What is “symbolic violence”? A popular PC language maneuver, taking something non-violent and associating it with danger and crime. A rhetorical trick that creates and magnifies a sense of crisis among campus activists. Here is a guide to proper usage. You too can translate from PC to English.
Visual Rape. Peeping or ogling. Checking a woman out without getting her written permission.
Cultural appropriation. Sartorial theft. Wearing hoop earrings or any garment invented by someone in another culture.
Intellectual harassment. Criticism, disagreement. The gravest version is “anti-feminist harassment. Prof. Annette Kolodney at the University of Arizona says “This serious threat to academic freedom” occurs when any statement or behavior has the intent or effect of devaluing (feminist) ideas about women.
Non-traditional violence. Criticism, disagreement (see intellectual harassment). Lani Guinier says she became a victim of non-traditional violence when the media attacked her novel plans for proportional racial voting in 1993. Husbands who argue with their wives are behaving in a non-traditionally domestically violent manner.
Mental Rape, emotional rape. Paula Jones said Bill Clinton’s unzipped behavior was “almost like a mental rape.” Monica Lewinsky said she felt emotionally raped by Kenneth Starr.
Symbolic and low-tech gang rape. Feminist Catherine Stimpson’s term for Anita Hill’s treatment by the Senate Judiciary Committee. A rebuttal to Clarence Thomas’s ‘high-tech lynching” (a nontechnical non-lynching.).
Economic violence. Jesse Jackson’s term for abrupt plant closings, home foreclosures and other economic dislocations.
Economic censorship. Any boycott against any product or person associated with your side of a political issue. Also a familiar complaint by artists, meaning “Nobody is buying my work,” closely related to censorship by omission, which means ‘Why am I never on TV? “Why don’t I get invited to big parties?”
Retinal chauvinism. Flashy internet graphics that totally disregard the visually impaired.” Web design is primarily driven by retinal chauvinists,” said Jerry Kuns, a technology specialist for the California School for the Blind. “Pictures are great, but they are stumbling blocks to me.”
Emotional intelligence, bodily intelligence. Harvard’s Howard Gardner, who concocted the theory of multiple intelligences, was once asked, ‘why?’.” If I had called them talents, no one would have paid any attention,” he said. So now, everybody is smart in some way, even if they can’t read or write. And thanks to Gardner no athlete can ever be called a dumb jock. If they are athletic, they can’t be dumb—they have bodily intelligence.
Semantic violence. Northwestern University professor Regina Schwartz says the biblical covenant between God and the Israelites committed semantic violence by cutting the Israelites off from any sense of common humanity with other peoples. She has said that religions with only one god induce violence behaviors.
Cultural genocide. Intellectual genocide. Complete destruction of one culture by another. Or an easy but vague way of complaining about American public schools. “Public school students (in Washington) are being subjected to a particularly insidious brand of intellectual genocide—Columnist Courtland Milloy.
Environmental racism. A racialized version of NIMBY. No dumps or incinerators in my backyard, please.
Symbolic hate crimes. Noncriminal incidents with doubtful connections to hate or bias. At Swarthmore College years ago, feces was discovered at a table in the Intercultural center. Outraged critics didn’t miss a beat when the offending substance turned out to be chocolate cake because the cake “had the symbolic effect of a hate crime.” This proves that baked goods can be hate speech if you think about them hard enough.
