Posted on 08/04/2011 8:59:30 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
It was five years ago now that Mitt Romney and the late White House spokesman Tony Snow both spent time in the hot seat for using the term “tar baby.” Romney was referring to the Big Dig highway project in Boston, and Snow to an abstract debate. But there are those who consider the term, originally referring to something difficult to free oneself from once touched, a racial slur. John McCain nevertheless used it the following year in a discussion of divorce law, and this week it’s Representative Doug Lamborn who is being accused of racism for his comments on a radio show in the wake of the debt ceiling debacle:
[T]hey will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to be associated with him, it's like touching a, a tar baby and you get it ... you know you’re stuck and you’re part of the problem and you can’t get away. [emphasis added]
Lamborn has apologized, but the word around the blogosphere, most articulately phrased by David Sirota at Salon, is that Lamborn was using coded language: “[T]he comment reveals how various forms of racism are still being mainstreamed by the fringe right,” as Sirota has it. But before making that judgment, we must ascertain: Is tar baby actually a racial slur?
Certainly not the way the guys before Lamborn were using it. A notion that they were passing a quiet signal to racists is awkward, given the decidedly non-black topics they were discussing. Need we entertain the possibility that Romney was telegraphing a subtle signal to bigots in a discussion of a highway project? Was John McCain preaching a coded message to a racist base in a comment about divorce procedure?
In those instances, a simpler analysis works. Language is all about metaphor, and it is useful to have one to refer to objects or topics that ensnare one upon contact. It’s why the Bre’r Rabbit story the expression traces to has had such legs—as well as why cultures worldwide, including African ones, have equivalent folklore characters. Thus a reasonable analysis is that people reach for this useful metaphor, within the rapid and subconscious activity that speaking entails, unaware that some consider it to have a second meaning as a slur.
And the “some” that do appear to be in the minority. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions tar baby as a slur online, but not in print. The American Heritage Dictionary, notoriously attuned to everyday usage, does not refer to the slur usage. I, for one, am well aware that there are slurs for black people that are less prominent than the N-word—porch monkey is one that comes up now and then, although I have only heard it referred to, not applied—but only in 2006 did I catch that tar baby was one of them.
If my experience were universal, then no dictionary entry would list it as a slur at all, of course. However, I do not live in a cave, nor do the countless people currently learning for the first time that tar baby is a slur—and I recall assorted media writers equally perplexed when I did interviews on this back in 2006. Tar baby, it seems, is an obscure slur, not even known to be so by a substantial proportion of the population.
When I had a hard time seeing Romney and Snow as racists for using the term in 2006, many purported that tar baby was so obviously a racial slur that I must be dissimulating somehow. I submit, however, that to a large extent, those who feel that tar baby’s status as a slur is patently obvious are judging from the fact that it sounds like a racial slur, because tar is black and baby sounds dismissive. And here’s the crucial point: that, in itself, is a reality that cannot be denied.
Part of the human propensity for metaphor is that we make semantic associations, which drift and reassign over time. As such, it’s not the most graceful thing to refer to a black figure as a tar baby, and it was quite gracious for Lamborn to apologize. However, to assume Lamborn knew the word was a slur and was passing a grimy little signal to his base is unwarranted here. It is the kind of reflexive and recreational abuse we revile when it comes from the other direction (i.e. Obama as a “racist”).
Tar baby is one of those intermediate cases: The basic meaning is the folkloric one, while a derived meaning, known only to a segment of American English speakers (and to many among them, only vaguely) is a dismissive reference to black people.
There will be gaffes with expressions like these, upon which, in a sociologically enlightened society, apologies will be necessary. However, to insist upon the moral backwardness of the apologist is logically incoherent in reference to this particular term, and as such, less sociologically enlightened than it may seem.
This is the guy I was telling you about Saturday.
It’s only a racist slur to those who were not bright enough to read (and understand) those original Uncle Remus stories.
Unsurprisingly, that group appears to be comprised of folks who love to claim literacy.
Go figure.
Tar baby bump
Let’s ask Br’er Rabbit.
Words are what the liberal progressives say they are. /s
Yes; what did Br'er Rabbit mean
when he used the now infamous phrase.
Okay - I guess the University of North Carolina will have to change its nickname, too. When they got it, all the players were white. Now, they are a hodgepodge.
Another banned word on the way.
SARC
Written by: Paul Mooney
Interviewer.....Chevy Chase
Mr. Wilson.....Richard Pryor
Interviewer: Alright, Mr. Wilson, you’ve done just fine on the Rorshact.. your papers are in good order.. your file’s fine.. no difficulties with your motor skills.. And I think you’re probably ready for this job. We’ve got one more psychological test we always do here. It’s just a Word Association. I’ll throw you out a few words - anything that comes to your mind, just throw back at me, okay? It’s kind of an arbitrary thing. Like, if I say “dog”, you’d say..?
