Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has gotten into trouble for referring to the Big Dig as a "tar baby": "'The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can," he told a crowd of about 100 supporters in Ames, Iowa."
Black leaders were outraged at his use of the term, which dates to the 19th century Uncle Remus stories by journalist Joel Chandler Harris. The term refers to a doll made of tar that traps Br'er Rabbit, the main characters in the series of stories. It has come to be known as a way of describing a sticky mess — and has been used as a derogatory term for a black person.
"Tar baby is a totally inappropriate phrase in the 21st century," said Larry Jones, a black Republican and civil rights activist.
As a practical matter, politicians may be well advised to stay away from words or phrases that may be seen by some — whether rightly or wrongly — as offensive. But it seems to me that the rest of us, regardless of our race, have no legitimate grounds for complaining about statements like Romney's.
"Tar baby" is one of many words that has a standard and common meaning that is not pejorative, and that isn't even derived from a pejorative concept or strengthened by its association with a pejorative concept, but at the same time has a completely different meaning than is derogatory. Using it in a context where there's no reason to think the speaker is saying something pejorative (such as this context) is no more offensive than saying "a chink in his armor," "spic and span," or "nip it in the bud" where there's no reason to think the speaker is trying to insult the Chinese, Hispanics, or the Japanese.
Conversely, it seems to me that if you complain about Romney's use of "tar baby," you must equally condemn someone who innocently says "nip it in the bud." Both "tar baby" and "nip" can be and have been used as pejoratives; "nip" is, I suspect, even more broadly known as a pejorative than "tar baby" (Romney said he was unaware of the pejorative meaning, which seems to me plausible). Both are being used without any such intention. Someone who is actually trying to figure out what the speaker means would clearly and quickly grasp that the speaker is using the term with the innocent meaning. It seems to me that either you must condemn both (and the other examples) as "totally inappropriate," or, in my view the better position, avoid taking offense where none was intended.
Thanks to Richard Graves for the pointer.
What's distressing about these incidents is not that they occur but that, more often than not, they end up validating stupidity. Instead of become public laughingstocks, the offendees manage to get the "offender" disciplined.
Logically, that's true. But logic has nothing to do with it. In America, there is almost nothing considered more offensive than a perceived slur against black people. "Nip" is probably better known as a slur, but slurs against blacks generate more umbrage.
Similarly, I was amazed that anyone could object to "eeny meanie miney moe," but apparently in the South the word "tiger" doesn't appear; an ethnic epithet is there instead. I'd never heard of that either until I read about some flight attendent getting in trouble for using the first part of the rhyme (without racial epithets).
Personally, I think it's ridiculous for anyone to get mad at Romney, or Snow. They need to exercise some tolerance themselves, and understand that other people are not carrying the same ethnic baggage they are. On the other hand, Romeny was right to apologize once it was pointed out to him that he inadvertently offended some.
On second thought...
We spent the next two holes debating whether it would be funnier to complain to management in mock indignation, or hide in the ravine and suprise the next foursome with some beligerent actions.
I'm glad this particular friend was with us, since the rest of us wouldn't have dared "go there" if he wasn't. I probably would have acted like I didn't get the joke.
However, for me, the phrase always brought to mind the small licorice candies that we ate when I was a kid, which were called, at the time, "n***er babies." No one I knew ever thought anything of it (admittedly, there were no blacks in my social circle = neighborhood at the time), although by the time I knew n***er was a "dirty word" they had been re-named licorice babies.
If it's ridiculous for people to get upset at these things, why was Romney right to apologize? Being able to force apologies is a large part of the reason these ridiculous people people still feel justified getting upset.
I can see how someone could dismiss the whole Uncle Remus ouvere as a racist characature. No, I don't think that Romney was being intentionally racist or pejorative himself, but there's more baggage to this stuff than what Dr. Volokh presents. OTOH, the tar baby story is a pretty good metaphor for a problem that's best avoided and it would be a shame to ban it from polite discourse because some people take it the wrong way.
I agree that its no crime to use the phrase, and it shouldn't be used, but it is not comparable to nip it in the bud. Tar isn't the insulting word, the whole phrase was the insult.
I am also with Southern in the City having not heard the word Tar Baby used for anything but a racial slur
Also John Armstrong where do you get the states rights is "supposedly" a code word for slavery/segregation? There isn't much doubt to the fact it has been.
Supposedly?
I actually think the racial epithet preceeded the use of "tiger" in that particular nursery rhyme. By the time I was coming up, it was definitely the word "tiger," but in my parent's generation, it was not.
@DeezRightWingNutz:
I really don't get the joke. I realize that explaining it will remove the humor, but care to anyway?
Besides which, the hypothetical speaker is very possibly one who is unaware of this history before being attacked for using the term. Looking through his eyes, the validity of his attackers' assertion is an open question at the moment he is confronted with it.
Funny, when you said we're a nation of thin-skinned individuals and then said
"Whoever promised us that we could go through life without being offended from time to time? Then I realized what’s really going on. Taking offense is a form of aggression and a means to exert control."
