Saturday, January 14, 2017

Has Political Correctness Gone off the Rails in America?

http://www.spiegel.de ^ | 1/5/17 | Philipp Oehmke 

Few terms are as divisive in today's United States as "political correctness." A concept that was intended to create greater freedom in the country may instead have resulted in the opposite. It also helped strengthen the right wing.
It's a Friday afternoon in Oberlin, Ohio, around one month before the country heads to the polls to elect Donald Trump as its next president. The final classes and lectures of the week have just ended, and a young woman comes walking by in bare feet with a hula hoop gyrating around her waist while others are performing what seems to be a rhythmic dance to the African music that's playing. Two black students are rapping.
It's the kind of scene that could easily play out on a beach full of backpack tourists, but this is unfolding at one of the country's most expensive universities.

Many female students here have dyed their hair green or blue, they have piercings and their fashion sense seems inspired by "Girls" creator and millennial star Lena Dunham, who, of course, also studied here.
In such a setting, it seems almost inconceivable that this country could go on to elect Donald Trump as its president only a few weeks later. Yet pro-Trump country is just a few miles away. Oberlin is located in Ohio, one of the swing states that made Trump's election possible. Drive five miles down College Road toward town, and you start seeing blue "Trump Pence 2016" signs on people's lawns.

Places like Oberlin are the breeding grounds of the leftist elite Trump's people spoke so disparagingly of during the election campaign.
Only a few months earlier, a handful of students claimed they had been traumatized after someone used chalk to scrawl "Trump 2016" on the walls of buildings and on sidewalks at Oberlin and at other liberal
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...

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