Is Politically Correct Truly Correct?

Some people think that simply changing the language, specifically the words we use in our everyday communications, will banish the "racism and hate" in our society today. But changing "women" to "womyn" or "black eye" to "mouse" will change nothing about how people think about their counterparts. In The Word Police, Michiko Kakutani shows her readers how ridiculous the idea of replacing such words is.

Let's go example by example. Replacing "women" with "womyn" does not sound different phonetically. So when people use it in their everyday speech, it doesn't change anything to them at all. "But it will when they write." Wrong. When someone writes, nobody sits down to check the spelling of all their words. They just write, and come back for edits later. And when they come back, they are likely to forget that the spelling of "women" has been changed. So who corrects these "spelling errors?" Editors; meaning that the only people who actually use the "correct" spelling of the word add up to be a very small quantity of people compared to the entire population. "We'll just put the correct form of the word into our spell checks then." Yea, that won't work either. Sure, people will see a red squiggly line under the word in question, and will fix its spelling, but they won't give it a second thought. They are not going to sit down to think about why the spelling changed, they will just move on with their lives. So how are we changing sexism by doing this?

To change sexism, or racism, or any type of discrimination, it is necessary to change how people think of their diverse peers. Changing the language simply does not do enough to change people's perspective.