Quicksand? The harder you struggle, the harder it is to get out.
The problem with tar baby is: It’s just so onomatopoeic. It made perfect literal sence in that it’s something you can’t ever possibly touch without getting covered in it…but as an adult, I look at it and wonder if perhaps it doesn’t refer to an illegitimate child with a slave?
(yes, you may hit me over the head with the d’uh! bat)
You could trade ethnicities with which to be racist or non-PC by using Chinese finger trap if that toy conveys your idea.
We’ve actually discussed this pretty extensively in the past.
From 2011: Is the term “Tar Baby” an ethnic slur? (with poll)
From 2006: “Tar Baby” - offensive slur?
From 2001: I used the word ‘tar-baby’
For anyone unfamiliar with the story, Spoke summarized it well in that last thread:
Of the suggestions people have made here, quicksand seems to me to best capture the quality of “the more you struggle, the stucker you get.” However, don’t people get trapped in quicksand because they don’t see it? which is kind of the opposite of the tar baby situation.
Here’s a nice visual from Shakespeare: “Steeped in blood”.
The whole quote is from MacBeth:
“I am steeped in blood so that were I to wade no more,
returning would be as tedious as to go o’er.”
It has a real “might as well get it over with, because there’s no getting out of it,” feel.
Maybe a tar baby IN quicksand…
The Br’er Rabbit stories are anti-racist stories, and the tar baby in the story is not an actual baby at all, of any race, but a device used by Br’er Rabbit (representing the powerless but wily black man) to trick Br’er Fox (the powerful and dangerous, but stupid, white man). Do we really have to give up all our shared metaphors just because they may have occasionally been misunderstood and misappropriated by racist morons?
Tarbaby, Tarbaby, tell me true
Who is really the jigaboo?
Is it the white man, the white talking that jive
Or the black man, the black, trying to stay alive?
You can’t touch a tarbaby, everybody knows
Smiling all the while wit de bone in de nose
That’s the way the story goes
That’s the way the story goes
Gelatinous Cube?
Does “can of worms” work?
I think you got that backward. It was Br’er Fox who made the tar-baby to trick Br’er Rabbit.
And, to the OP, no, tar-baby isn’t an inherently racist term - unless reference to anytthing ebony-hued is racist. Yes, the tar-baby was black. Why? Because tar is black. Why make it out of tar? Because tar is notoriously sticky. Why make it in the form of a person? Because Br’er Rabbit was unlikely to be upset by the indifferent silence of a tar-shrub.
It can be used in a racist way, “Buncha fucking tar-babies always causing trouble.”
But it is properly used to describe a situation that is really easy to get into and really difficult (and messy) to get out of, “Wow, subprime mortgages sure turned out to be an economic tar-baby. Whodduh thunk it?”
A funhouse, badly maintained, with no exit?
Sarah Palin’s Vagina
(hey, it fits with what the OP is reading.)
Hotel California?
Yeah, maybe you are right, maybe Br’er Fox made it, it has been a long time, but the point remains the same, because, of course, Br’er Rabbit was not ultimately defeated, rather he turned the con around so that it was Br’er Fox who lost. Br’er Rabbit (it is coming back to me now) got himself thrown in the briar patch, because it was was what he wanted, because he could survive there when Fox couldn’t, and because it was the ideal place to unstick himself from the tar-baby. It is still an anti-racist (or reverse racist) story, where Rabbit (powerless but smart black man) defeats Fox (powerful, predatory white man who is not nearly as smart as he thinks himself to be).
It means what you said it means, and, as I said before, we should not be so ready to surrender our good common metaphors to racists, just because they may sometimes misuse them.
Don’t know why you rule out “quagmire,” that is the best substitute.
Giggity giggity!
Thanks to Family Guy, “Quagmire” now has a whole nother set of associations for many of us.
I was thinking
- Albatross
- White Elephant.