The movement for “trigger warnings” in college classrooms is part of a troubling trend toward protecting people from their own individual sensitivities.
But it seems political correctness is being
replaced by a new trend—one that might
be called “empathetic correctness.”
While political correctness seeks to cultivate sensitivity outwardly on behalf of those historically marginalized and oppressed groups, empathetic correctness focuses inwardly toward the protection of individual sensitivities. Now, instead of challenging the status quo by demanding texts that question the comfort of the Western canon, students are demanding the status quo by refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort.
