Comment

Michele Bachmann (R-Mars): Obama Is 'Waving a Tar Baby in the Air'

58
Nyet4/19/2012 3:19:55 pm PDT

re: #56 Loco Mescalero

News Flash. Most folks never read Uncle Remus and the usage of the term tar baby to those has no bearing whatsoever except as an insult in certain quarters. Let’s call a spade a spade here.

Most people actually don’t seem to know about its secondary usage as a racist slur.

tnr.com

Thus a reasonable analysis is that people reach for this useful metaphor, within the rapid and subconscious activity that speaking entails, unaware that some consider it to have a second meaning as a slur.

And the “some” that do appear to be in the minority. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions tar baby as a slur online, but not in print. The American Heritage Dictionary, notoriously attuned to everyday usage, does not refer to the slur usage. I, for one, am well aware that there are slurs for black people that are less prominent than the N-word—porch monkey is one that comes up now and then, although I have only heard it referred to, not applied—but only in 2006 did I catch that tar baby was one of them.

If my experience were universal, then no dictionary entry would list it as a slur at all, of course. However, I do not live in a cave, nor do the countless people currently learning for the first time that tar baby is a slur—and I recall assorted media writers equally perplexed when I did interviews on this back in 2006. Tar baby, it seems, is an obscure slur, not even known to be so by a substantial proportion of the population.

[…]

Tar baby is one of those intermediate cases: The basic meaning is the folkloric one, while a derived meaning, known only to a segment of American English speakers (and to many among them, only vaguely) is a dismissive reference to black people.