At New College, political correctness could sometimes become a contest of one-upmanship, and there was social cachet to be won by pointing out prejudice in its smallest manifestations. One student admitted that he liked to wear glasses despite having twenty-twenty vision, and then another student said that was “ableist,” because he was appropriating the legitimate struggle of disabled people. “Maybe so,” countered another student, but in fact there was no such thing as “disabled people,” and that phrase was a micro-aggression against “people with disabilities.” And then there was Derek, the
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