"tar baby" in the news

Thu Aug 4 16:06:11 UTC 2011

paul johnson
     None of us may like it, but if we have Jewish friends or even worse
Jewish in-laws you don't discuss Israel.  As a Gentile, you are
automatically disqualified.  Much the same with whites and blacks.  It's
hard to be civil while tiptoeing on egg shells and that's in public
dialogue, in written discourse, one certainty is that someone's going to
end up offended.

On 8/4/2011 9:26 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> This was supposed to go to everyone but didn't:
>
> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Harris got bashed and re-bashed in the '60s.  The fact that was a Geirgia
>> white man didn't help.
>>
>> I guarandamntee you that when I watched Disney's "Song of the South" at the
>> age of about seven, it never occurred to me that anynody was parodying
>> anything. Uncle Remus was a great. The animals had no race.  The tar baby
>> was made out of tar.
>>
>> Years later I read many of the original stories and found nothing
>> offensive. But of course, I'm disqualified as a judge in some extreme
>> quarters.
>>
>> The rap against the Uncle Remus stories seems to be:
>>
>> 1. As a white man, Harris was not authorized to write about black people,
>> even though Uncle Remus is clearly intended to be no more than an Aesop
>> figure.
>>
>> 2. Harris has Remus speak in dialect, which is degrading and insulting.
>> (When Huck Finn speaks in dialect, that's degrading and insulting too,
>> but only because he uses the N-word.)
>>
>> 3. Remus never protests racism.
>>
>> 4. There isn't enough racism in the stories for Remus to protest: so Harris
>> lies to children about the South.
>>
>> 5. Remus exists only to tell clever stories to a wealthy little white kid.
>> So instead of Superfly, he's just an Amos 'n Andy fantasy.
>>
>> 6. Harris dreamed up most of the stories instead of being a black man
>> telling authentic folk tales passed down over the centuries from Africa.
>>
>> But the point is that I never took the tar baby to be a slam at black
>> people.  I suppose the "baby" might have been made of, I don't
>> know, vanilla-wafer dough instead of black tar, but then Br'er Rabbit
>> wouldn't have gotten quite as stuck.
>>
>> HDAS has several exx. of "tar baby" in the contemptuous sense, however. All
>> after "Song
>> of the South."
>>
>> JL
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Ron Butters<ronbutters at aol.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Ron Butters<ronbutters at AOL.COM>
>>> Subject:      Re: "tar baby" in the news
>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> "parody for white readers" strikes me as wrong on two counts. Was it
>>> really parody, or simply dialect literature (a genre that was extremely
>>> popular in its day)? And were nonwhites forbidden to read it and enjoy it?
>>>
>>> Sent from my Droid Charge on Verizon 4GLTE
>>>
>>> ------Original Message------
>>> From: Herb Stahlke<hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
>>> To:<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Date: Thursday, August 4, 2011 12:43:22 AM GMT-0400
>>> Subject: Re: [ADS-L] "tar baby" in the news
>>>
>>> Wilson,
>>>
>>> Back in the forties, when I was little, I had an Uncle Remus story
>>> book including the tar baby story.  I remember the picture of the tar
>>> baby looking very like a cartoon image of a black baby.  Harris used
>>> eye dialect to parody black speech for white readers, so I suspect the
>>> racism of the image wasn't accidental, even if he may not have been
>>> responsible for the specific illustration in my story book.
>>>
>>> Herb
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Wilson Gray<hwgray at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>> Poster:       Wilson Gray<hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>>>> Subject:      Re: "tar baby" in the news
>>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>>>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERVUGA.EDU>
>>>>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>>>> Subject: Â  Â  Â "tar baby" in the news
>>>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> U.S. representative apologizes for 'tar baby' comment
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/08/02/us.rep.tar.baby/index.html
>>>>>
>>>>> LH
>>>>>
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>>>
>>>> "It can refer to a sticky problem or situation but _[it] also is
>>>> understood as a derogatory term for African-Americans_."
>>>>
>>>> Really? I did not know that.
>>>>
>>>> FWIW, back in the day - who knows what PC hath wrought since the '70's
>>>> - The Compton, California - the Hub City - High School used "Tartars"
>>>> as the nickname of its athletic teams. Those teams were routinely
>>>> referred to in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan-area press as the
>>>>
>>>> _Tar-Babies_
>>>>
>>>> At the time, it struck me as trivially odd that the Compton High
>>>> student body was apparently cool with the school's teams being named
>>>> after a "graven image," so to speak, of a baby made out of tar. OTOH,
>>>> in those days, it was certainly true that schools that had to play
>>>> against the Tar-Babies usually found themselves in a sticky situation.
>>>>
>>>> That "tar-baby" was ever a reference to black people, individually or
>>>> severally, living or dead, real or imagined, even now, strikes me as
>>>> unreal, and I ain't going for it.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe I need to _read_ me some Joel Chandler Harris. My only knowledge
>>>> of this masterpiece is based on the Disney cartoon strip, based upon
>>>> the "Uncle Remus" tales, that once appeared in the Sunday funny
>>>> papers. If the tar-baby in the relevant tale was intended to represent
>>>> a stereotypical, infant pickaninny, well, as is the case WRT the
>>>> author of _Hole in the Mattress_, I Mr. Cumpleetleigh.
>>>>
>>>> I think that this was yet another example of the Republican strategy
>>>> of bending over backward WRT trivia - especially when the situation
>>>> can be tarred with some refernce to race - but standing like a stone
>>>> wall WRT important matters, such as being willing to bankrupt the
>>>> country, if necessary, to ensure the success of their stated intention
>>>> to destroy the Democrats in general and Obama in particular.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> -Wilson
>>>> -----
>>>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
>>>> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>>>> -Mark Twain
>>>>
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>>>>
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>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
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>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>>
>
>

--

Blunt force trauma
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