Cultural appropriation - your thoughts

PC, in theory, is a great thing.

But, in practice, it tends to be a set of rules for people and businesses to achieve approval from today's culture, when they are simply whitewashed tombs. I encounter this quite often. As long as they treat those who fall within the category of "disenfranchised minority" (most often because a particular "believable" narrative places them there and not because statistics do, though they often do) according to the established rules, they are unassailable, when others who are disenfranchised who might not be part of a group that is systematically oppressed can be treated with the utmost contempt, and the outcry will be comparably quiet.

Prime example: Run for Cover, a popular independent record label, dropped shoegaze band Whirr last year. Why? They made hateful comments on Twitter towards a band made up of transgenders called G.L.O.S.S. Fair enough. The most vitriolic things they said were about the quality of G.L.O.S.S.'s music, but that's beside the point. They were dropped and Run for Cover donated a large sum of money to transgender organizations. The problem is, Whirr's derogatory comments had been going on a long time, but only recently had they pertained to transgenders. Many of their comments had actually pertained to suicide victims and those who have attempted suicide and they were much more hateful towards them than they were to G.L.O.S.S. Yet Run for Cover let them continue for years. Only when there was internet uproar, or predicted internet uproar, did they take action and they only attempted to make amends for the acts that directly caused the uproar and not Whirr's acts as a whole. Run for Cover may actually care about treating people with respect (I don't really know), but it's apparent that their idea of treating people with respect only applies to those who, if discriminated against by them or their clientele, would get them into trouble with their customers. In essence, the label was simply being true to their name.

But it's not just a corporatization of political correctness. I have many friends who essentially follow suit. Political correctness for them are rules that they have to follow to be accepted by their culture, but they don't seem to feel any responsibility to treat people who are not classified as an "oppressed minority" by that narrative, with respect. This has led me to wonder how much of PC today is actually in step with the overarching moral concept that is supposed to define it. 

I don't claim this is the case for my generation as a whole. But I spend a lot of time around musicians, particularly in the indie rock scene here. These people are my friends, and they have their virtues, but I notice their hypocrisy, their overall rhetoric of hatred, time and time again. I legitimately fear that I will be ousted from my peer group if I believe differently from them. At the very least, they present their friendship on social media as a conditional privilege that can be lost by coming to certain conclusions. There is no room to be misguided or skeptical in their book, so it seems. 

PC, in theory, is a great thing.

But, in practice, it tends to be a set of rules for people and businesses to achieve approval from today's culture, when they are simply whitewashed tombs. I encounter this quite often. As long as they treat those who fall within the category of "disenfranchised minority" (most often because a particular "believable" narrative places them there and not because statistics do, though they often do) according to the established rules, they are unassailable, when others who are disenfranchised who might not be part of a group that is systematically oppressed can be treated with the utmost contempt, and the outcry will be comparably quiet.