Holy crap. Just reading Beatty's The Sellout, and I've come across a pretty egregious error.

[David Morris]

Very recently I was informed (online) that "blacks" is an offensive term.
"Black people" is OK, though.  This semantic rule seems to be just what the
PC police are looking for.

David Morris

On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 8:58 PM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> And this, my friends, is an example of precisely what I was afraid
> might happen actually happening.
>
> Let me explain...
>
> On page 95, Beatty writes:
>
> "The only certainties I had about the African-American condition were
> that we had no concept of the phrases too sweet and too salty. And in
> ten years, through countless California cruelties and slights against
> the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and
> 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg's Crash and
> Dave Eggers's do-gooder condescension, I hadn't spoken a single word."
>
> I'm sure I probably don't have to point this out to too many of you
> here on the P-list, but Beatty can't possibly mean Cronenberg's 1996
> film in this context. He must be referring to Paul Haggis's 2006
> Academy Award-winning mediocrity. And now his error is immortalized in
> the printed word, in a very popular novel, indeed.
>
> SHIT!
>
> I haven't been able to find Beatty on social media at all. Is there
> any way to contact him to let him know, so that maybe the error can be
> corrected in future editions? It IS a pretty serious error, after all.
>
> Cheers,
> yer old pal Jerky
> --
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>