Now Is Not The Time To Give Up On Political Correctness

How do you know if you're woke? Is it a "you either are or you aren't" situation? Is it on a sliding scale? Maybe there's a Buzzfeed quiz for it (of course there is, I just checked). Maybe it's like being queer or left-wing: something that feels a tiny bit pretentious to self-describe as down the pub because it's more of end goal, a state of enlightenment to constantly work towards than something you can actually be. You might have queer values, yes, but can you honestly say you never watch unethical lesbian porn or that you're a particularly active activist? Of course you voted Labour in the last election, but was every Uber you claimed against tax truly for work?

You see what I'm getting at: it's easy to mock the politically correct even when you're among them; if not as feminist killjoys, or as a tetchy swarm of morality police, or as the people euthanising free speech and good comedy (all shit, reductive arguments by the way), then as hypocrites (fair enough).

Take the word "woke" itself – the fact that it was popularised in the Black Lives Matter movement but is now mostly applied by white people to aggrandise their own sense of political awareness in a manner that is almost too ironic to bear.

But whether it's a word you choose to use or not, if the events that unfolded over the last week have shown us anything, it's that being socially conscious and respectful of the struggles facing minority groups is now more important than ever before.

First came the news – which arrived via a series of raving Tweets – that Trump is banning transgender people from serving in the military, supposedly to keep medical costs down. Then, here in the UK, we learnt that our national broadcaster pays women significantly less than men.

Over the weekend, the Sunday Times Irish edition published a sexist and anti-semitic column about these BBC pay gaps called "Sorry Ladies – Equal Pay Has to Be Earned", which suggested that men get paid more because they work harder, are sick less and seldom get pregnant, adding that Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz probably got paid better than most women because they're Jewish.

All of this comes just a couple of weeks after an Irish newspaper mistook Stormzy for football Romalu Lukaku – because they're both black – and an MP thought it was alright to say the n-word in a discussion about Brexit. The Sunday Times columnist was sacked, so was the MP, but anything up to 6,000 or more trans people in the US military still wait to see if they're out of a job, and racism persists so violently in this country that, on Friday night, there was a small riot on the streets of Dalston over the death of Rashan Charles, a black man killed in police custody in Hackney this month.

For some, it's beginning to feel like the question "shouldn't we expect more than this?" is paling into insignificance. It's no longer just difficult to see where the bar for political correctness is, but rather, it feels like there is no bar.

The other night, my girlfriend read me some of the YouTube comments left on a VICE documentary I recently worked on called Raised Without Gender, about gender neutral schools in Sweden: "God Damn, Swedes are pathetic. A genderless people getting raped by Muslims," read one. "1 like = 1 dead faggot," was another choice quote. "Fucking jews… Every GOD DAMN TIME…" read another. I literally did not look up from my dinner; these sorts of comments just felt par for the course, especially online.

WATCH: Raised Without Gender

What did catch my attention, however, was something else I stumbled upon online over the weekend: Chelsea Manning's Twitter account. As far back as I could scroll, the transgender ex-military whistleblower had posted Tweets full of hearts, sunglasses and rainbow emojis with the hashtag "#wegotthis". "Remember, its [sic] love and inspiration that gives us our courage," read one. "howdy! im the sheriff of #WeGotThis" read another, and "trans people are fighters, not victims". This wasn't the angry political Twitter rhetoric I was used to seeing (although at times like these everyone has their right to be angry), it was a "kill em with kindness" approach that left a huge lump in my throat. Not least because, as I was reading it, I could hear the sirens of police cars heading towards Dalston.

You might be wondering, after the last week's events, where do we go from here? In a time which feels increasingly like we are being enveloped in a blanket of bigotry, it's hard to know which battles to pick, and it's even harder to muster the energy to pick them at all. But what we can learn from the examples of Chelsea Manning and the people that rioted in Dalston on Saturday is not to get complacent. If an acute spike in transphobia, racism and bigotry has brought about the realisation that progress can be undone overnight, we should probably all harness that realisation, swallow our hypocrisies and do what our leaders, our police force, our newspapers and our TV stations are failing to do: champion political correctness, all jokes aside.