I immediately thought of the GOP's criticism of Bush and/or the war on terror and/or showing war or dead soldier images, etc. etc. etc.
I agree with EV, though - not much ado about much of anything, other than Romney learning that politics is a special world unto itself.
That said, I also rarely heard anyone use it. So, I can't honestly say it's not an epithet in my region (the greater Chicago area).
Obviously, any politician speaking to a crowd of supporters in Ames, Iowa certainly ought to avoid the term. (Particularly an out of state politician visiting for what one might speculate is "the obvious reason".)
for instance
The Holocaust killed alot of Jews
Supposedly the Holocaust killed alot of Jews
Which do you think would cause more problems? :p
So he had an asian friend, they saw a sign that said "Dangerous Slope" near a ravine... (slope being an epithet for asian...) *rimshot*
According to Wikipedia's entry on Australian English terms for people
Slant or slope – a derogatory term used for people of East Asian or South-east Asian descent. Derived from the epicanthal folds (i.e. "slanted eyes") of people from these backgrounds. During the 1990s, the related term "power point" was reported as being used by some members of the New South Wales Police for similar reasons, based on the slanted positive and negative pins on an Australian-style power point. Highly offensive.
And while uh clem may be right to say that Harris's writing sounds demeaning by 21st century standards, Harris didn't write in the 21st century. (His dialect in print was an attempt to render accurately the ways Georgia blacks spoke then, and if you read the successive volumes of Remus stories, you will clearly see that Harris lightened up on the typography considerably. He had to. The first volume of Remus stories is virtually incomprehensible today, as hard to decipher as Chaucer. We may wonder whether this approach was a sign of contempt, respect or merely a reporter's attempt at strict accuracy. Or all three. My impression is, all three at once. Yes, Southerners of that era could simultaneously feel contempt for blacks' for alleged incapability, and respect for what they might have thought of as their primitive wisdom. Among white Southerners who considered themselves racial liberals, as Harris did, the form in which that was expressed in the late 19th century was culturally constrained.)
Might as well condemn Bible stories for being insensitive to Egyptians.
That said, language goes its own way, and apparently 'tar baby' has had a different evolution among (at least some) American blacks than in the wider society.
I, too, grew up in Georgia (my grandfather was a social acquaintance of Harris's when they were young men working in Atlanta in the '80s), and unlike llamasex or Southern in the City, I never heard tar baby used as a racial slur in the 1950s and '60s. But then, I didn't hang around with people who used racial slurs of any kind.
Earlier this year, I used tar baby in one of my newspaper reports, and none of my editors, who are all non-white though not black, thought to question it.
A couple of black readers did, though.
My publisher felt compelled to print an apology, which irritated me.
Live and learn.
Incidentally, I don't think the Uncle Reamus stories are any worse than the crows in Dumbo. The Dumbo crows are pretty bad stereotype-wise.
My favorite example of this kind of hubub is not "niggardly" (admittedly a classic) but rather "Chinese Wall," which was once frequently used to describe workplace barriers in ethical matters. Now, following allegations that the phrase was racially insensitive, I see these referred to as "firewalls" or "ethical walls." I don't mind either replacement phrase, but it's ironic since the phrase "Chinese Wall" was probably initially used out of recognition of, and admiration for, a remarkable achievement of Chinese history: a really big wall.
I suspect the ignorant among us conflated Chinese Wall with the (clearly derogatory) "Chinese fire drill," thus dooming the Chinese Wall reference.
None of this is remotely comparable to "nip in the bud," as several posters have noted. I think EV sort of brain-whiffed there.
When someone says "nip it in the bud" it is not shorthand for "put a Japanese person in the bud". Nip (the verb) and Nip (the racist slang) are homonyms by coincidence, but that's all. One is not derived from the other. Same for chink in the armor or spic and span.
However, "tar baby" was a term popularized largely by the Uncle Remus stories. (Note that Disney doesn't sell the original "Song of the South" in part because to modern eyes, it treads a questionable line.) So, there is a substantive connection.
Writers &speakers of English need to be realistic about the resonances of the terms they choose, regardless of whether they're sympathetic to the reasoning. Anyone who uses "tar baby" takes an unnecessary risk.
Not by the term "tar baby," nor any of the other "dual purpose" terms in Prof. Volokh's posting, but by a commenter misremembering and misconveying the content of one of the greatest movie monologues of all time, that of Christopher Walken giving young Butch his father's watch in Pulp Fiction.
After some research of my own, I discovered that the word is actually of French or German origin ("Pique-nique" or "Picknick" respectively) and has no slave origins whatsoever.
I agree that there are certain contexts where particular words should not be used. The litmus test I use is whether the speaker intended to use the word in an offensive manner that targeted a particular group. The Governor's use in my opinion is a harmless error, a mere gaffe. I don't think more should be made of it.
Which does not seem remotely plausible of that term were a widespread racial moniker of ill opobrium in the South.
