PC culture empowers bigots

The argument

The claim is counter-intuitive by design: the backlash against PC actually empowers bigots. By being overzealous, PC warriors are enabling bigotry by trivializing it — not by defending it, but by spending the vocabulary that condemns it on cases that cannot carry the weight. The examples show the mechanism. Being called a racist for having dreadlocks as a white person, or sexist for calling someone "Dear", trivializes sexism and racism and weakens the denunciation of bigotry when it does genuinely occur. Words such as racist and sexist carry force because of what they are normally used to describe; applied to a hairstyle or a term of address, they invite the listener to conclude either that the charge is disproportionate or that racism and sexism are smaller things than they had supposed. Either conclusion leaves the word less able to do its job the next time it is needed. The cost falls where it matters most. When severe racism and sexism does occur, it becomes more difficult to defend the victims and denounce the bigot without being accused of being a PC warrior, or a snowflake. The accusation works precisely because the trivial cases have made it plausible: an audience that has watched the language stretched over small grievances has been given reason to discount it when a grievance is real. The bigot inherits a ready-made defence built by their opponents. Underneath both problems lies a loss of distinction. It leads to a difficulty to clearly demark the difference between a 'microaggression' and serious discriminatory behaviour, and once that line is gone there is no way left to signal which cases demand urgency. A more measured view of political correctness would allow society to better confront dangerous opinions when they're expressed, by keeping the strongest language in reserve for the conduct that warrants it.

Context

If the objective is to call out genuinely dangerous and bigoted opinions when they are expressed, then political correctness is more of a hindrance than an asset.

Premises

Counter-arguments

When employed correctly, political correctness forces us to examine our speech and modify it in a positive way that prevents damage or harm done to others. At its core, it is not supposed to put perpetrators of 'micro offences' in the same box as bigots and those that hold deeply racist and sexist beliefs. A politically incorrect statement is not tantamount to hate speech. Nobody would suggest that everyone that uses the term 'obese' instead of 'people of size' hates plump people. Political correctness does not trivialize genuine examples of hate speech by conflating them with micro offences, it just forces us to adopt more inclusive patterns of language.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Political correctness has no impact on our ability to challenge bigotry. It merely helps us adopt more inclusive language.