A Mother Responds…

I wanted to respond to your comment about your ”effort is largely misspent…Going after ‘bad’ words obscures the source of the problem and therefore fails to resolve it. Such is the nature of political correctness efforts; largely cosmetic.”  While I understand the point, I feel like we have got to start somewhere to bring awareness to this issue.  While I know we live in a wonderful, free country, I dare not believe that what has happened in other countries can not and will not happen here.  There is progression to prejudice and I feel like the “r” word is evidence of that progress.  Here is the best explanation of the “process” of prejudice we have found:

Here are the rungs of the Ladder of Prejudice;
http://www.tolerance.org/teach/activities/activity.jsp?ar=857

The First Rung: Speech – Its fun to talk bad about or make fun of those who are not like us.

The Second Rung: Avoidance – Lets shun them, ignore them. They are not like us and we are better than them. Surely if we ignore them, they do not exist.

The Third Rung: Discrimination – We don’t want them around here. We will make them leave, or at least not live next to us. We will make them live away from us in a place befitting them – like institutions, or group homes away from our community, not in our own backyards.

The Fourth Rung: Physical Attack – Lets taunt them, pick on them and if there is enough of us, hurt them. And if no one is looking or cares…

The Fifth Rung: Extermination – You mean like Hitler did to those who did not fit his profile of a ‘perfect race’ during WWII? Or maybe we can selectively breed them away or remove them by other methods – Eugenics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/library/wdc-lib/historical/eugenics/index.cfm

This is what we are fighting. 

It’s not a matter of political correctness, its a matter of respect.

From The ARC of the United States: The R-Word Isn’t Just Hurtful, Its Hate Speech.

 

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