Obama told host Steve Inskeep, “If you’re narrowly defining political correctness as a hypersensitivity that ends up resulting in people not being able to express their opinions at all, without somebody suggesting they’re a victim. You know, if our social discourse and our political discourse becomes like walking on eggshells, so that if somebody says ‘You know what, I’m not sure affirmative action is the right way to solve racial problems in this country,’ and somebody’s immediately accused of being racist, well, then I think you have a point.”
But the definition of “politically correct” is “all over the map,” Obama said.
“I suspect the president-elect’s definition of political correctness would be different than mine,” he said of Trump. “If what’s meant by political correctness is that there is some broad disapproval that’s expressed when somebody uses a racial epithet, or somebody makes a derogatory comment about women, or about the LGBT community, and people say, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t do that. That’s wrong, that’s cruel, that’s hurtful. Here’s the history of that word.’ And when you use words like that, you’re reinforcing people feeling like they’re outsiders, and less than other Americans.”
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