CHandler was considered suspect in the South, as someone who liked and admired the (I won't use the term he would have used except it is Yet Another Now Insulting Term [YANIT]) for their creativity and good spirits in dealing with a very bad hand that they had been dealt. When waiting for a train, he was known to leaver proper socierty to get down to the "wrong" wnd of the station and swap stories with the [YANIT] men, in the awful dialect of the books, which he aparantly spoke well.
Whether he would meet all modern sensibilities is one question, but he sttod alone in the old south as someone who liked and respected [YANITTs] and felt their culture worthy of preserving and sharing with a wider audience.
Somehow he has always seemed less racist to me than many who feel that all minorites are children who must be protected from all bad thoughts, understnding, and education (say as in the etymology of the words for fishing for eels or sedish words for stingy"
http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/picnic.htm
I fear the foolishness of yet another sad debate such as this will soon reveal a starker reality:
The gain of some groups of people who profit from such a backlash against Romney (this particular black organization) have come at the expense of a larger unity...i.e. as Americans, as being well-educated for its own sake, public debate infused with logic....
And to think, these ideas and the groups gaining from them have not yet reached their zenith inside the institutions which produce lawyers.....(civilrights, gender equality, race theory...they're not done yet)
I only hope the analytical thinking of lawyers, their adherence to reasoned thought in maintaining living traditions will protect it from what has already happened to the liberal arts and humanities (you're losingthe dreamers, artists, writers and the vast numbers of people that follow them knowingly and unknowingly...) Their allegiance (or tolerance) is based on a series of misconceptions about you but also towards your moral service
Good luck to you all, for the sake of my freedoms and yours. I will do what I can.
(2) Dialect, as EV points out, was commonly used in a great many works in the 19th century. There are lots of reasons why; "realism" is a biggie. One could indeed argue that failing to reproduce the dialect of African-Americans at the time "robs" them of their culturally distinctive speech and assumes that there's something preferable about how educated whites spoke.
(3) "Tar baby" is indeed a useful expression, &also a great story. It would be a shame to let it vanish under a tide of ignorance.
The language used may be deemed by some as offensive--I don't care, I'm also not offended by Middle English in Chaucer. It's a fairly accurate rendering of the modes of speech common to poor people in the South at the time, at least in what used to be slave country.
I don't know how any Afircan American who's aware of the context of the "Tales" could think a reference made to them by a white person is neccessarily or even plausibly racist.
Romney should not have apologized for the not merely innocent but if anything positive literary reference.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
I'm curious about this, from the story:
I'd be interested in knowing more about Larry Jones, black Republican. His level of outrage seems pretty high given that this was a single incidenct in which Romney was quite clearly referring to a highway project, not anything to do with race. Or when Jones says "all he's shown us," is he referring to some kind of track record of Romney's? The article doesn't mention any other "incidents."
- Alaska Jack (who, yes, has scoured this post for any evidence of offensive language)
Harris's work in documenting the Uncle Remus stories was monumental and of incalculable value from the standpoint of preserving the cultural/literary/vocal record of blacks in the South. That his work would be so misunderstood because of trendy greivances is truly mind-boggling.
That was really funny, and I could use a laugh.
Thank you,
Tom Perkins,
molon labe
montani semper liberi, &
para fides paternae patria
Is anybody familiar with him? His comments obviously made the news release, because the story gets something like 190 hits on Google News with his quotation intact.
This pattern has the markings of a hatchet job, but it also could be the example of a reporter happening across some random guy and throwing him in the story, but I think you're feeling is correct that this was a fairly odd thing to say given the circumstances.
I agree this is much ado about nothing, although it has revealed some interesting stuff; and Jones appears to be a professional agitator.
An appropriate response, if any is needed, might be: 'Of course, Mr. Romney did not mean to say anything about black people; and even if some people think the term 'tar baby' is offensive, Mr. Romney's use proves that he is among the group who has no idea of that usage.'
You obviously know nothing of the racial stereotyping that was commonplace in the early to mid 20th centruy. Look at racist cartoons such as The Spirit with black characters with oversized features and stereotyped language and find a real black person who ever sounded like that. Defend Mit Romney's use of the word as you see fit, but save the defenses of clearly intentional forms of racism that is a sad and obviously forgotten part of this nation's history.
I think he’s supposed to be this guy.
Derek: You obviously know nothing of the racial stereotyping that was commonplace in the early to mid 20th centruy.
And you, Derek, obviously know nothing of the racial ideologizing that was commonplace (in graduate English departments) in the late 20th century. Which makes you kind of lucky, actually.
Now, given that the 59-year-old Romney is Governor of a state that contains about half a million black people, and that he is positioning himself to run for President, how proudly should he trumpet his lack of knowledge?
--A little more seriously, to what extent was literary realism in general (and not just the reproduction of dialect) caused by class anxiety in the post-1815, early-industrial era? Was representing the speech and manner of rustics, workers, etc. a politico-cultural effort to emphasize class barriers that were glossed over in earlier literature that depicted shepherds and vagabonds with speech and manners much less realistic &much closer to those of the upper classes?