Mr. Wilson: “Tree”.
Interviewer: “Tree”. [ nods head, prepares the test papers ] “Dog”.
Mr. Wilson: “Tree”.
Interviewer: “Fast”.
Mr. Wilson: “Slow”.
Interviewer: “Rain”.
Mr. Wilson: “Snow”.
Interviewer: “White”.
Mr. Wilson: “Black”.
Interviewer: “Bean”.
Mr. Wilson: “Pod”.
Interviewer: [ casually ] “Negro”.
Mr. Wilson: “Whitey”.
Interviewer: “Tarbaby”.
Mr. Wilson: [ silent, sure he didn’t hear what he thinks he heard ] What’d you say?
Interviewer: [ repeating ] “Tarbaby”.
Mr. Wilson: “Ofay”.
Interviewer: “Colored”.
Mr. Wilson: “Redneck”.
Interviewer: “Junglebunny”.
Mr. Wilson: [ starting to get angry ] “Peckerwood!”
Interviewer: “Burrhead”.
Mr. Wilson: [ defensive ] “Cracker!”
Interviewer: [ aggressive ] “Spearchucker”.
Mr. Wilson: “White trash!”
Interviewer: “Jungle Bunny!”
Mr. Wilson: [ upset ] “Honky!”
Interviewer: “Spade!
Mr. Wilson: [ really upset ] “Honky Honky!”
Interviewer: [ relentless ] “N*gger!”
Mr. Wilson: [ immediate ] “Dead honky!” [ face starts to flinch ]
Interviewer: [ quickly wraps the interview up ] Okay, Mr. Wilson, I think you’re qualified for this job. How about a starting salary of $5,000?
Mr. Wilson: Your momma!
Interviewer: [ fumbling ] Uh.. $7,500 a year?
Mr. Wilson: Your grandmomma!
Interviewer: [ desperate ] $15,000, Mr. Wilson. You’ll be the highest paid janitor in America. Just, don’t.. don’t hurt me, please..
Mr. Wilson: Okay.
Interviewer: [ relieved ] Okay.
Mr. Wilson: You want me to start now?
Interviewer: Oh, no, no.. that’s alright. I’ll clean all this up. Take a couple of weeks off, you look tired.
Doesn’t anybody ever even read a book anymore? This has nothing to do with racism but everything to do with ignorance.
It must not be a commonly used word. I have never heard a single person us it.
The opposite of a sticky tar baby would have to be Teflon. Would they complain if 0bama was called the Teflon president like Clinton was? What color is Teflon?
similar scene in clerks 2. an oblivious jeff anderson listing off a bunch of racial slurs, arguing porch money is not a racial slur, with wanda sykes getting furious about it.
McWhorter was a linguistics prof. at Berkeley while my son was there. I’ve read some of his books, and he generally rejects this race-baiting nonsense.
However, I was disappointed when he endorsed Obama, seemingly due to skin color, but also using the same faulty, “he’s a pragmatist” logic that fooled GOP moderates. I’m not sure how he feels about that endorsement now.
Doesn’t anyone read anymore? “Tar baby” is a metaphoric device in the Uncle Remus stories (written by a black storyteller) for a problem that gets worse the more you struggle with it. It has nothing to do with race.
Funny, I am constantly being told by my children that I can not use certain words in front of the grandchildren. You might think this is about swearing but it is not. It is about sensitivity training. Heaven forbid that I offend anyone. Oh did my use of the word Heaven offend the atheists? Please just give me a list of the forbidden words because it seems that new ones are added all the time.
The Tar-Baby is a doll made of tar and turpentine used to entrap Br'er Rabbit in the second of the Uncle Remus stories.Any other meaning is deconstruction of English by Collectivists,The more that Br'er Rabbit fights the Tar-Baby, the more entangled he becomes.
In modern usage according to Random House, "tar baby" refers to any "sticky situation" that is only aggravated by additional contact.
elitists or Marxists in order to entrap freedom loving people.
You must be under 55 or 60 if you haven’t heard of it. Early boomers remember it from a popular Disney movie “Song of the South”, which is no longer available because some considered it racist.
One commenter at the linked article said this:
The Baby Boom generation can’t pass into senscence soon enough, so that we no longer have to spend precious oxygen debating whether the use of arachaic terms they once heard as kids in a movie theater might actually be offensive to someone.
I am offended by that.
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