"tar baby" in the news

[Jonathan Lighter]

Wilson, nobody in his right mins could disagree with your charaterization of
minstrel shows.

But Harris's stories were absolutely harmless - or so it seemed to me forty
years ago. I have to assume that whatever his deepest private feelings about
race may have been (and they were undoubtedly not up to current snuff), when
his stories appeared in the 1880s and after, they were generally thought of
as progressive:  races and classes united through stories told by a shrewd,
affable but hardly clownish slave. And to the extent that they were versions
of genuine African-American folktales, they proved that said folktales were
as intelligent and meaningful as any of the European persuasion. The white
kid in the stories was an idealized JCH himself.

Sentimental? Simplistic?  What in popular culture isn't?

Just showing off for a moment: _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ painted so heart-rending a picture of slavery that Lincoln said he
thought Harriet Beecher Stowe  could have started the Civil War all by
herself. When I was in high school, however, it was dismissed as sentimental
trash. When I was in college, it was doubly sentimental trash because
written by an unauthorized and obviously clueless white woman.  Ten years
later, it was a key document of the American canon, because it effectively,
passionately, denounced slavery and was written by a brilliantly perceptive
white woman.

My point about Harris isn't that he was a second Mark Twain (one of his many
friends, BTW) or that Uncle Remus is a compleat literary figure; only that
it's as overdetermined to find evil in  Uncle Remus as it is to find it in
_Huckleberry Finn_.

Or, as Mad magazine once paraphrased the motto in a different context
entirely, "Honey, why did you swat Mel in the pants"?

JL
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 2:26 PM, 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 Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 1:39 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > the
> > collective judgments tilts against those being offended
>
> As should surely be the case, here.
>
> But I often find myself behind the curve, non-distinct from the most
> blatant racist. E.g., I've never been able to see how it could be the
> case that it should have come to be the case that referring to people
> of East-Asians descent as "Orientals" should suddenly be perceived as
> a supposed insult, after dekkids of dekkids of ordinary use.
>
> Of course, what such people should be called is of no real concern to
> me. However, that I found having to make this very trivial semantic
> shift to be a gigantic,
>
> how-can-"Oriental"-possibly-be-construed-as-some-kind-of-insult-by-those-people?-why-I've-been-using-it-all-my-life-without-the-least-intent-to-insult-anyone!
> pain in the ass puts me on the same level as any other casual
> racist-in-the-broad-sense.
>
> But, it wasn't *my* ox that was being gored.
>
> --
> -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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 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."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org