Wish I had my copy of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis to see whether he has anything on that ....
A lot of these themes are distributed Africa-wide. Of course the Senagalese will claim them as their own, as will most everyone else on the sub-Saharan part of the continent.
Unfortunately, Lighter's 'Historical Dictionary of American Slang' is not up to 'T' yet, but Wentworth &Flexner's 'Dictionary of American Slang,' which is the best before Lighter's, does not have any entry for 'tar baby.'
Can anyone provide any citation to the use of 'tar baby' as a slur, in print or otherwise? Or is this what the Japanese in Hawaii call shibai?
Points to Romney, if you ask me.
Sensing this is total made-up [insert barnyard epithet], I looked into it and found out that, in fact, this is total made-up [insert barnyard epithet]. (Try it yourself, google "buffett" and "fucking ignorant", or "fins" and "fucking ignorant niggers", or whatever variation you like. Not a peep about this on the world-wide-interweb; I can assure you that if this were so much as even a fake rumor, it would show up somewhere). So, I call him out and state that "noone ever mentions this tho" because it is made-up [insert barnyard epithet]. I further state that only a [insert synonym for donkey] would find it a "clever" epithet.
A few posts down, the esteemed Mr. Drackmann says to a fellow poster "actually the term 'Troll' is very offensive to short hairly ugly people oh yee of stick up the anus no sense of humor sour pussedness". That post remains (along with the unbelievable original post calling "fucking ignorant niggers" a "clever" epithet). Yet my post, the only reasonable post in the series, is deleted for "rudeness".
I realize it's your blog. I realize you can do whatever you want. I further realize that your rules themselves point out that you may turn a deaf ear to claims of "you should remove A's posts, because they are just as bad as B's". But seriously, my response was the only way to deal with something as bone-chillingly idiotic and ignorant as "clever" Mr. Drackmann's post. I just can't understand your decisionmaking process here.
Somehow I missed this on my first trip down the thread ...Master Shake has a point. (Speaking of ignorance, the correct spelling of "Caribbean" has been rather prominent lately ....)
That's the problem with deleting/editing comments, I guess; you risk seeming to tolerate the ones that you don't ax.
Got a better one for you Derrick. Prove the representation of colloquial African American speech in 1870's agricultural workers is misrepresented there.
The features, yes. The speech, I think not so much.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Using it in a context where there's no reason to think the speaker is saying something pejorative ... is no more offensive than saying "a chink in his armor...."
I'm told that American architects used to call I.M. Pei "the chink in our armor."
I can't say for sure, but I think he was making the same reference I did in a earlier post. Randall, a white character in Clerks II, attempts to "reclaim porch-monkey" as a non-racial insult. His grandmother used to call him a porch monkey, and she "wasn't a racist," so he was unaware of the racial connotation. He then uses the term in front of some black customers, leading to a lengthly discussion of what terms are and aren't racial slurs, and to Randall's realization that his grandmother was, in fact, a racist.
Best scene in the movie.
I suspect it's commonly used in the 21st century, but we're less aware of it because we're more familiar with the dialects represented.
(I borrowed my daughter's copy of Elmore Leonard's "Coyotes in the House" -- this writer's first venture in "children's" literature was a quick, pleasant read -- and the coyotes use dialect, in fact its urban African-American speech patterns of a few decades ago. [Oh stewardess! I speak jive.])
As for Tar Baby, I think I knew it had acquired racial overtone connotations. Words do change meaning and connotation, and while we can resist it, we can't deny it. I'd have been more inclined to say morass, because I don't like metaphors that are allusions, and I like saying more ass.
As far as I'm concerned, it's about like "paddy wagon." It wasn't until long after I moved to Massachusetts from Ohio that I was told that that had a racial overtone. Who knew? And who cares?
And he's not just a carpetbagger, he's a troll too.http://makeashorterlink.com/?G33061F7D
/Oh, the irony
//Hey, I'm a troll too
///At least I've got something to be offended about now
After Martin Luther King day my kids came back with a new word. They had been shown a film at school lionizing King's work and now they knew the term jigaboo. A white woman in the film used it to refer to blacks. Are schools now tasked with teaching kids all the deragatory terms so that they will know not to use them?
I'll just go rent you the DVD with African-Americans working and speaking in the 1800's agriculture industry. If you aren't intelligent enough to realize the racist overtones in characters with over-sized lips, giant eye-balls, bones through their noses and speaking some unintelligable dialect that wasn't being spoken in the earlier 20th century when they were actually created then maybe you might be the person with the racist problem and not Gov. Romney. I didn't think that this was an ongoing debate whether much of the cartoons from white cartoonists depicting black character in the early to mid 20th centruy were racist in their intent and tone, but I guess here on Volokh the debate continues
My knee jerk reaction to the phrase was that it was offensive. After a quick internet search for the etymology of the phrase, I realized that it was not, and that I needed to adjust my thoughts. How many people take that step to learn the history of a new word or phrase?
