"tar baby" in the news

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I never took the tar baby to be a slam at black
>> people.

Me, neevuh.

OTOH, I'm in a sufficiently-extreme quarter to believe that
minstrel-show blackface is still blackface, even though its
perpetrators were just ordinary Joes trying to make a buck at the
expense of those who have no means of protecting themselves from
exploitation. What could be more American than that? It's the
Republican dream!

If I take your shotgun and, purely accidentally, with absolutely no
malice aforethought or otherwise intended, accidentally blow your head
off, your lucky ass is still as dead as it would be, if I had plotted
your murder for dekkids.

OTTH, I'm shocked, SHOCKED! to discover that there is documentary
evidence that someone ever felt that it was all right for  the
otherwise pure-as-the-driven-snow, newborn-lambly-innercent tar-baby
to be co-opted as a term of opprobrium for blacks by random
sheetheads.

And what's the deal with the colored Spiderboy?

--
-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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