Using politically correct language

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In the USA, the home of political correctness, there are now well developed lists lists of taboos. The words "tribe" and "Indian" are out, in favour of "group" and "Native American," even though many Native Americans use and prefer the former terms. The word "slave" has been banished, replaced by "enslaved person," on the grounds that slavery was a temporary condition that was imposed upon people, not part of their essence as human beings. But "slave" is a far more stark and powerful word, expressing much more accurately the horror of the owning, buying, and selling of human beings. The term "enslaved persons" sounds like a bureaucrat's euphemism. Even "African-American," until recently the most politically correct of the current labels, has come in for criticism: some activists have insisted that the word should not be used to apply to the period before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, since only then did blacks become American citizens. "This is ludicrous," says one editor who worked on one of the current social studies texts. "It's one thing to refer to a man who has just stepped off a slave ship in the seventeenth century as an African, but it's absurd to refer to someone living in 1860, whose parents and even grandparents may have been born in this country, as Africans."