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http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/07/31/romney.racialremark.ap/index.htmlIn an article today, CNN reports that Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has apologized for a comment he made using the term "tar baby". Both AWAD and Webster's (See AWAD Aug 15 1999, and M-W.com) define the term just as Romney used it, and note the source of the term was an Uncle Remus story. Neither source mentions any use of the term as a racial epithet. My question: Is this the use of this phrase as a derogatory term for a black person commonplace, and do any authoritative sources support this? Clearly, the phrase is to be avoided if that is, in fact, a valid definition. Reading the CNN article, I was immediately reminded of a case a few years ago in which a member of the Washington, DC mayor's office resigned over his use of the term "niggardly": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/jan99/district27.htmHow much care ought a speaker exercise over his or her use of language, and should this extend beyond the accepted meanings of words to possible misinterpretations on the part of listeners? Should government officials be held to a different standard than lay-persons, owing to their public positions? I'm curious to hear what others think, but I offer this caveat: discussion of this topic is fraught with the possibility of protracted and difficult ensnarement.  Best, -JD
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RE; and note the source of the term was an Uncle Remus story
while many of the stories that fall under the catagory of "uncle remus" stories, are americanized versions of classic african folk tail (a large percentage are ashanti in origin) the Disney production of the Uncle Remus Stories (Tales of the South) was a very racist.
if you know the Tar Baby story from reading, you know it in one context. if you know the Uncle Remus stories from the disney production (or if your parents knew them from the disney movie --since its not shown any more, nor is tales of the south available on tape/dvd--you might have a totally different view.
in New England, 'cracker barrel' is a term for a farmer, or rural person, but old yankie farmers are considers wise..(or wily or canny)
in the south, a 'cracker' can be a term for a farmer or rural person but they are often not considered wise.
Is cracker an insulting term? could be, depends on context, tone and who's using the word (and who its being used about)
language is fluid, and sometimes there are words that are like quicksand.. its hard to know when a term is safe!
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So tell, oftroy, in terms that a visitor from Mars can understand,
what is racist about Uncle Remus?
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Not Uncle Remus, but the disney movie, based on Uncle Remus stories (Song of the South) is racist. (which Disney corp acknowledges, and 'keeps it in the vault' (no special releases, its not available on tape/dvd/disney channel)
(the part about Uncle Remus being a happy slave is just one aspect of the racism.)
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Really? well I guess if you want to manipulate the language I guess you could say that all aspects of slavery are "racism".
But man and Christanity being what they are don't you think that it is possible that Uncle Remus was happy? At least on his good days?
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Quote:
its not available on tape/dvd/disney channel)
Parm my beg to differmints, but it is available on DVD and VHS in the US and VHS in Canada, the UK and Germany, but not on either in France. Might could be you have to look hard for it.
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"This movie has not been released on DVD." - Netflix
previously released on VHS and laser disc, I suppose there are bootleg copies out there on DVD..
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addict
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FWIW, while rooting about on amazon.com, I noticed that the German title is:
Oncel Remus' Wunderland
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stranger
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Well this was still bugging me, even a day later, so I asked a friend who is African-American if the term was racist. Her immediate response: "Yes. It's offensive."
I told her a little more of the context for why I was asking, and quoted Romney's statment. As soon as she heard that he was talking about the project, and not applying the term to a person, she softened her opinion. She still wasn't comfortable with the term, she explained, largely because of Song of the South, and having heard it used as a euphemism for blacks. Nevertheless, she understood that there was no racial dimension to Romney's statement.
I remember Song of the South from my childhood. I think I watched it on a Sunday night episode of the Wonderful World of Disney. The movie really does draw on those minstrel stereotypes heavilly, and the offense, I believe is in images like that of a slave singing:
Zip-a-dee do dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My oh my, what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine headin' my way
Zip-a-dee do dah, zip-a-dee-ay
Mr. Bluebird's on my shoulder
It's the truth, it's "actch'll"
Everythin' is "satisfact'chall."
The image of a Uncle Remus as happy is problematic because it doesn't just imply, it comes right out and *says* he's satisfied with life. He might as well be singing "I'm a slave and everything's great!" Disney's got a good reason to want to put it in a vault.
So does that make the story of Bre'r Rabbit and the Tar Baby racist? Does it make the term itself racist? Clearly it can be used both pejoratively and in a way that contains no hostle intent. (And does an absence of "bad" intent exonerate a statement from being racist?)
