PC=Pretty Crazy?

I inadvertently booby-trapped my friend’s house last night. You may recall that my friend Jen is blind. Not “optically challenged” or any other such nonsense. She prefers the term blind--but that doesn’t stop her from making “sighted people” jokes, either. I was at her house yesterday baby-sitting her big lovable baby of a dog while she was away, and I had a glass of water, which I only drank half of and then forgot all about. I left it on one of her end tables. Jen discovered it this morning by knocking it over and getting water everywhere. Oops. After she called to give me a good-natured hard time about it, I thought that I should have told her I did it on purpose to add some excitement to her life.

Jen actually appreciates being teased (within reason) about being blind. It’s often far more annoying to her to have people sidestep all through their conversation trying to avoid any reference to the fact that she can’t see. This is truly ridiculous behavior--after all, Jen is well aware that she’s blind. She’s noticed by now, believe me, and it’s a definitive part of who she is. I’ve actually been around her when people have said things like, “It’s nice to see you again,” and then immediately looked stricken by the fact that they used the word see. What the heck else are you supposed to say? “It’s nice to be-physically-in-your-immediate-presence again?” Pshaw! Jen is not offended by verbs that allude to seeing things. She doesn’t take it as some sort of sighted person taunt. She herself uses those words ALL the time. No big deal.

And then there’s the time that Jen was over at Kiki’s with us for a party, and asked where the bathroom was. This particular bathroom has no sink, as it has been in a state of remodeling limbo for a few months. While she was in there, I told Kiki we shouldn’t have warned her about the absence of sink; that in fact, we should have told her that it was really hard to find, and see how long it took her to figure out that we were playing a prank on her. We told her about our proposed joke when she came out, and this was her response: a very loud laugh and a pronouncement that “I love you guys!”

I do believe that the PC movement has produced some beneficial mind-opening for a lot of folks, but at the same time, sometimes it encourages people to act like fools. Most folks I know like to be called Black, not African American. And through the course of my work as an archaeologist, I’ve met quite a few Indians--not a single one of whom ever referred to his- or herself as Native American. Call people what they want to be called. It’s that simple. We don’t need to make up protracted polysyllabic phrases to describe people in a way that precludes--what, exactly? I’m not even sure.

Just one more example--a while ago, when another friend used to work in the restaurant industry, she was told to take a dish to a particular person at a large table full of people. The other server went through all kinds of painful lengths trying to describe who this person was, but Lisa just couldn’t see who she meant. After all, there were two women wearing red. Finally, Lisa asked, “Oh, you mean the black woman?” Apparently, the other server felt that it would be scandalous or offensive to call attention to the fact that the woman was, indeed, Black. I think that by sidestepping all around the issue she actually had the opposite of her intended effect. In reality, it could even be construed that she felt that being black was somehow a negative thing, or why else wouldn’t she have just said so? Here’s the other part of the story: everyone else at the table was white. That would have been such a simple way to distinguish her from the other guests--not a comment on racial relationships, a criticism of her skin color, or a slight against Black culture, just a momentarily distinguishing characteristic like the fact that she was wearing a red blouse. The same pretty much goes for disabled people--Jen doesn’t need or want kid-glove treatment. She wants to be joked with and teased like anybody else. Why shouldn’t she? And quit being so surprised that she can cook!