in touch with reality are locked up in asylums, while the rest of us, who have totally lost touch with reality are permitted to wander around freely. That’s a sobering thought.

Despite this, I was initially amused, but on reflection concerned to learn this week that President George W Bush claims as did my altar boy, to be in receipt of messages from God. It seems that in an interview with the Palestinian politician Nabil Shaath soon to be broadcast on BBC television, the politician claims “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s word coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m, gonna do it.”

George Bush was born again as an evangelical Christian in 1985 with the assistance of Billy Graham who is alleged to have warned him, ‘Never play God’. Throughout his political career he has claimed divine guidance for practically every action he has taken. He ran for President because ‘God wants me to do it’ and last year claimed in a meeting with Amish folk in Pennsylvania ‘I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job’. Moreover he believes that the USA is God’s instrument for the salvation of the world. ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world’, he says, ‘It is God’s gift to humanity’. White House staff are expected to attend regular prayer meetings and in terms of the delivery of social welfare, the President has set aside billions of dollars for ‘faith-based groups’ because he believes these to be more effective instruments of poverty alleviation than government agencies.

Of course this religious rhetoric and faith-based welfare delivery have enormous appeal for the millions of Americans who constitute the Christian Right and whose votes are essential for maintaining Bush in power. Thus US General William Boykin, responsible for leading the hunt for Osama bin Laden told Christian groups in 2003 that the War on Terror is a war against Satan and said of the President ‘The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this’. The General was subsequently promoted to the post of deputy under secretary for defence. Of course many Americans consider the Christian Right’s captivity of the presidency outrageous, and Bush’s critics accuse him of increasingly blurring the long held constitutional separation between Church and State.

Another product of Bush’s religious convictions, shared with the Christian Right, is his Islamophobia. Although following the attack on the World Trade Centre, his use of the term ‘crusade’ in framing his response was quickly removed from his public vocabulary, there is little doubt that this is what he privately believes. This week in revealing that the US and its partners had foiled 10 al-Qaida plots since September 11 he claimed ‘We are facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world’ which is paradoxically of course precisely the way many poor nations have viewed US economic and foreign policy over the past fifty years, and in a heightened way during the Bush Presidency.

I think that Bush’s religious mania constitutes a threat to us all, particularly when he employs it to justify violence and war. The US and its Coalition partners provide no public figures of either troop or civilian casualties resulting from God having ordered the President to invade these countries. Figures compiled by agencies which do keep an eye on these things claim on the basis of the lowest estimates that in Afghanistan there have been to date 3,485 civilian deaths with a further 6,237 seriously injured, and in Iraq there have been 24,770 civilian deaths with 44,586 seriously injured.

For killing four innocent people because God told him to, my altar boy expected to spend a lifetime behind bars. For his divinely inspired role in the killing of nearly 30,000 innocent people President Bush not only remains free, but is applauded by members of the Christian Right.

The Use and Abuse of Statistics

Sorry that I missed posting a blog last weekend. I was busy preparing for one of our intensive distance learning residential weeks at Lampeter University, and as usual was running so late that certain things had to be sacrificed.

One of my academic interests is equipping students in the use of tools derived from the social sciences in order that they may better understand the dynamics of the world and community in which they live. I call this ‘critical social analysis’ and much of what I teach is based on the pioneering work in devising a pedagogy for social transformation which was the life-long task of Paulo Freire. I encountered Freire first through his books like Pedagogy of the Oppressed but when he held a post in popular education at the World Council of Churches, and I was involved in development education for the churches in New Zealand, our paths crossed on many occasions. One of the things I learnt from him was that knowledge can be packaged in the way a government, an educational institution, or teachers decide is appropriate, and can deliver messages those in power want the rest of us to hear. And this applies equally to statistics, and they way they can be used for social control on the one hand, or for human development and emancipation on the other.

I was reminded of that this week when I read that the American radio show host, William Bennett, one time Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan, and drugs czar under George Bush the Elder made a statement which seems to have embarrassed Republicans everywhere. He said, “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”. Although he went on to say that aborting black babies would be an “impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down” the damage was done. He was implying that US statistics indicate that there are a disproportionate number of Black criminals in comparison to the white population.

This reminded me of a situation I became aware of in New Zealand several decades ago, an instance which I now use as a case study with my students. An organization of mainly Maori and Pacific Island unemployed people in Auckland were similarly confronted by Government statistics which suggested that an overwhelming number of crimes were committed by, and the larger part of the prison population represented by the minority Maori and Pacific Island population. Certainly there was no other conclusion to be drawn from the way that the information was presented.

The organization then turned its attention to other sets of statistics presented by the Government and quickly became interested in the unemployment figures. They noticed that whereas the figures on crime were described in terms of gender and race, the numbers of those employed and out of work were presented by district and by gender only. So members very quickly articulated the question ‘Why are the statistics on crime presented on the basis of race, and those on unemployment on the basis of gender?’ They decided to engage in some research of their own into what the unemployment statistics would look like if they too were presented on the basis of race.

There’s probably little need to tell you what happened. The proportion of persons from minority populations who were unemployed almost precisely reflected the proportions of those from these communities who were branded as criminal. They came up with some horrific stories including one of an unemployed Pacific Islander who became so desperate to feed his family that he stole several loaves of bread from a supermarket. This alternative research was a cogent reminder that for many people life is absorbed by the daily struggle just to survive, just to find food, clothing and shelter for one’s family. It also revealed that in many instances our political economy reckons crimes against property to be worse than crimes against persons. And importantly it demonstrated the way that Governments, simply by the way they present statistics, can employ them for ideological ends or racist purposes.

So it looks to me as if William Bennett was doing the American Government’s work for it in highlighting the perception that Black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime. What ideologically perpetrated interventions of this kind never highlight is the relationship between poverty and crime, survival and lawbreaking, race and unemployment. It is for many of us not just an injustice but an indication of moral turpitude that in the world’s richest country possessing the world’s biggest economy there exist so many people who have become so marginalised, so alienated, so humiliated, so bereft of the compassion of the rest of the community, that they are unable to survive.

In the face of such endemic poverty it is an outrage that people like William Bennett choose to talk in terms of aborting Black babies rather than in terms of building a genuinely just, participatory and inclusive society in which the opportunities and the benefits are available to all.