Seemingly innocent phrase used by conservatives and others to denigrate multicultural efforts and sensitivities. The phrase evokes insincerity and empty rules, rather than new, complex worlds of knowledge, behavior and communication that a recognition of diversity and equality entails. Certainly colleges (a frequent target for those who decry p.c. thinking) and other cultural institutions have created missteps as they try to regulate speech or interpersonal relations or interpret activities through a rigid template of race, class and gender. Nonetheless, attempts to deconstruct cultural patterns based on white male dominance prove both difficult and threatening towards those conservatives who throw this term (like “family values”) around rather freely.