I love the idea. It’s the execution that bothers me, because I am noticing a tendency for the politically correct terms to be the ones that privileged peoplethinkare most respectful rather than the ones that the people in question actually want.

Examples:

• My teacher told me about her friend, who is Haitian and doesn’t want to be called African American because Haiti isn’t Africa, and she gets corrected when she calls herself black.
• Caucasian is considered politically correct by many, and considered problematic by many others. It seems to be mostly privileged people who like Caucasian as far as I can tell, but I’m not quite so sure about this one.
• Visually impaired and hearing impaired seem to be politically correct alternatives for Blind and Deaf, but I don’t see much evidence of the Blind or Deaf communities describing themselves that way.
• Autistic person vs. person with autism. Person with autism is politically correct. Autistic person seems to be preferred by most autistic people.

It’s not an “Everything politically correct is wrong!” kind of situation by any stretch, but it is an “We should make sure the politically correct terms are actually the ones people want to be described by before we insist on them” issue. Political correctness is supposed fix the problems with privileged people using insulting/problematic terminology, and we need to make sure it actually does that.