Volokh readers will likely take these steps and educate themselves, but I believe that many Americans will run with their knee jerk reaction and fill themselves with righteous indignation over possible racist language. Which bring me back to the Disney movie. If this was for sale or rental, and kids (and their parents) saw what a tar baby really is, would the outcry be the same?
Try responding to what I wrote, not what you imagine I wrote.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
In Hawaii, Milton Murayama is a literary hero for having written the first novel to use pidgen (what the PC call 'Hawaiian creole English'), 'All I Asking for Is My Body.' There is a whole publishing house, Bamboo Ridge, devoted to reproducing the experience of the plantation era in Hawaii by people who experienced it, or heard about it from their parents. Some of its best writers, like Darrell Lum, use a printed dialect that can be pretty hard for a writer of Standard English like myself to follow. But since Lum ain't writing for me but for other people like Darrell Lum, who I am to criticize? (But then Lum faces the problem of the great novelist in Finland. How many books does he hope to sell?)
That's a different approach from the stories that try to preserve the experience of the Jews in, say, prewar Poland by retelling them in Standard English. (But I don't know if it comes over the same way in Yiddish.)
Worse? Offensive? Well, the writers are doing it to (or for) themselves these days. It isn't like the (still funny to me after all these years) Potash and Perlmutter stories, written by an American Irishman, written about Jewish immigrants to New York City.
Then we get into the argument whether 'Hawaiian creole English' is a dialect of English or an independent mother tongue.
The PC view is independent mother tongue.
Oh, please. What does skin colour have to do with it? We're talking about language and meaning here, not weird personal hangups. If someone has a bizarre phobia of the word "it," that's their problem, not mine. So, yes, we are talking about when private citizens may, or may not, feel offended by public discourse. You may certainly ask your intimates to "stop saying the word" but the idea that someone should be punished for using a perfectly good word or expression in public discourse because someone else has an irrational and personal aversion to it is just dumb.
Some people are the racial equivalent of Beavis and Butthead. Heh, heh, you said "niggardly." The febrile imaginations of pimply-minded offenderati are no guide to either taste or language.
I don't doubt that somewhere at some time (or times), a racist has used it in a racially derogatory way. I suspect, however, that the majority of those offended by the term have simply inferred a racist meaning from the fact that (a) tar is black; (b)tar has some negative connotations--it's sticky, hot, etc. (c) "baby" could be seen as an attempt to infantilize--as when racists refer to adult black men as "boys" and (d) a vague notion that the term originated in the pre-civil rights South.
To my mind, the most unfortunate part of this whole story is that it sounds like a large portion of America has never read Joel Chandler Harris' stories, which provide great insight into human nature.
OT, big shout-out to EV et al. on the new link colors in comments, which are a great idea.
I did address what you wrote. The fact is that your point is silly. I could go to a poor part of West Virginia and use uneducated and illiterate white people to illustrate the speech patterns of late 20th century white people but that would be ignorant of me for attempting to skew the issue to make some point. The fact is that African-American speech was stereotyped and misrepresented to make a wider point about their intelligence and the feeling at the time that they were less than human. There is no vast archive of the speech patterns of African-Americans from the time that you speak of so to even claim that I need to PROVE to you a point on the stereotyping is just being facetious. I've heard African-Americans who were born in that time perioud and they don't sound anything like the cartoons that I've seen, but if you want to believe that those cartoons were attempting to show some realistic potrayal of black people at the time then be my ignorant guest.
Others: Quite a few of Frank Drackmann's posts would get deleted if I thought they were serious, but my experience with his comments (see here for a sample) suggested to me that they tend to be weird attempts, sometimes successful and sometimes not, at absurdist humor. The particular post to which Shake was referring seemed to me to be pretty obviously that; it's so implausible that it must have been a joke -- the "noone ever mentions this tho" struck me as similar to the "I did not know that!" at the end of my post on FDR's announcement of withdrawal from the Italian campaign.
On reflection, I should probably have noted that expressly when I marked Master Shake's comment as deserving deletion, since other readers may not have seen as many of Drackmann's work as I have, and may not have grasped that this particular post couldn't have been serious. If I thought Drackmann was serious, a lot of his comments would be deleted; but I'm nearly certain that this wasn't so here.
Speaking of which, sorry to have missed the gag in the porch-monkey question -- I just never saw that movie ....
Stranger: If you find reading comments to be a waste of time, isn't there a pretty simple solution to that problem? And if there is, then why does the blog's having comments make the blog worse for you?
I am quite familiar with the story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
As far as I am concerned, Mr. Romney has nothing to apologize for. He would gain a lot of credit with me if he didn't grovel to the grievance-mongers and professional offense-takers. I suppose that's too much to expect.
It's obvious to me, as it must be to anyone, that Romney meant no harm and was using "tar baby" in its non-racial meaning. But Romney is a politician, and political questions are not answered by dictionaries or etymologies. "Tar baby" is a wonderfully evocative and colorful phrase, but Romney is in the politics business. He made a political gaffe. He ought to know enough black people from political life to know that a substantial number of reasonable people reasonably find the term offensive, or he ought to get out of the politics business. But then, he's a Republican from Utah. What would he know?
