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.
