Letters to the Editor
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Oh...my....God.
You really do have to be kidding me, right?
Honestly, why are Republicans even relevant in this country? We don't understand 150 years of American Culture? Is Snow high or is he just plain stupid? It must be a pre-requisite for employment at Fox that you have absolutely no sense of ironic self awareness OR common decency. Which, also, of course is a pre-requisite for employment in the White House.
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Damn Disney
The "Song of the South" was considered a classic and completely acceptable movie when I was a kid only a few decades ago. The story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby seemed like a sort of Aesop's fable type story to a child's eyes. No doubt if I saw the movie today I'd be bowled over by the racist overtones and stereotypes, but my point is that the metaphor "tar baby" made its way into many folks' cultural consciousness in a sort of stealth manner that did not seem overtly racist.
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This isn't a new concept
During my dermatology training in the early nineties I referred to pair of patients getting Goeckermann treatment (Cover them in tar overnight and then subject to light therapy) as my tar babies. My supervisor turned pale and said that could be interpreted as racist and don't ever say that again. It had not occurred to me and certainly was not intended that way but I've not used the term since because I am teachable. That was 15 years ago. Where have these guys been that they would continue to be clueless to the potential objection to the term?
Thinking of disney with stereotypes of the day, check out the crows in Dumbo. Just as embarassing now as song of the south. They show up right after the "Dumbo gets drunk episode" which is much more of a psychedelic/peyote sort of experience for that lovable pachyderm than any alcoholic drink I've ever heard of.
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This is a surprise to me
Yes, I agree that the story that the term "tar baby" came from was larded with a lot of what we've come to understand as rank racism. However, it was - and frankly still is - my understanding of the term in current usage that it has no racial component whatsoever.
It's more of a term to describe something that one has embraced that proves to be difficult to rid oneself of once embraced. It refers to the messy stickiness of tar... not race.
If it DOES offend people, then I won't use it. But at some point we have to stop stripping our language of colorful colloquialisms. Before you jump all over me for that, I would ask where does this end? Does every little offense - from the use of a term that most people don't use in any racial way like "tar baby", to demanding, as some Muslims have, that no depiction of their version of the holy be depicted in any way - demand that we honor these sensibilities by completely castrating the language in the process?
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Tar Baby
I think I've reached the limit of what I can tolerate from the PC police. Where do you suppose all this nonsense might end? For anyone to think Tar Baby was used for anything other than how McCain meant it, is nothing more than more of the same-old-same-old game of "gotcha" politics, and I for one am sick to death of this crap. "HA! We made that bastard apoligize for saying a word that we, the keepers of truth, have deemed inappropriate for public speech." I don't care which party is doing it. This foolishness needs to stop.
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Glad to see other responses here don't see the problem.
The tar baby is a great metaphor for something it does you no good to attack becasue you are the one who gets the worst of it. The tar baby isn't a black person, and the characters are animals. The story was taken from slave narratives. That Joel Chandler Harris may have added a condescending tone, and a dialect that sounds more like blackface than geniune conversation, is beside the point when it comes to the central idea. Which is an example of African-American art.
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"tar baby"
He's just worried that the phrase will remind everyone about his illegitimate black child. You know, the one I invented with my whispering campaign back during the presidential race. I love to remind him about that every time I make him lick my boots.
signed,
Karl Rove
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Snow is right (oddly enough)
Snow is right. Attacking somebody for using the term "tar baby" is basically a Beavis and Butthead gag: "Hyuk, hyuk, he said 'niggardly'".
Any halfway educated person knows that "grabbing hold of a tar baby" is a reference to a Brer' Rabbit American fable, and that the reference to tar is to a black, sticky substance, that has nothing to do with any supposed racist slur.
It's unfortunate when public speakers have to avoid particular terms and expression because so much of the American public is culturally ignorant--and because of those particularly repugnant individuals who knowingly exploit that ignorance to try to score a political point.
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Bad choice of terms!
You know, I believe that they didn't mean it to be racist, but they probably should have picked a better term.
I would suggest, really, that the GOP get comfortable with the term "quagmire."
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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.