You use the dinner table standard in your comment policy. Where I come from, NOT smacking down someone who says "fucking ignorant niggers, of which there are quite a few [anywhere]" at the dinner table is what would be rude, rather than the use of the (relatively mild) term "jackass".
And I really can't understand your response in light of Drackmann's later comment "I can go into Atlanta and see characters with over-sized lips,giant eye-balls,bones through their noses(and other areas) and speaking an unitelligable dialect that wasn't being spoken in the earlier 20th century". Do you really think this falls out of your dinner-table standard because he might not be "serious" (whatever that means)?
I am really, really baffled by this.
Harris, like my grandfather, was a white country boy of privilege who had intimate everyday interactions with black people. My grandfather owned some. He was proud that he spoke Gullah. He was proud that he fought the Klan, with real bullets. And he was a racist. It's complex.
It also interests me that testimony from people who lived in the South splits just about even whether 'tar baby' was commonly or never used as a slur.
The South is a pretty big place.
I actually have seen this recently-- it's not hard to come by a VHS which has been bootlegged from the Japanese laserdisc, as becomes obvious when burned-in subtitles appear during the songs (the rest of the movie would be dubbed for them)-- and it's not a racist movie.
What it is, is: a movie that takes a very nostalgic view of life in the old South. There was a whole cycle of movies right after WWII which promoted this kind of cozy view of 1900-era or earlier America-- Meet Me in St. Louis, Life With Father, etc. Not uncommon, look at all the 50s nostalgia we had during the Vietnam era. People like to fantasize about a happier, simpler time that never really was. The problem with Song of the South as opposed to Life With Father is that its cozy 19th century fantasy portrays slave days, and did so right as the civil rights movement was getting going. So it very quickly became a movie which many people resented for presenting an anti-progressive view of race relations-- especially as, in the next few years, serious movies about race were made.
Nevertheless, it's quite a wonderful film, with a terrific, warm performance by the black actor James Baskett (who sadly died not long after). I hope that the day will come that we can look past the political ramifications of the movie in its time-- or the book for that matter-- and recognize that both the book and the movie celebrate a people who really existed, who told stories to help leaven the miseries of their existence, and who deserve better than to be buried in history.
You wrote: "The fact is that African-American speech was stereotyped and misrepresented to make a wider point about their intelligence and the feeling at the time that they were less than human...I've heard African-Americans who were born in that time perioud and they don't sound anything like the cartoons that I've seen, but if you want to believe that those cartoons were attempting to show some realistic potrayal of black people at the time then be my ignorant guest."
I'm not 100% positive that you are referring above to the written Harris texts, but I do not believe that his writing was meant as stereotype or misrepresentation. More broadly, and addressing your latter point, I can 100% guarantee you that there are people today, young people even, whose speech patterns are quite similar to what's depicted in the Uncle Remus stories. The Gullah are the best example, but it's all around in the South.
Is it "proper English"? No, but neither is what I speak.
It's different - very different, but if you grow up in communities where this is spoken, you can understand.
To reach across the ocean, I'd bet there are small-town Scots who are even less comprehendable to many of us, but they're no more wrong.
Pine
I agree. It's similar to a point I made on another comments thread. From a PR standpoint Romney should have said, "Look , here's the transcript, and here's the accusation made against me. I'm perfectly comfortable letting the public read both and making their own minds up as to
what an idiot Jones iswhether what I said was racist."- Alaska Jack
That said, you might be surprised to learn that such language issues are not an uncommon topic of conversation when white and black people associate with each other and are not afraid to engage in candid talk as equals. Utah Republicans might not know that.
Mr. Drackmann: Please keep this in mind; not everyone is getting your jokes, and many are understandably not appreciating them even if they realize they are jokes.
Master Shake, back to you: In any event, regardless of the perceived provocation, you cannot respond to rudeness with rudeness.
Others: Please also keep in mind that it's impossible for me to maintain any completely consistent standard of editing. I read some threads more carefully than I read others. I read some commenters more carefully than I read others. I have different idiosyncratic reactions to some than to others, for instance if I have experience with a commenter and have learned (rightly or wrongly) to put off his comments to humor. I'm busier or more distracted when I skim some comments than when I skim others. Editing comments is not my full-time occupation, thank God.
So if you think some comment is inapt, please feel free to comment about it. Please even feel free to call on me to remove it or block the poster, though I'll feel free to pass on that. But don't assume that just because something hasn't been edited out, I approve of it, or that there'll ever be a standard of careful and precisely calibrated editing attention to all the comments.
"I did address what you wrote. The fact is that your point is silly. I could go to a poor part of West Virginia and use uneducated and illiterate white people to illustrate the speech patterns of late 20th century white people but that would be ignorant of me for attempting to skew the issue to make some point."
Unbelievable, you almost make my point for me.
I agree the physical representations were exaggerated and fictionalized, and that in almost every instance they were used with the author aware they would cause harm and the author intending that.
