I'm actually not trying to be controversial

(My goal, rather, is to point out a interesting observation I made a couple of weeks ago.)

We were reading Le Spleen de Paris (The Parisian Prowler) by Charles Baudelaire. Our class discussion led us to the fact that he had a mistress. This work was first published in the early 1860s. This affair would thus have been all the more gossip worthy because his mistress was a woman of color.

In itself, I find this information to be not all that shocking. What became interesting was what my professor said to describe the woman. As the discussion turned to poems such as Beautiful Dorothy he explained who this "Dorothy" might have been.

"At the time, it was commonly known that Baudelaire had an African-American mistress."

Excuse me?!? Did anyone else catch that? Baudelaire was French. He lived in France (as the French tend to). One dead give-away is the reference to the city Paris right in the title!

So what am I getting at? Well, "Dorothy" couldn't exactly have been African-American if she was French. African-French maybe, but I somehow doubt that's what the common phrasing was there, particularly at that time.

This brings me to my main point: I think we've gone well beyond the original intention of "Politically Correct." Personally, if I ever feel the need to discuss a person's skin color, I would generally call people who appear to be of African descent "black." I'm not trying to cling to the status quo. I use the more general term for accuracy really. Now if I were to ever be corrected, I'd absolutely change the terminology I used for the person requesting the change, but I prefer not to assume too much before I know that is the proper term for a person.

I think the civil rights movement took the United States a long way in the right direction. People know that to judge a person's "content" and "character" based on his or her skin color is wrong. Why then, do we accept that we can know a person's ancestry or native country based on this same criteria?

I discussed, recently, with a friend from Nigeria how he would feel if someone referred to him as "African-American." His response indicated that he would not be too pleased. And what about the many people living in the Carribean, or in Central and South America (or all over the world for that matter)? They are neither African nor American. We need to be careful how we use such terms. Perhaps they have gone from used to abused?

I have no problem with these politically correct terms. I will use them when I know they are accurate. I simply refuse to assume that much about a person when all I know for sure is that their skin indicates a heritage different from my own.