I've got to side with Romney on this particular incident, but I think the jury is still out on the term itself. Language is a moving target, and the dictionary is just a blury snapshot as it gallops past. And yes, an online dictionary is more like a movie camera, but it still give us just a flat image, with the illusion of depth and motion. The true experience of a language takes place in intercourse, and thus my question here.
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Quote:
The image of a Uncle Remus as happy is problematic because it doesn't just imply, it comes right out and *says* he's satisfied with life. He might as well be singing "I'm a slave and everything's great!" Disney's got a good reason to want to put it in a vault.
Well then, Jon, better stuff "Satchmo" Armstrong in Disney's vault too because his great smile and his deep laughter while under the boot of deplorable segregation is antithetical to those who you would allow a degree of happiness.
After basic necessities are met happiness comes from within and not from without.
Are all poor people unhappy? If not, maybe we should chide the happy poor people for their happiness and demand that they mope around in accord with their unfortunate lives.
Wise old Uncle Remus said nothing about slavery. But wise old Uncle Remus said everything about the joy of being alive.
Policing words and distorting reality is something best left to the Word Police among us - they, unlike good people, enjoy being unhappy and enjoy others being unhappy too.
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Pooh-Bah
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In today's climate of Political Correctness, Helen, it's best to always avoid racial or National references of any kind, even if complimentary, as any such allusion, however neutral, will be interpreted by the PC crowd as pejorative and racist
dalehileman
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in intercourse . . . ."
ooooh, aaaaaaaaaaahhh, ooh, yessss.
TEd
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Pooh-Bah
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I would consider "tar-baby" to be offensive because, except in the Uncle Remus story, I have only heard it used as a racial slur. After decades of it's being used to offend I am surprised that an American politician would expect it to be taken any other way.
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Quote:
I would consider "tar-baby" to be offensive because, except in the Uncle Remus story, I have only heard it used as a racial slur. After decades of it's being used to offend I am surprised that an American politician would expect it to be taken any other way.
Sure thing, Zed, if you don't mind rewriting history for the sake of cowardly politicians and disregarding conventional meanings on the outside chance that it might offend.
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19990212 
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I think perhaps you misunderstand me. I think Disney has good reason to keep Song of the South in a vault, but I'm not in favor of censorship of words, thoughts, literature, or films. I'm perfectly comfortable with the notion of Song of the South, The Anarchists' Cookbook, and even Mein Kampf being available in my local public library. They don't have a place on my personal reading list, but they're a part of the historical record of what was deemed appropriate to publish at various points in time. We need those records to understand the history of those times.
Surely you understand why the minstrel-like image of Uncle Remus offends so many people, even if you, yourself aren't offended? That's why I say it's problematic. I'm not trying to police what anyone says; I'm just trying to foster what I hope is an interesting discussion.
Ultimately, each person is responsible for their own speech acts. To one extent or another, when we write or speak, it's for the purpose of causing a change in our listeners or readers. The question I ask is simply to what extent we should consider how others might misinterpret our intent.
Sadly, I'll probably think twice before using the word "niggardly" or the phrase "tar baby" in the future, even though I think they're both perfectly acceptable turns of phrase. In the abstract there's no hate in either one of them, but as your indignation shows, no matter how careful a person is in what he says, there's always the possibility of being misperceived.
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I've only heard it used one time with any frequency. When I was a teenager, a black woman at the end of our building always referred to her kids as tarbabies. I don't think she meant to convey any evil intent by it.
At the time, I had never heard the word used by anyone before. I had assumed she just made it up on the spot. I'm not sure whether it would occur to me to use this on other people, but I've thought several times about referring to my youngest daughter in this way, as she tends to get very dark during the summer.
OTOH, there are attempts to silence people from saying things on the basis that saying those things in those particular ways is necessarily racist. For example, if a white person were to talk about "asian mothers," she would almost certainly be met with ridicule and scorn. Any time my kids are talking with other asian or half-asian kids, an inevitable topic of conversation involving mutual mocking and commiseration, is their experiences with their asian mothers. If you look on the web, you might even find a few websites, including videos, of asian kids poking fun of their parents.
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themilum
Not sure I understand you. How was I "disregarding conventional meanings on the outside chance that it might offend?" I was surprised that a political figure would use a term that I thought had been used as a slur for decades and had therefore adopted this derogatory meaning as it's conventional meaning. It is hardly an outside chance or overly sensitive to be offended if someone uses a phrase that has often been used by others deliberately to offend. Given the wide variety available in the English language, surely a word or phrase without that connotation could be found. I would consider this simple courtesy not political correctness.
edit - I changed the above because on rereading it sounded rather strident and it wasn't meant to.
