personally i don’t think it’s a HUGE deal, but it is in bad taste. at most it’s a “lolz, what!?” on par with Jessica Simpson asking if tuna was fish or poultry, but really nothing too shocking. an unfortunate choice of words, but ultimately not terribly malicious. we can’t get too worked up over every single passing, POSSIBLY racist term being thrown around. as long as overt racism and institutionalized racism is eliminated, who cares about a few unfortunate turns of phrase?
If I were advising a politician, or anyone else, for that matter, I’d suggest using “flypaper” as the metaphor for something difficult to get rid of once touched.
bolding mine
Don’t be silly. There are black mice. I saw one in my backyard the other day. I’m not offended by the existence of the tar baby story, and I don’t think that I implied that I was. In fact, the whole story is derived from an African folktale*. The point of my post was pretty much the same as your bolded sentence. The tar baby had to be black, therefore it had to be an imitation of black person, so race is not totally irrelevant to the story.
(By the way, It is kind of ridiculous, but the quickest way to offend me is to imply that I’m the kind of person who takes “offense at most anything.” The fact that I do not find the story to be racially neutral is not the same as finding it offensive.)
Too late to edit:
Upon reflection, the fact the story is derived from an African folktale suggests that caricature aspect I referred to was not in the original intent of the story, but is used that way by people who deliberately use the term “tar baby” as a racial slur.
It was an unfortunate choice of a phrase considering how pc most Americans think they are, but I’m sure he didn’t mean it as a racial slur. It does mean a sticky situation that keeps getting worse, but I think many people are just convinced it is a racial slur because they aren’t familiar with the background. Kind of like saying niggardly (miserly) and the resulting OMG you called someone a nigger chorus.
The difference is that niggardly is a pretty uncommon word, and I think a lot of the reaction about that was that people assume “niggardly” IS a racial epithet. It, however, isn’t. At all. It never has been, has a different etymology, and is still used amongst wordy people without concern.
But “tar baby” does have racial connotations. It’s used as an epithet. Heck, it’s largely been popularized in the latter half of the twentieth century by a Disney movie particularly famous for racial concerns. Hiding behind erudition doesn’t help in this case, because the erudite should be aware of alternate meanings and the baggage associated with the term.
I really doubt this shows that Lamborn is a secret racist who’s decided to “come out” to the press. But it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say.
Let’s just call a spade a spade and admit that Obama’s a shitty President.
That’s totally not racist because I’m clearly referring to the gardening tool.
I’ve heard it used as both.
I’m of the opinion that the guy didn’t mean it in a racist way. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt there. But it’s an incredibly poor word choice when addressing the media. If you’re a politician and you’ve been paying attention to the world over the last couple of decades, you’d have to know that “tarbaby”, kind of like the word “niggardly”, is best not said in front of a microphone. Even if your intentions are innocent, you are bound to come out looking like a racist. Especially when referencing a person. It would be different if he’d been talking about the negotiations in general, without referencing the president and the president alone.
I was talking to my boss today about press conferences yesterday and what to say and what NOT to say. Take home message: Do not give the press anything that will give them a bad headline. They don’t care about what you’re saying. They just care about having a story and will glom on to anything that gives them that. They live for moments like this.
So not necessarily a racist, but certainty not a smooth move for a politician. One could even suspect that he threw that line in as a wink to those who would enjoy hearing the word being used in the bad way, while taking advantage of the other meaning as a way to play the misunderstood literary allusionist. We have no evidence of this, but worse things have been done. So for being dumb and potentially smarmy, he gets little sympathy for me.
I don’t see it as racist, but it seems others can, so it seems an unwise term for a politician to use.
Yes, these are definitely dark times for the US.
I don’t think it’s all that uncommon a word. Less common than ball or cat, but hardly out of the reach of someone with a minimum of a high school education. Same with Uncle Remus.
However, it seems that when niggardly is used publicly, even amongst wordy people, a public outcry follows.
Best quote:
“You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding”