Someone pointed me to a controversial article written a couple years ago. The article remains controversial. I replied that it’s a topic that I’ve not followed any detail and I’ll just defer to the experts. My correspondent pointed to some serious flaws in the article and asked that I link to the article here on the blog. He wrote, “I was unable to find any peer responses to it. Perhaps the discussants on your site will have some insights.”
My reply is the title of this post.
P.S. Not enough information is given in this post to figure out what is the controversial article here, so please don’t post guesses in the comments! Thank you for understanding.
Hmmm – is the clue that it is filed under ‘Public health, Decision analysis’?
From Wikpedia:
“In modern use, tar-baby refers to a problematic situation that is only aggravated by additional involvement with it.”
Notice the hyphen and more importantly, the connection to
“Several United States politicians—including presidential party nominees John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney[27]—have been criticized by civil rights leaders, the media, and fellow politicians for using the “tar baby” metaphor.[25][28] Linguist John McWhorter argued that people are “unaware that some consider it to have a second meaning as a slur” and it “is an obscure slur, not even known to be so by a substantial proportion of the population […] those who feel that tar baby’s status as a slur is patently obvious are judging from the fact that it sounds like a racial slur”
Consequently, merely naming a reason for not bringing up an uncomfortable and unnamed topic is equivalent to discussing the topic in the first place. And, if Andrew, a tenured professor, is hesitant, what silence must shroud adjuncts? Are we back to the days of the fictional “ABC Company” so as to avoid all sensibilities and relevance? Now that I am long retired, I encourage all of you to have the courage of my convictions.
When I saw the use of Tar Baby I was definitely a bit put off… I recommend the use of perhaps “Tar Ball” or “Tar Pit” to make it unambiguously not a slur. After all “baby” has nothing to do with it… It’s the sticky tar that’s the point. Plus I live not that far from LaBrea tar pits so it makes sense to me how things get stuck and it becomes a disaster.
I guess it’s a generational thing. I read those rabbit stories when I was a kid.
And please don’t throw me in that briar patch …
The tar baby story goes back farther than Uncle Remus: see
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/11/527459106/tar-baby-a-folktale-about-food-rights-rooted-in-the-inequalities-of-slavery
I mean, I did too? But mainly through books related to the Disney film Song of the South, which always struck me as super problematic even as a 5 year old… I guess growing up in Oakland CA surrounded mainly by black kids if you started using the dialect they use in the 1946 movie in any way at all the black kids would probably rightfully believe you were denigrating them and their way of speaking (which was substantially different from the southern dialect but still was also substantially different from the way that typical white kids spoke) and you’d get your ass kicked.
I was slightly surprised to learn that some consider it a racial slur…I think I learned this roughly 10 years ago when Jon Steward mocked someone for using it. I always knew, of course, that the origin is from a story in which the ‘tar baby’ is a sort of doll or scarecrow made to look like a black boy (or perhaps a black rabbit), so…yeah, tar is black, it could only be about a black person, etc. But I didn’t see, and still don’t see, what makes it a slur. For one thing, in the story the black rabbit is the smart one in the bunch. For another — and this seems more important — the salient characteristic of the tar baby is that it is sticky, not that it is black. If you grab hold of the tar baby, thinking you are solving a problem, you find that you have not solved the problem and yet you cannot let go. That seems like a great metaphor for, say, invading and occupying Iraq. I can’t think of another metaphor that quite captures it.
I know I’m just repeating what everyone here already knows. I’m tempted to say that it “sounds like a slur to people who are ignorant of what it really means”, but that would just enrage people who know what it really means and still think it’s a slur. In this sense it reminds me of the word ‘niggardly’, a word of Scandinavian origin that has no linguistic relationship to the dreaded N-word, but of course not everyone knows that. I’ve dropped it from my vocabulary as not worth the risk, which is an easy decision because there are other words that are very close to being synonyms (‘stingy’, for example). I’m less happy about having to give up “tar baby” because I don’t know of any equivalent. But whaddyagonnado, people have decided it is a slur so it’s a slur. If 20% of hoi polloi decided “lounge chair” is a racial slur, we would have to stop using the term “lounge chair.” It doesn’t matter why, it just is.
So I’ve dropped ‘tar baby’ from my lexicon. A pity.
> all the black kids would probably rightfully believe you were denigrating them and their way of speaking
Be careful. Denigrate comes from niger.
Phil. In the story a fox creates a “tar baby” (a little black kid) and the rabbit comes by and says hi to it in passing, and then it doesn’t answer, so the rabbit decides to whomp the little black child to “teach him a lesson” and put him in his place. Of course then he gets stuck in the tar, and eventually captured by the fox.
I don’t see “that little black kid disrespected me I’ll beat him until he learns a lesson about respect” as anything but a hugely problematic racist story.
Tar Ball works fine as a metaphor for “a sticky mess you shouldn’t touch” without any of the “beat up the black kid because he’s not showing proper respect” connotations.
Daniel – Maybe I’m not remembering correctly, but in these stories wasn’t Br’er Rabbit the hero (blacks) and Br’er Fox and Bear the villains (white)? Br’er Rabbit is the one who punches the tar baby to teach it a lesson. I think the reaction of punching the tar baby shows the hard handed approach toward discipline (perhaps from all races) for children at that time that was accepted as normal. I don’t think it’s the racist story you are portraying, because I think that would be a misinterpretation of the characters in the narrative. Now, whether or not people see the phrase “tar baby” as racist today, I don’t know, and would err on the side of caution. However, I think your portrayal of the original story as “a hugely problematic racist story” is incorrect.
Jd:
I don’t remember the details, but I recall that the Uncle Remus stories are considered racist in their use of dialect and that the Song of the South movie is considered just plain racist. I’ve never actually seen the movie, though.
Andrew – Hmm. It has been a long time since I read the Uncle Remus stories, but I think I just assumed the writer was trying to copy the dialect. Having grown up in the South, it is rather obvious that there are many strong dialects from people of all races across the South, so it would be interesting to know why trying to imitate dialects would be racist. People from Georgia sound different to people from Kentucky or people from southern Louisiana or from Texas. I’ve never seen the Song of the South movie. From what I vaguely remember from the Uncle Remus stories is the Rabbit is the hero and the underdog, and he constantly has to outwit the more powerful Fox and Bear. I think in the tar baby story, he eventually outwits the Fox by getting the Fox to throw him into the briar patch (Rabbit’s home) by pleading with the Fox to do anything to him except throw him in the briar patch. I remembered the Rabbit being the hero in these narratives and representing the black person, and the Rabbit comes out on top in these tales. Perhaps I just remember incorrectly!
jd. The story goes back way before Uncle Remus, and is basically a “trickster vs brawn” archetype. Similar to stories of Loki or Anansi or Hermes or etc. If you go back far enough the racist component probably is different, it might be more tribal for example, but there’s always an “us vs them” component. Certainly Uncle Remus and Song of the South both portray racist stereotypes, and I doubt that most people have knowledge of the Zimbabwe-Botswana roots or whatever. Yes, the rabbit is sort of the hero, but he’s a hero who decides to “beat the tar” out of what he thinks is a small black child sitting by the side of the road in the south… Does anyone think that the rabbit would have beat up a small white child? Anyway if that doesn’t bother you, it probably should.
If you say “tar baby” today, it is most likely to evoke a notion of “an untouchable little black kid”, whereas “Tar ball” or “tar pit” are just inanimate objects that have no such connotations but still connote “a thing that will trap you”.
Imagine being a 12 year old black child in a class full of white kids and the history teacher says one of these:
1) “The Vietnam war was a terrible tar baby for the united states resulting in thousands of deaths and major stateside unrest”
2) “The Vietnam war was a terrible tar pit for the united states resulting in thousands of deaths and major stateside unrest”
I personally think that (1) would be inviting bad behavior and comments about “tar baby” and soforth perhaps outside of class at the bus stop in a place where the teacher never hears it, but it still would have a considerable risk of unnecessarily making that child feel ostracized.
Heh, I guess I had it backwards, I thought Brer Rabbit made the tar baby to outfox the fox. Whatever. The point is the same: don’t grab a tar baby because if you do you will never be able to let go of it. A useful metaphor.
You could say this applies to anything sticky — don’t grab a tar ball! Don’t grab flypaper! Except…who grabs a tar ball, or flypaper, on purpose? So I don’t think these work as well.
I’m willing to stop using ‘tar baby’ but I think it’s a pity to have to do so.
Well if whoever emailed Andrew, reads this blog, now is their chance to post a link to the article as a comment. :)
It was me, I sent the email
https://tinyurl.com/4px6zpj5
I’m curious, what sort of discussion were you hoping for on this post?
Erin:
I wasn’t expecting or hoping for any discussion at all! I just thought it would be mildly informative for readers to know that there are hot topics that come in that I don’t want to discuss, because such discussions can just create bad feelings without any edification. It’s a combination of the topic and people involved being controversial, and me not having anything useful to say.
I think the symbolizm of the tar baby in the Brer Rabbit books comes from the US slavery past. As we have found out in recent years, many white slave owners had children with slaves that produced babies. In antibelum south, having a tar baby would mean having a kid who was yours but also a slave. The connotation meaning that when the white slave owner tried to do anything with the “tar baby” it always came with unanticipated consequences.
I find tar pit (and another subsitute that I am not finding quickly here) unsatisfactory as a substitute. Other articles have suggested “albatros, tar wolf, tar rabbit and glue ball.” I prefer a substitute that has a needy person or animal in it, as I am currently dealing with a homeless drug addict who fits this description perfectly. If you let them use the bathroom, they will not leave the house for hours…. I wonder if children’s author Laura Numeroff had experience with addicts that inspired her to write “If you give a Mouse a Cookie.”
I suggest that we use the term Glue Baby instead. Elmers makes dozens of colors of glue but not black glue, although it is available elsewhere. Anyway, Glue Baby gets my vote.
What’s interesting is that contrary to many depictions, the “tar baby” isn’t actually black. In the original story the tar baby is made from pine tar thinned with turpentine, not the asphalt that we think of as “tar” today. Modern tar is black, but pine tar isn’t, it’s golden brown, getting an even lighter color when thinned with turpentine. Race plays literally no part in this story.