Last edited by Zed; 08/01/06 11:11 PM.
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Quote:
themilum
Not sure I understand you. How was I "disregarding conventional meanings on the outside chance that it might offend?" I was surprised that a political figure would use a term that I thought had been used as a slur for decades and had therefore adopted this derogatory meaning as it's conventional meaning. It is hardly an outside chance or overly sensitive to be offended if someone uses a phrase that has often been used by others deliberately to offend. Given the wide variety available in the English language, surely a word or phrase without that connotation could be found. I would consider this simple courtesy not political correctness.
edit - I changed the above because on rereading it sounded rather strident and it wasn't meant to.
Yeah, Zed, you do that.
But in doing so you will fail to impart a small bit of history to the people that you feel you must protect.
I reached adulthood in the segregated South.
Never, I say, never, did I ever hear anyone refer to a colored child as a tar baby. Down South, you see, we love babies.
And, as well, back then no one would be so insulting to suggest to another human being (black or white) that he was incapable of making the distinction between a parable and an insult.
I think that this little tidbit of paternalism is a product of the North.
Too bad. 
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never, did I ever hear anyone refer to a colored child as a tar baby.
check out Toni Morrison's or Salman Rushdie's usage of the Tar Baby imagery. They ain't talkin' about children.
Ooh Tar Baby yeah you got me stuck on you. Ooh Tar Baby and I can't get loose it's true. Come on Tar Baby won't you hold me tight, we can stick together all through the night. Ooh Tar Baby and maybe I'm in love with you. (from The Ground Beneath Her Feet)
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Another article on this issue that appeared in the Boston Herald contains a few more reactions to Romney's statement: http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=150679One comment in particular caught my attention: Maurice Lewis, a former Boston television reporter who
is black, said of Romney’s choice of words, “I just think
it’s reflective of how he sees people who don’t look like
him. Words like tar baby and pickaninny are deeply rooted
in the segregation of America. They don’t have an
ever-changing, ever-expanding meaning.”What really made this comment stand out for me was the same thing that sparked my original post: the notion that the commonly understood meaning of this phrase is a slur. These comments, and those posted in this forum show that this is true for some, and not for others. Do dictionaries exhibit bias by not mentioning the negative connotation of the term? Perhaps the difference in meaning falls along regional lines, or perhaps it's racial, I don't know. I'd agree with Lewis that these phrases are deeply rooted in America's history of segregation and slavery, but I think the notion of any word having a static meaning is absurd. Some change more slowly than others to be sure, but language can be as fluid as a glacier, or an ocean.
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Quote:
Do dictionaries exhibit bias by not mentioning the negative connotation of the term?
Maybe so, Jon. AHD4 and W3 both omit the pejorative sense; but OED2 covered it:
tar-baby, (a) the doll smeared with tar, set to catch Brer Rabbit (see quot. 1881); hence transf., spec. an object of censure; a sticky problem, or one which is only aggravated by attempts to solve it (colloq.); (b) a derog. term for a Black (U.S.) or a Maori (N.Z.) [E.A.]
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Dictionaries often mention that a word is considered pejorative or vulgar. For example in Merriam-Webster, common derogatory terms for various racial or ethnic groups are introduced as usually offensive or usually vulgar. "Honky" is defined as usually disparaging : a white person. Hillbilly is defined without editorial comment as "a person from a backwoods area."
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Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, racism is in the eye of the minority which perceives that it has been subjected to a pejorative term. To view this in any other way is to outright dismiss the views and feelings of others; that of course is racist in and of itself.
It is all too easy for those of us who are in the majority to say piously, "Oh, but we didn't understand that term to be racist."
Well, h**ky politician, now you do understand (because you have been told that it is so) that the person whose ox is gored is belittled by the usage. So stop using it already. To try to argue that it is not racist because the user did not intend to be racist is disingenuous.
I have no doubt in my mind that Romney did not understand the negativity of the term, so I think we should give him a pass on it. Once. It isn't exactly something that comes up in conversation on a weekly basis, now is it?
I actually had not realized how pejorative this was, as is evidenced by the fact that I recently had a picture of the tar baby on line here as my avatar. Or avatar-baby. I thought it was a cute pun, not realizing it was offensive. It' would still have been here if I hadn't come up with the current pun in my avatar.
