Bashing Bigot-Bashers Just as Conservatives Had Nearly Run Out of Liberals to Attack

ELLEN GOODMAN

April 02, 1991|By ELLEN GOODMAN

BOSTON. — She was accused the other day of being politically correct. Maybe it was the string bag in her hand. Maybe her use of the word ''person.'' Or her ticket stubs to ''Dances with Wolves.'' Maybe it was because she was known to favor such things as multi-culturalism or diversity.

She says that she was ''accused'' because this was not a friendly exchange. The label was delivered with a sneer and carried the aura of an epithet. Once attacked, she was expected to cringe with denial.

This brief encounter confirmed what she had suspected for some time. It was no longer trendy to be politically correct. Indeed, it had become wrong tobe right. Or wrong to be too right which is to say too left.

Once the term PC had described an idealism that was at worst excessive, occasionally even silly. But at best, an on-going impetus for change. But that was before the rash of articles declaring the New McCarthyism, the New Stalinism, the New Hegemony (wonderful word that) and the Fascism of the Left on American campuses. She had counted now some half-a-dozen cover stories and several dozen major articles about these repressive progressives.

According to the current theory, a faculty raised on '60s dissent was spending the '90s rooting out the very last vestiges of racism, sexism, heterosexism, Euro-centrism, even looks-ism and species-ism. In the process, no dissent from their dissent was allowed.

Undergraduates in their care were said