Donald Trump and the other contenders in the Republican primaries (especially Ben Carson) insisted that ‘political correctness’ was a huge problem in the US and that we needed to be able to speak our minds openly. Of course, they could always do that. What they were really objecting to was being criticized for saying awful things. So they were not calling for the end of censorship but asking for their critics to be censored or to self-censor.

Donald Trump’s victory seems to have been taken as a signal that the era of political correctness, not that it ever existed except in the fevered minds of some, is over. Adam Horowitz has a round up of the many ugly things that people who are not white are already being subjected to. It seems like many people interpret the end of political correctness as a license to unleash their ugliest thoughts and actions. They seem to be thinking that basic politeness and decency are the equivalent of political correctness and can now be dispensed with. You can expect to see a lot of such reports coming in. The id of America has come into the open and much of the id is not a pretty sight.

I am of course an immigrant to US. I am not white and hence may be presumed to be foreign by sight. I also speak with a foreign accent, a dead giveaway that I was not born here. I have never been the victim of bigotry and racism except when I was a graduate student in Pittsburgh more than three decades ago, when I was denied an apartment because I was a foreigner and when walking down a street, a couple of youth threw stones at me and yelled ‘”fucking Iranian” during the Iranian hostage crisis.

The thing is, I do not feel like a foreigner and do not go around expecting to be insulted or discriminated against and so would be very surprised if anything similar to the incidents described by Horowitz happened to me. But I suppose I had better brace myself.