by Scott Jameson

700 words

For my first post on this blog, I thought I’d talk about something relevant to the mission of the blog: Political Correctness. I’m very grateful to RaceRealist for inviting me to hop on board here (although I should put out the categorical disclaimer that me posting here is not in and of itself an endorsement of any given thing he’s said over the years).

This is going to be something of an opinion essay about why denying reality is silly: because you still have to live in it. Most of my content is going to be more empirically driven, as you’re used to on this blog. Bear with me.

The SAT’s name change story is a classic case of “Political Correctness,” and is mirrored by KFC’s story of adapting to new nutritional standards. For those out of the loop: after the public realized how unhealthy fried foods are, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC. The point was to make the unhealthy nature of the food one conceptual extrapolation away from the name itself, in hopes that the public would not bother to recall what the “F” stood for.

SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” It was (and is) a test to determine how apt you are for scholarly endeavors. Put bluntly, it’s a somewhat sloppy IQ test oriented towards scholarly settings in particular. Of course, that name was too accurate, so it fell out of favor. The public does not want to live in a world wherein poor students are less apt than rich students and Black students are less apt than White students, and so the Scholastic Aptitude Test became the Scholastic Assessment Test. In order to be offended by that, you have to remember that what’s being assessed is aptitude and that nothing has changed. Like “KFC,” it was one conceptual extrapolation away from the reality at hand. Most people were probably too harebrained to see through that.

For some reason, they kept rolling with it. It became an alleged Reasoning Test, and then simply a series of letters that used to be an abbreviation: “the SAT,” no doubt an homage to The Colonel and the chicken he hawks. They’re both just a series of letters now – the unpleasant realities contained therein have been conceptually sterilized. Like the SAT, the nutritional content of the chicken hasn’t changed as much as the name has.

You may suspect that I’m simply flinging excrement in the general direction of The College Board, but there’s a point to what I’m saying here. What we call “Political Correctness” is a pervasive scrubbing of reality out of the consciousness of the public at large, especially the young. There was a time when people were allowed to say things like “I do not enjoy living around Blacks/Whites/Hispanics/whomever.” “Political Correctness” entered from stage left, and then Boomers had to say “bad schools” and “bad neighborhood” instead. Odds are, the Boomers understood the connotative meanings, at least at first. But if you asked millennials what those terms are, I’d bet on most of them actually being ignorant enough to think that the schools are themselves the problem. Nobody ever pointed out to these kids that almost all of the “bad schools” – the schools with low average test scores – are simply full of Hispanics (Mestizos) and African Americans who have low average test scores regardless of what school they’re in, and that the supermajority of all of the “good schools” aren’t. Anyone who doesn’t know this has been deliberately rendered ignorant of a reality that is important to their lives.

What we call “Political Correctness” is in fact the successful, systematic obfuscation of reality, and having reality perpetually hidden from you is dangerous. That is why we at this blog are NotPoliticallyCorrect. As long as I’m here, I can promise you my best attempt at discovering and conveying the truth in the NotPoliticallyCorrect fashion exemplified thus far by RaceRealist: bringing you interesting truths, obscure truths, and of course, controversial truths.

*****

I’m not the first to make the SAT-KFC comparison, by the way. After I wrote this article, I looked around for sources only to dredge this up.