What Happen to Thinking?

Before I start my first post, welcome to the new blog. I guess this is what Liberal Arts majors do when they graduate. We'll see how long this lasts but for now I plan on making this my forum to rant on sports, culture, and politics whenever something catches me. Also I need suggestions for a name for the blog cause I'm not good at shit like that. So...here we go...

The new Don Imus controversy has got me thinking about political correctness; more specifically how it is now politically correct to be politically correct. While politics should be an area that gets people thinking about real issues, it has become one large paradox, in so far as American politics effectively depoliticizes people, or pacifies them when it comes to the heart of important social issues that define our postmodern paradigm (racism, sexism, poverty, intolerance, etc.). When I think of politics, I immediately think about these issues. But what dominant society, led by corporate media, ultimately does is obfuscate these issues by conveniently politicizing them, which in America means we don’t need to think about them anymore; we simply need to choose Left or Right. Politics has pacified Americans to the point where thinking is no longer necessary because we no longer get to make any real choices (we are given them). On the other side of this same coin is this idea of political correctness. In the case of Don Imus’ comments, people act like race is an issue that can be solved by being politically correct. So instead of admitting that racism is a major problem that pervades every corner of society, it is much easier to reduce it to a manageable set of superficial unwritten rules, which boil down to being cordial to one another so that we don’t ever have to really confront these institutionalized prejudices. So even though I think Imus is an idiot, I think it is even more idiotic to pay his “political incorrectness” any attention. Race isn’t merely a “spec on our cultural lens” as Cornel West puts it. We can’t simply wash the blemishes of history off and pretend, by only being politically correct that we are all “colorblind.” The sooner we confront the issues, and stop and think about them, the better off everyone will be.