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Townsman, 1991-07, Page 42Cd1IIMM Living in the mine -field By Keith Roulston I was watching a movie on televi- sion the other night and I didn't know whether I was supposed to cheer or tut -tut when Whoopi Goldberg and Sam Elliott played a love scene. Now usually love scenes are pretty happy occasions and I think I was supposed to be in favour of this one but I'm not always up to date on my political correctness so I was left uneasy by what my reaction should be. See, in case you didn't know, Whoopy is a black woman and Sam is a white man. The movie played it pretty cagey about whether anything really hap- pened: sort of the way the 1940s movies used to do when the camera shifted off the curtains blowing in the wind or waves breaking on the shore. One minute the camera showed him consoling her and hugging her, the next it showed her having a shower, coming out and looking at the rum- pled bed and calling out to Sam who had taken off to parts unknown. None of those full-blown, down and naked scenes you see in so many movies these days. Besides the fact neither Sam or Whoopy are exactly body - beautiful, the North American audi- ence still might not be up to graphic love -making between black and white on the screen. But what worried me was what the politically -correct reaction to the scene was supposed to be. At one time such a thing was taboo, of course. In the days when Harry Belcfonte creat- ed a stir just by holding hands and kissing Julie Andrews on the cheek on television, a love scene between a black and white would have been seen as a courageous act of liberation. Then things switched around and blacks were supposed to only care about blacks—a black woman being made 40 TOWNSMAN/JULY-AUGUST 1991 love to by a white man would have been seen as political subjugation. Now? Well, I don't know. These things change so often and so fast, I don't know what's politically correct anymore. I find I'm always behind on my political correctness these days sort of like I am with fashion. By the time I finally get a tie that's the right width, I find they've changed the proper width again. It's that way with political cor- rectness too. By the time I catch up on what I'm supposed to believe, I'm not supposed to believe it any more. This can be dangerous, especially when you're on display to thousands of people every week in a newspaper. One slip of the computer key and you can be branded a white, chauvinist, neanderthal, racist man for life. The ground is especially dangerous because of course a lot of political correctness comes in the use of the right words. I recently read where some supposedly politically -correct woman used the term that things were not "in black and white", then apolo- gized because that was a racist term. Really? I always thought it meant just that things were clearly one thing or another, not some muddled middle mixture of grey. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean just because people of dark skin colour decided they'd rather be "black" than negro, does it make an expression that had nothing to do with racism suddenly racist? Then again, maybe the politically correct woman was behind the times herself. I heard recently that "black" is out and African-American is the politically correct term now. The mine -field gets more danger- ous when it comes to dealing with men and women. I mean even in the U.S., the black population is only 10 per cent of the total population so the number of people you can upset by using the wrong words is limited. Since women make up 50 per cent of the population, the potential for putting your foot in it is infinitely greater. The biggest problem in my busi- ness, of course, is the language. Gen- erally, anything with the letters "man" in it is verbotten, even if it had noth- ing to do with sexism in the first place. (Where this puts the word woman, I haven't figured out.) Now some of the new, non-sexist language makes good sense. Chang- ing the Workmen's Compensation Board to the Workers' Compensation Board not only makes sense, but it probably saves us money because there are fewer letters to be painted on office signs. Making Canada Man- power Centres into Canada Employ- ment Centres probably tells us more of what the place is all about anyway. But I'd have to be a pretty strong fem- inist before I'd rather be called a "chair" than a chairman. A chair, last time I looked, was an inanimate object. Now I've known a fair share of leaders of organizations who have been just that, so I think I'd rather get along with the horrible three letters on the end until somebody can come up with a word that's really an improve- ment. Which is where I ask for trouble, I guess. In my writing, the leader of an organization is still a chairman until somebody can find something that makes sense. It seems to me that all we have to do is ignore the history of the word and it can be perfectly acceptable. In my other life, for instance, I'm a playwright which means a crafter of plays just as a millwright means a crafter of mills or a ploughwright means a crafter of ploughs. It's pretty archaic language but nobody seems in a rush to change the word to playwrite as they have in the U.S. because nobody has turned it into a political issue. Words are what we make them. If one minute black is beautiful and the next it isn't, it isn't the word that changed, just our attitudes. All of which, I suppose, is what makes me retarded in my political correctness. Of course retarded has been politically -corrected to "mentally challenged"—but then I am that every day of my life.