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

[David Morris]

Like you, I wasn't aware of this "blacks" taboo.  I can't object because
I'm not black.  This dynamic is silly, and makes Trump great for idiots.

On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 10:32 PM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Not sure where you're going with this, or what you mean, exactly.
>
> That phrase ("the blacks") only appears in my email as a direct quote
> of Beatty's text.
>
> Beatty is an African American author, in case you weren't aware.
>
> You should read The Sellout. It's fantastic, unfair attack on David
> Cronenberg notwithstanding.
>
> YOPJerky
>
> On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 10:33 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>