I, as did Mitt Romney, plead ignorance; ignorance is curable. And we need to be understanding of the ignorant.
TEd
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Interesting reoccurring topic this one. I have often heard the idea suggested that most racism or xenophobia is generated within the group against which it is apparently perpetrated, because they are the ones who know each other best. There seems to be this naturally tendency to speak in derisive terms of one's own 'group' (perhaps in jest), which in turn acts as a means to delineate the boundaries of the group/race/etc. This notion seems to be supported by the fact that I have received joke mails along the lines of 'You might be from [place name] if you .....'. Of course, this process flows in the other direction too - where derogatory terminology is adopted by the group against which it is directed - these words then have particularly ambiguous intent.
I wonder, however, whether the origins of some culturally/racially derogatory terms can support the idea of xenophobia from within.
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Quote:
Quote:
The image of a Uncle Remus as happy is problematic because it doesn't just imply, it comes right out and *says* he's satisfied with life. He might as well be singing "I'm a slave and everything's great!" Disney's got a good reason to want to put it in a vault.
Well then, Jon, better stuff "Satchmo" Armstrong in Disney's vault too because his great smile and his deep laughter while under the boot of deplorable segregation is antithetical to those who you would allow a degree of happiness.
After basic necessities are met happiness comes from within and not from without.
Are all poor people unhappy? If not, maybe we should chide the happy poor people for their happiness and demand that they mope around in accord with their unfortunate lives.
Wise old Uncle Remus said nothing about slavery. But wise old Uncle Remus said everything about the joy of being alive.
Policing words and distorting reality is something best left to the Word Police among us - they, unlike good people (emphasis added), enjoy being unhappy and enjoy others being unhappy too.
I agree with most of this. except the last sentence with implied superiority and judgement. that's beneath you, Milo.
formerly known as etaoin...
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I wrote... Quote:
Policing words and distorting reality is something best left to the Word Police among us - they, unlike good people, enjoy being unhappy and enjoy others being unhappy too.
So etaoin decided to write this...
Quote:
...agree with most of this. except the last sentence with implied superiority and judgement. that's beneath you, Milo.
Now Etaoin, just what do you mean "implied"?
Are you implying that I'm not a better person than the Word Police? And really, yankee Etaoin, are you really suggesting that I shouldn't use "judgement"? Wow!
Gee Etaoin, you have every right to morally judge what is "beneath" me, but when a small group of elitist protectors of other humans of whom they, by their paternalism, demostrate that they think them to be beneath them, then, yes, they are "bad" people and I am better than they.
You do believe that all men are equals and should be treated as such, now don't you Etaoin?
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oy.
either I say nothing to that Milo, or I have to write a book. and I'm too lazy to write a book.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Quote:
oy.
either I say nothing to that Milo, or I have to write a book. and I'm too lazy to write a book.
You doesn't have to write a book,
You doesn't have to call me mister mean.
But you do have to apologize for empathizing with the Politically Correct.
I'll return here in 10 days to view your message of apology.
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you joined them when you said you were better.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Quote:
But you do have to apologize for empathizing with the Politically Correct.
Ah yes. So much easier to be politically incorrect. All you have to do is find out how the PC think about something and then just do the opposite.
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Sadly, the offensiveness of terms such as tar-baby lies with the beholder. You use the word in one context, you use it correctly - but the less skilled user of language misunderstands (or chooses to); I suggest it falls in the same category as the golliwog; no longer acceptable in this PC world (which is why I prefer Apples).
How could niggardly be offensive? The etymology has nothing to do with negroes and to jump to conclusions of racism implies a sad failure of vocabulary. In some environments this misunderstanding might form an accetable pun. Would that we all lived in such circumstances.
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Hi, djs, and welcome aBoard. Good to have another Brit (or at least British-residency) here!
How could niggardly be offensive? Because some peoples' brains focus on the first two syllables to the extent that they don't "hear" the d, and even if they do hear the d, they probably don't know what the word means. Perhaps the offensive "n-word" was a lot more widespread here than it was there.
A high school teacher in our area was fired recently for using that word while addressing a student. I don't know from personal experience, but the newspaper reports made it sound as though the (white) teacher felt that he had a good enough relationship with the (black) student that he was in effect saying, "I know you know me well enough to understand that I'm not insulting you". And that may have been true; I don't know. But the kid's mother, and other people, got all up in arms about it. So it's still a "hot topic" here. He was an English teacher, too...
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