It really seems that political correctness is getting thoroughly out of hand!

Recently, Sheryl and I watched the movie "Rush Hour", starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Sheryl mentioned that this film is now considered to not be politically correct, because it contains racist words and phrases (anti-Chinese and anti-black). The movie was made in 1998, and the world at the time was much more racist than it is now (and even now, the world is still very racist). The social and historical context is thus racist, and a film set against this background needs to represent this context (without condoning it). Movies that do not properly represent their social and historical context are flawed, and generally uninteresting (no-one will watch them). Lots of other kinds of context are apparently allowed to be represented (and even exaggerated) in movies (sex, violence, espionage, war, science, technology and crime, for example) without the self-appointed PC watchdogs crying foul, but racism now has to be whitewashed (and no, whitewashed is not a racist term). I am getting really fed-up with this PC nonsense!

Another example, reported here on People, is the decision by Hulu to pull an episode of the Golden Girls from their catalogue, because of a scene where the stars are wearing mud-masks; not black-face, but a beauty treatment. All this because Hulu were worried that audiences would misinterpret this scene as racist. How far are companies willing to go to guard against the ignorance and stupidity of some of their consumers?

In other PC news (here, on the BBC), Twitter and other companies are dropping the terms "master", "slave" and "blacklist" (very widely used in software) in favour of more inclusive language. I can understand dropping the use of the word "blacklist", which has racist origins, but "master" and "slave" are words that pre-date the enslavement of blacks and have meanings that accurately describe the functions and relationships of things, which are not based on racist models or analogies. The word "master" is not modelled on a white slave-owning person, and "slave" is not based on an enslaved black person.

Another aspect of political correctness is the beatification by public opinion of the victims of police violence. No matter what the history of such a victim is, once dead they are treated as a saint, and any suggestion to the contrary is met with a vicious backlash by the PC police. An example is George Floyd. There is no question that George Floyd was brutally and unjustly murdered, but he was no saint. Nevertheless, Ron Johnson, who was head of consumer products at Riot Games had to resign (as reported here by the BBC) over a meme he posted about George Floyd, which included the statements "no reason to condone his killing" and "This type of criminal lifestyle never results in good things" (about George Floyd, not the police officer who killed him). Being factually correct seems to be no protection from these kinds of backlash.

There is a well known phrase, widely quoted in several variants: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". How can we learn from history if our history is whitewashed and we cannot discuss the facts and implications of our history? Political correctness (among other things) is now standing in the way of our learning from our history, and thus guaranteeing that we will repeat it.