Calgary, August 2023
John Smith was a politically correct person. I cannot say he was a politically correct man because that would be politically incorrect. John wanted to live in a country where nobody was discriminated against for their gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or anything else. But living in such a country implied responsibility and John knew that his duty was to defend those moral values. His job as a director of the LA County Affirmative Action gave him a good opportunity to do so. He was checking how many women (saying female would be politically incorrect) were in the management positions of government offices, that the visible minorities weren’t discriminated in hiring process and that government forms didn’t ask questions about age, gender, religion and similar. Vocabulary was also a target of John’s effort. In his view the words like manual, mankind, manager, chairman and similar should all be replaced with gender-neutral terms. (Some might say that replacing the word ‘manual’ with ‘personual’ and ‘manager’ with ‘personager’ doesn’t sound so good).
One day John was inspecting a computer lab and he was shocked. The room was full of computers and one machine, bigger that the others, had a sign ‘master’. The smaller ones had a sign ‘slave’. John was outraged. “We don’t live in a society where we have masters and slaves,” he thought. He called the person (politically correct term) in charge of the lab and asked him about the signs.
“We don’t live in the master-slave society anymore,” John lectured him. “What is the meaning of those signs?”
“The big computer manages the small ones.”
“OK, but those signs are inappropriate and should be replaced.”
“Those signs came with the machines when we bought them.”
“Where did you boughed them from?” asked John and the guy told him the name of the suplier.
Back in the office John called the computer supplier’s marketing manager.
“Are you putting sines saying ‘master’ and ‘slave’ on your computers?”
“Yes.”
“Those are inappropriate signs; we don’t allow slavery in this country anymore. You must change them.”
“This is a standard terminology,” he said and hung the phone.
John was again outraged. How could the marketing manager dare to hang up on him? He issued a memo requesting an exhaustive search for any computer equipment labeled ‘master’ and ‘slave’. He also stated that all offending labels should be replaced with more appropriate terminology. Purchasing officials subsequently requested all suppliers to stop using labels deemed “unacceptable and offensive”. However, at that time (2003) ‘master’ and ‘slave’ were common terms in the computer industry and have been used without complaint for decades. Computer suppliers refused to follow John’s memo, and LA County’s Division of Purchasing and Contract Services had to stop enforcing it.
This should be the end of such silly requests, but we live in the politically correct times. In July of 2018, Google asked their employees to replace biased phrases like “master-slave” with the company “respectful code policy”, and to stop using politically incorrect terminology. In the Amazon, the words “master-slave,” were replaced with “primary-secondary” or “active-passive.” The same is happening in other large companies like Apple and Microsoft. Will this march to political correctness save the world? I personally doubt it.
And what happen with our John? In 2013, ten years after his famous memo, Dennis Tafoya (his true name), former director of the Affirmative Action Compliance office, received $65,000 when he resigned. County officials described it as a routine departure.