However, I am making the case for the speech patterns likely being at most mild exaggerations of what was once real. You claim that you could go to "a poor part of West Virginia and use uneducated and illiterate white people to illustrate the speech patterns of late 20th century white people" and the my point is that at one point not long you, you could do just that.
Your duplicating their speech patterns might be viewed by you to be stereotyped and offensive--and it would nevertheless be an accurate representation of their speech patterns. I had the privelge of knowing two of my relatives who were in their late 80's in the late 1970's.
They did not speak as I speak.
I am telling you and you yourself admit, that you do not know what you are talking--"There is no vast archive of the speech patterns of African-Americans from the time that you speak of so to even claim that I need to PROVE to you a point on the stereotyping is just being facetious"--about when you seem to be claiming the representation of African American speech patterns are not accurate ones.
And I wouldn't be too sure there is no such record. Edison's wax cylinder phonograph has been around a long time.
I suppose we differ in our operative definitions of what a stereotype is, or on what the connotations are.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
I disagree. People who should be ignored, they manufactured the gaffe. They should be ignored.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
I hope that I'm just missing the tongue-in-cheek nature of this comment due to the fact it's in print and therefore I can't hear the intended humor/irony in your voice.
Harry Eager - "In Hawaii, Milton Murayama is a literary hero for having written the first novel to use pidgen (what the PC call 'Hawaiian creole English')"
I spoke to my friend who is a linguist and he said that linguists call it a creole instead of a pidgin because it is a creole and not a pidgin. However, since the speakers themselves refer to it as Pidgin, when speaking of the creole, most linguists will call it Pidgin.
My point still remains that the purpose of much of these cartoons was a perverse version of African-Americans that I'm sure that if I looked hard enough I could find blacks who sounded like that. But how can you maintain your casual attitude when whites weren't potrayed to near the exaggerated manner that I've addressed. I maintain that a proper depiction of any group would be to take some reasoned, comprehensive view of the community and not some minority of it to use as STEREOTYPE. If I wanted to steroetype, I could say that for instance that all Republicans are racists. But I know that while I've met some who were, the assumption that all were would be a STEREOTYPE and unfair to those who weren't.
And Eugene, I didn't address Drackmann's earlier post, because quite frankly there was no point. I didn't even see an attempt at humor. And just as Bernstein and others have criticized Kos's comments sometimes for their anti-Semitic comments, I would easily use that for evidence of racism at this blog if I wasn't a frequent guest with a generally good impression of the respectful level of discussion typical on the Volokh Conspiracy.
It is entirely possible that it is a slur in some regions that has never been used in others. This would be supported by the fact that in pretty much every dictionary people have checked in, the "sticky situation that one can't extricate themselves from" definition comes first while the "racial slur" definition is listed second if at all.
So, even if he had many black friends, there's a chance that it's not a slur in Utah/Massachusetts as opposed to other areas.
Furthermore, as someone mentioned, it's not likely to have come up unless he used the phrase in front of his friends (assuming they would even consider it a racial slur). Unless you are suggesting that he sits down with his ethnic friends and says "Please tell me any and all phrases and terms that may be construed to be racist." he's not likely to know all the slurs for all ethnicities in all regions of the country.
The thing that is most shocking to me is that a politician actually made a literary reference to something beyond Reader's Digest (a fine publication, I'm not knocking it). Usually they are so busy attempting to be the "everyman" that they throw in a few 'likes' or 'yeahs' to be on our level.
In Blackcommentator, 2002 you'll find a story of Clara Denise West, Ph.D., an African American working at Redstone Arsenal.
Evidently, during the course of a controversy, coworkers and supervisor came to label her, rather than a problem, specifically as "a tar baby".
So, the article states:
"What do they call a Black Ph.D. at Redstone? Tar Baby."
It article describes the meaning most of us are familiar with, and the goes on to discuss how the use was transfored at the Redstone arsenal.
Is the term used this way outside the arsenal? Is it a new use? Either way, if this story is well known in some groups and unknown in others, could explain why many think it just meant "a sticky situation" and others think it means something else!
Hmmm. Maybe that's a feature, not a bug.
I use that stuff. Does it have 'street value'? Maybe I can enhance my retirement account.
One of the posters thought that it referred to the Great Wall of China. Wikepedia (for what's that worth) says the term may refer to the wall, but:
Given those possible etymologies, I'm still at a loss whether it's offensive.
I realize that that is the object of this exercise in selective indignation, but I wish to tell my Canadian brothers that I’m not going to walk down life’s road furtively looking around corners in fear that I may offend his delicate sensibilities.
I would suggest that if he finds the term “tar baby” offensive, he share that ignorant – and I would add racist - belief with the people he is in contact with. But in the case of people he does not know, who do not know him, and for whom the reference is a literary allusion, please don’t share. It tells us more about you than we want to know.
We were talking also about descendants of the Celtic Fringe--hillbillies--commonly depicted as incomprehensibly speaking, grass chewing, droopy felt hat wearing, inbred, tobacco drooling, murderous, idiots. And that's just the Fred Flintstone cartoons I watched as a kid.
