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• Friday, March 16, 2007 01:56 PM

  Eyes Roll

  Any political pain and suffering inflicted on the likes of McCain, Snow and Romney is welcome, but let's devote some real thought to this subject. Does anybody NOT notice that the context of these usages had nothing to do with race?

  As I understand it, the tar baby is from West African folklore. Slaves brought it to the U.S. and thus to white Southern culture, and thus to author Joel Chandler Harris, and thus to Disney. Not many folks of my generation use the term in any way for the same reasons we don't use other "Southern" words of African origin--"goobers," "po' joe," "tabby". We're homogenized to the point that we've lost much of our linguistic distinctiveness--at least some of which is of African origin. Many of us do still eat Okra.

  So, in recent years some yahoo decided to use this term as an epithet. That's no surprise. I was born and raised in Alabama and by the time I reached high school I thought I'd heard every disgusting term white racists apply to black folks. I never heard "tar baby" used that way, but never mind.

  But am I still allowed to enjoy Oreos, crackers, apples and bannanas? I would think those terms are far more well-known than "tar baby" as epithets. I'm all for tweaking our language when an originally innnocent term becomes best known as a hateful term, but has "tar baby" really reached that point? Is it really better known as a tool of race hatred than as a vivid description of, say, the catastrophe in Iraq?

  If this dubious linguistic stuff is all we can pin on the likes of Romney and McCain, the progressive cause is doomed.

  —Alabama Read Alabama's other letters
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