Quote from: David Lucifer on 2004-01-03 12:36:47
I came across this interesting hypothesis on the evolution of the political correctness meme:
Quote:...political correctness had been invented to protect affirmative action programs and the mindset behind them from the intense scholarly scrutiny it had begun to receive. The insinuation of political correctness was that anyone who had doubts about such programs was almost by definition a covert racist and sexist, and therefore to be discounted rather than responded to. |
Any ideas on what kind of evidence could be discovered to support or falsify this view?
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I suppose one could create a data set comparing instances of public speech for political correctness with public speech for affirmative action, but that's kind of self-evident, isn't it?
Better would be to take a poll with two groups: one group consisting of members who have been the target of affirmative action, the second a control group. Then determine if there is a correlation between support for political correctness and support for affirmative action.
If political correctness is a threat co-meme, then it would probably correlate well with affirmative action.
However, I'm not sure that a threat co-meme can't break off and become a meme in it's own right, or even link with another meme. It may be too late to do this study if the PC meme has evolved beyond the scope of the survey.