Trevor Phillips asked us on Channel 4 last week whether political correctness had gone mad. He ended the programme with the insight: “The path to real progress may include learning to live with offence.”

It is hard to imagine just how – in a climate where politicians openly assert that a nation produces rapists and black women are compared to apes wearing lipstick – Phillips thinks political correctness has stifled rightwing views too much. But it’s easy to understand why he might think it has become irrelevant.

Political correctness was, after all, supposed to be about the creation of a social code to define what is acceptable in a society that wants to be open, non-prejudiced, and inclusive. Right now society feels anything but those things. It has become acceptable to harass me in an airport because of the colour of my skin or the sound of my surname – even in the “land of the free”. The issue in my life isn’t having to live with offence, it’s having to get used to it. It’s the reason why, when my friends ask whether the numbers marching against Trump make me optimistic, I respond with a decisive “no”. Tens of thousands of protesters do not fill me with hope – I feel scared that so many feel they have to take to the streets.

Perhaps a better question for Phillips would have been whether the path to progress requires us to actually partake in the soul-searching that political correctness originally intended. Not to say, as Phillips did in his Daily Mail article, that because of political correctness, he was not surprised to be called a racist even as a black man. But instead to accept how deeply sad it is that as people of colour, we can hold racist views ourselves. That we, too, might make judgments about how much more “competent” a white candidate seems for a role, because the image of success we are so often fed is prepackaged in a white, male, heterosexual form. The question is not whether political correctness is mad, but whether its binary distinction between “correct” and “incorrect” doesn’t allow us to have an ongoing discussion about all of the grey areas in between.

Trevor Phillips discusses oversensitivity towards race on This Morning

Racism is not just calling me a “Paki”. It’s the thing that makes you ask how mentally stable a terrorist was only when he has skin a different colour than mine. But to understand that, we have to accept that all “isms” are insidious, shape-shifting creatures that follow us and cling on whenever they can. And they affect all of us. Even those who believe ourselves to be the most upstanding, liberal members of society. Even those of us who are women. Even those of us who are non-white. Even those in the LGBT community.

Accepting that doesn’t need to make us haughty, as Phillips seems to suggest; instead, it gives us a place in common from which to speak. To admit that I chose to play with the white girls in my school as a child because, somewhere deep down inside, I knew that they might help me to escape some of the social-tarring of my own skin colour. Or how I mocked my dad’s Bangladeshi accent among my white friends because it ingratiated me with them, and indicated to them: “I’m one of you, honest.”

Of course, admitting that can be hard. It can be hard in the way that requires getting over the childish, human instinct that you feel when you’ve been caught doing something wrong, that urges you to say, “stop being offended”, rather than to think about what you’ve actually done. Instead of going on the defensive, and shifting the emphasis to take action on to those who feel under attack themselves, we should be asking: where does that take us? How can we move on? Because Phillips responding to the death and rape threats that Caroline Criado-Perez received online by asking why she doesn’t just quit the internet, doesn’t feel like moving forward. It feels horribly similar to exactly what Phillips claims he is complaining about: shutting the conversation down.