PUT DIFFERENTLY AUGUST 3, 2011
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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.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic.
13 comments
Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X notes that Malcolm used the idiom of "Uncle Remus"/trickster stories all the time to connect with black audiences. He even spoke in dialect at times. I'm not saying that any white person should do that, but stories like the one about the tar baby do, as McWhorter argues, have some resonance and explanatory power that go beyond racism.
- propjoe
August 3, 2011 at 8:31am
here we go again, yeah, yeah, technically it ain't offensive, just as the world niggardly means something entirely else from how it sounds but c'mon. Growing up I heard the term tar baby far more than once and it was always used in a derogatory fashion.It was only as an adult that I learned it had its common American origin in the Brer Rabbit stories, which themselves came from Africa. Would it be nice if blacks could reclaim the origin of the story since it came from African folklore? Sure, but I am content to let blacks take the lead, at the very least I can express the concept in other ways, and if southern whites somehow find that they can't, that they just have to choose to express phrases that have double connotations, then let them take the heat.
- blackton
August 3, 2011 at 8:44am
Here's another question: now that we have an African-American president, would it hurt to avoid using antiquated and (at best) ambiguous terms such as this? A little more racial awareness in this country--particularly from members of the almost entirely white Tea Party--would go a long way.
- maxhencke
August 3, 2011 at 8:51am
This article completely neglects the fact that the tar baby story (and other Brer Rabbit stories) was originally written in a poor, heavily black southern dialect (the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris). And the mass popularization of the stories in Disney's "Song of the South" was also narrated in this manner. It has never been released on VHS or DVD because most people find that presentation offensive. The tar baby tale itself was excised from the (itself anachronistic) Disney ride "Splash Mountain" and replaced with Brer Rabbit being caught in a beehive. Whether such dialect can be an acceptable source of entertainment may be an open question, but to simply say the metaphor of a tar baby isn't racist, without referring to this history, is shoddy analysis.
- polcereal
August 3, 2011 at 10:23am
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.
- wildboy
August 3, 2011 at 10:42am
maxhencke - well spoken, and I agree. Just because a term fails to meet the strict definition of racism, doesn't mean the person using it isn't being insensitive.
- Tristan
August 3, 2011 at 10:44am
Blackton- Of course "tar baby" is derogatory. So is "idiot." The fact that it is derogatory does not mean it is racial. It is a perfectly good metaphor for something that will be difficult to extract oneself from once touched. The fact that the tar baby is made of tar connotes race to you? Dhurtado
- NR143296
August 3, 2011 at 3:12pm
'Niggardly' is precisely what the results for Democrats of this latest deal can be described as. No analysis of racism in language can focus only on how a word might sound -- there has to be some level of meaning in there too. There is no etymological relationship between that term and "nigger," as there is no such relationship between a contemptuous term for Mexican-Americans and cleaning something so it's "spick and span." One could imagine comedy making something of the accidental aural convergence of these words, but that's the business of comedy.
- ironyroad
August 3, 2011 at 5:39pm
I've never used the phrase tar baby in my life but I use "niggardly" a lot where appropriate in context. Having read McWhorter's post and the following comments I wouldn't hesitate unapologetically to use "tar baby" to describe a sticky situation progressively enmeshing someone, or something like that. That intense heat follows the use of the phrase, and followed "niggardly" at that, by more or less prominent people in benign contexts continues to amaze me and tells me that post racialism in America is hundreds and hundreds of miles south of nowhere near.
- basman
August 4, 2011 at 12:41am
What a pity! The story of Brothers Rabbit and Fox, the T-- B---, and the brier patch is one of the great tales of world literature, featuring not one but two trickster animals. Can it be revived somehow?
- jonrysh
August 4, 2011 at 1:16am
ironyroad the other day I spilled my bag of oranges in the mud and a car ran over them squashing them, which all resulted in a lot of dirty juice.
- basman
August 4, 2011 at 1:51am
And the Irish policeman kept harping on about it, no doubt.
- ironyroad
August 4, 2011 at 11:15am
He was a Scotsman and said someone could have been kilt.
- basman
August 4, 2011 at 12:52pm