Also please note that there was from time to time a great deal of truth to the stereotype.
In fact, as the Hollister/Pac Sun Company* found last year, you can still market shirts with that stripe of humor today, and I doubt they'd try any Anti African American stereotypes next to them.
*I think I'm thinking of the correct company.
My point is that you can't say the stereotypical speech patterns in the "Song Of The South" cartoon were inventions intended to make African Americans feel bad, or even that they were inventions at all.
Yes, certainly, the imagery you describe was just such an invention with such an evil end...but I never said otherwise either.
Your point may well be beside my point.
Are there any online images of this bunch, 'cause I'm having really having trouble picturing them.
And it sounds like a picture worth seeing.
Once.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Our local do-good columnist, who is always helpfully on the lookout for things at which to be offended, orchestrated a campaign of outrage.
One of the issues raised by people who didn't agree with him was that the racist version of the rhyme had fallen out of use so long ago that young people weren't even aware of it.
The original is now hidden behind the pay-for-it archive wall, but his response was essentially that it was his job to make sure that everyone remembers that they are supposed to be offended by the use of any possible variant of this rhyme, because a racist version was once used.
Because, you see, if he didn't continually remind us, we might forget to be racists. Can't have that. He'd be out of a job!
For pete's sakes, cartoons made fun of everybody.
I sincerely do not understand your objection to the Uncle Remus stories. As far as I can tell, they are analogous to the Grimm brothers' Kinder-und-Haus Maerchen (generally referred to as the Grimm's Fairy tale, but they aren't really fairy tales). The Grimm brothers were amazing linguists and historians, and many of those stories were transcribed verbatim from very elderly Germans in dialectical text. More than a few of them are virtually impossible to read even by modern-day Germans without assistance or even some translation.
The point: the Uncle Remus stories are fascinating, and almost cannot be read by modern-day Americans without assistance because of the dialect that Harris tried to preserve in the narratives. So what? He was working from the dialects of the 19th century. What is wrong with that? Complaining about it is about as dumb as complaining about Huckleberry Finn because one of the characters is identified as "Nigger Jim," even though the white Huck and the black Jim are obviously best buddies.
Oh, and, by the way, Joel Chandler Harris is not responsible for the later cartoon versions of his tales.
There is no definitive "original" version of the "Eenie Meanie Miney Moe" rhyme. http://www.wordorigins.org/wordore.htm (scroll down)
handicappeddisabledspecial.I'm sure he'll claim he's just trying to accurately depict a culturally distinct group, but I know that it's really evidence of his vile bigotry.
If you read my last post, you'll see that I admit that I don't have much of a problem with the Uncle Remus stories. There was a ton of artistic value to those stories.
But where you go very wrong is to tell me that it would be dumb to have a problem with Jim in Hucklebery being called "Nigger Jim". I don't know what point you are making, but if you somehow believe that being referred to as a nigger is all good and fine because of the time then you are disturbed sir. Twain definetely wrote one of the most "pro-black" stories of his time despite the necessity to use the unfortunate reality of black-white relations as the main backdrop. But that by no means makes it right to refer to a human being that way, and I only hope that you never do that in your real life or I'm sure that that "Nigger ___" will probably make you regret it.
I'm pretty sure that Raj was rejecting problem #1 -- he was condemning "complaining about Huckleberry Finn because one of the characters is identified as 'Nigger Jim.'" It sounds to me like you're defending problem #2, by saying that "being referred to as a nigger is [not] all good and fine]." So I'm not sure there's a real disagreement between your position and Raj's.
In my understanding, Jim's name is constantly paired with the epithet to reinforce the satire. In other words, to keep the reader from pretending that Jim was just like all of the other characters.
Jim's the decent, sensible and stabilizing character, and every (or most, been awhile) references to him in the book force the reader to call him an epithet.
Everyone else is pretty much a fool, and they're the ones who are treated "normally".
Twain's driving home the point.
Yeah, but we shot most of them down in WWII. Heh
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) has this passage describing a mental patient about to receive a lobotomy:
One other thing on the topic of whether it's sensible to be offended at the name "N***** Jim"...
You and I aren't Twain's target audience. The readers of Huck Finn were by and large middle-class white people in the late 1880's. They almost certainly held views that we today would clearly define as racist, but would view a public airing of "the N-word" as impolite and beneath them. But knowing the context, they'd not be especially surprised to see it in print this way.
Twain (I believe) meant to impress upon them that they should not be so comfortable with it. Jim's the honorable man amid a sea of scoundrels, and Mr. Reader eventually recognizes the absurdity of treating him with casual contempt.
In other words, it's supposed to be offensive. The reader is supposed to be offended at himself and the ease with which he slurs Jim. "The N-word" is the tool Twain uses to do this. It isn't included because it just happened to be common. It isn't included to put Jim down. It isn't included because it adds anything to the story. It's there to show certain folks that their underlying assumptions about the world actually are offensive.
So don't be offended at all. It's a tool.
Pine