A black guy, a Jew, and a Chinese dude walk into an Irish bar. The black guy says, Ill have a Guinness. The Jew says, Ill have a Stella, and the Asian dude says, Ill have a Makers Mark on the rocks. The bartender looks up from cleaning a glass and says, What the fuck are you guys doing in here? Get out of here.
These days its hard to tell if youre allowed to like jokes like these. All over the so-called free world, common sense and basic human rights are being smothered under a stultifying wave of censorship that used to be called political correctness and is now called tolerance.
Even VICEwhere we are committed to saying what you want, and where new employees are sometimes shocked that terms like slut, paki, and faggot are part of casual office banteris not immune to this insidious form of repression. In spite of the fact that I am one of the owners of this company, our lawyers suggested I undergo sensitivity training after saying I love fags in the middle of an important meeting. During the training we were told that it is illegal to discuss anything personal about your co-workers under any circumstances. In other words, I could be sued if I went to the bathroom with my co-worker, locked the door and whispered The managing editor is Italian.
This magazine was once banned at Ottawas Carleton University (my alma mater, Im ashamed to admit) after we featured an ad that displayed a female models pubic hair. The censors rationale was that the ad had used sex rather than sexuality to sell the product in question. When a student at the school tried to organize a debate over the universitys actions, the student council revoked the room that he had booked for the occasion. The school paper proceeded to print an article about the controversy and, as a result, was also temporarily banned from the campus.
Sadly, this sort of blatantly irrational hypocrisy has become the rule, rather than the exception, at most North American universities. At Wake Forest, one of the few orientation events that freshmen are obliged to attend, is an experience called Blue Eyed, in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with a person of color for a day. At Michigan State University, where certain elevators and cafeteria tables are reserved for blacks and gays as a way to counteract oppression, columnist Jason Van Dyke was dismissed from the school paper after he wrote a piece suggesting that the gay community may be intolerant.
And sanctions arent restricted to those whose ideas are deemed hurtful or offensive. When Dr. Richard Zeller, a sociology professor at Ohios Bowling Green State University, proposed a course on political correctness that would offer students a chance to look at this integral part of university life from a conservative perspective, he was forced to resign. When asked to comment, Dr. Kathleen Dixon, BGSUs director of womens studies said, in an admission that was as frank as it was disturbing, We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech.
The irony wouldnt have been lost on tyrants like the late Chairman Mao Zedong. The Chinese communist leader and mass murderer once proposed a campaign of thought reform and re-education for university students that would not be complete until, as Mao put it, children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and emerged as progressive in a manner satisfactory to their trainers.
This neo-fascist desire to control peoples attitudes and language also makes its way into the legislature. If you are arrested after being involved in a street fight, for example, you can be charged with some form of assault. But in many states, if you use the word nigger or faggot during the fight, the incident can be labeled a hate crime and you will be subject to an additional or more severe sentence.
Now, obviously a gang of racist skinheads deserves a harsher punishment than some drunken brawler, but problems arise when tribunals try to identify and quantify an entity like hate as defined under a statute. Arguably, there is a degree of animosity present any time one human being assaults another, but prosecutors have to determine whether or not this hate is the kind of hate theyre looking for. And so, an accused can be grilled about how many black friends he has or if hes ever made any off-color jokes. Often the proof comes down to an offensive epithet uttered during the incident. But, as anyone whos ever called their partner a dirty fucking slut in the heat of an intense sexual encounter can tell you, context is everything.
Ultimately, censoring discourse only serves to send bigotry underground, making the task of exposing its inherent stupidity that much harder. After several officers on a military base in Texas were reprimanded for using the word nigger in casual conversation, soldiers simply substituted the word Canadian. The euphemism spread to the general populace and led to some very confused Canuck tourists wondering why Texans were always going on about lazy fucking Canadians and the dangers of living in a Canadian neighborhood.
And often, hate laws end up hurting the people they were designed to help. When a coalition of Vancouver womens groups was asked to help set the Canadian governments guidelines for acceptable pornography, so many lesbian-made books and movies ended up being banned that two womens bookstores were forced out of business. Similarly, Americas anti-hate-speech laws have often ended up enhancing the societal imbalances they were designed to redress. In Michigan, more than twenty blacks have been charged with racist speech but not a single white person has. In Florida, the hate-speech law was used to throw a black man in jail after he called a cop a white cracker. In fact, the only hate-crime case to make it to the Supreme Court involved a man who had been called a white piece of shit by a black man.