Before we start, we should agree on one thing: America has issues with discrimination, ones that it must solve to distinguish itself as the free and liberal country it claims to be. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and more are not just problems as in, "these things should not exist, and we should stop them where they do" but rather as in, "these things do exist and we need to end them. Now." We, as a free and just society, need to justify our claims to the title of “most progressive nation on earth”, the title we have built for ourselves, by challenging head on the moral issues that the rest of the world is unprepared to face. That title has engendered our obligation to eliminate the factors of discrimination that we would look upon other countries for harboring. Just because America does not expressly deny the rights of certain subsets of our population does not mean that those subsets are not deprived of those rights, or that they are totally equal citizens.
Therein lies a central impetus behind socially conscious speech culture: Whereas discrimination in the rest of the world is usually more obvious, American discrimination is not a clear-cut oppression; rather it is one of subtle
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Of course, of course, of course - sometimes people take it too far. Same with any social or political movement ever. When people turn to violence, or denying white people and their opinions, or refusing to hear criticism, that obviously reflects poorly on all forward-thinking people who fight for multicultural sensitivity, and is decidedly unhelpful. But the restricting of the lens onto such infractions is to avoid the questions that socially conscious speech culture 's ideas should bring to mind. When America focuses on defending Woodrow Wilson 's legacy rather than questioning what it means that Woodrow Wilson 's name and image alone can still have an emotional effect on blacks 100 years later, that is a misdirection that perverts ideas that could have a serious effect on race in