May 19, 2006
Tar Baby Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:40 AM EST At a White House press conference on Tuesday, the President’s press secretary, Tony Snow, declined to answer a reporter’s question, saying it was a “tar baby” that would get him mixed up in unwanted complications. The next day, reporters for The New York Times and the Washington Post took Snow to task for “using a term—“tar baby”—that many consider racist” (the Post) or at least one that has “vague racist connotations” (the Times).
Even considering the sources, this tut-tutting sounded strange to me, since I had never heard “tar baby” used in any way except to describe a sticky situation that’s hard to get out of. And if it is a racist term, there are a lot of racists around: Fifteen minutes on the Internet yielded examples of the use of “tar baby,” with no hint of irony or disapproval, by Robert Dreyfuss and Laura Rozen in The Nation, Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive, Jack Shafer in Slate, Richard T. Cooper in the Los Angeles Times, Lance Morrow in Time, and numerous writers at The Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground (both left-wing websites), as well as such eminent liberals as James Wolcott (on his website) and Sen. John Kerry (in a New York Times article).
The term originates, of course, in an old African-American folk tale that Joel Chandler Harris adapted for one of his Uncle Remus stories. The story was first published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879 (though a Texas lexicographer named John Williams has recently found the phrase “tar baby” used in a magazine from 1870). A copy of Harris’s story can be found here. The story is hard to read today because of all the gwine’s and sho’s, but the gist is that Brer Fox traps Brer Rabbit by putting a baby made of tar by the side of the road. Brer Rabbit strolls by and tries to talk to the tar baby, and when it doesn’t reply, Brer Rabbit gets angry and starts punching and kicking it. Before long he is stuck to it and can’t escape. The metaphorical use of “tar baby” is well established, though with varying meanings. In Mark Twain’s autobiography, dictated to his assistant in 1906 but not published until 18 years later, he recalled the 1884 presidential campaign thus: “For two years the [Hartford] Courant had been making a ‘tar baby’ of Mr. [James] Blaine, and adding tar every day—and now it was called upon to praise him, hurrah for him, and urge its well-instructed clientele to elevate the ‘tar baby’ to the Chief Magistracy of the nation.” Some other uses of the phrase through the years can be found here. Most reference works, including The American Heritage Dictionary (with which our magazine no longer has any real connection), simply define “tar baby” as a problem or situation that’s hard to get out of, rarely with any mention of a racist connotation. Yet some authoritative sources have ruled that the term does has racist overtones. In 1998 a Massachusetts appeals court decided a case in which a woman named Zhang was suing MIT for employment discrimination. Among other alleged offenses, she claimed that an MIT official had used the term “tar baby” in connection with her, though a previous judge had ruled that “the term ‘tar baby’ had been made in reference to her situation and not her race.” The appeals court declared that: “For purposes of this decision, we acknowledge that the term ‘tar baby’ is extremely offensive to Black Americans. Nonetheless, in view of the undisputed facts that Zhang is not a member of the minority who rightfully take offense to that term . . . and that MIT has a history of employing minorities, including Asians, we agree with the Superior Court judge’s conclusion that Zhang’s proffer was insufficient to show a prima facie case of race discrimination.” A similar wrong-race case, involving a Philadelphia library official who used the phrase in an e-mail, led to this explanation in a newspaper article: “Although the e-mail recipient . . . is white, the term ‘tar baby’ is commonly known to be a racial slur.” Even when the term is not applied directly to a person, its use may inspire objections. In 2004 a newly hired director of the New Orleans City Planning Commission looked forward to starting his new job by saying, “I’ve got to grab the tar baby by the ears and jump right in.” Mayor Ray Nagin, who probably wishes that questionable colloquialisms were still his biggest problem, demanded and got the man’s resignation. The same thing happened later that year when a utility board official in Fort Pierce, Florida, said in an e-mail that a “reporter is calling a PCA increase a ‘rate increase.’ This is a tar baby.” See here for a brief account of the controversy; also see here for the minutes of a city commission meeting with an extended discussion of the phrase’s use, starting on page 43; at one point a man says that he “has learned about a story of a rabbit, it is a Walt Disney story.” (This and other Joel Chandler Harris stories formed the basis for Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South.) Anyway, the official resolved the matter by apologizing. Then last fall the acting mayor of a Houston suburb described “a piece of property that would be difficult to develop” as a “tar baby,” and he too encountered calls for his resignation, though in the end an apology sufficed. And just this spring, in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a commissioner was sharply criticized by the local NAACP after he described the proposed expansion of a city bureau’s responsibilities as a “tar baby”. The commissioner apologized. In this case the story is complicated further because the bureau in question was the St. Cloud Human Rights Office. So the phrase is widely thought to be racist, yet many people who you’d think would know better are evidently unaware of it. What’s going on here? My guess is that until recently, most people encountered the term “tar baby” only occasionally and seldom gave it a second thought. Then, during the last few years, it became one of those phrases that everyone suddenly starts using, like “beg the question” (which originally meant that you were evading a question, not raising one, but that’s another issue) or “the mother of all _____”. In particular, people have been applying “tar baby” to the Iraq war when they’re looking for a cliché to use instead of “quagmire.” Then other people read the phrase, find it apt, and use it themselves, and pretty soon it’s all over the place. And as this process happens, the volume of objections also increases. There are two ways this situation could resolve itself. Either the people who have been using the phrase will avoid it for fear that it might be misunderstood, and a colorful metaphor and a classic bit of folklore will be lost from American speech, or else the people who have been objecting to the phrase will come to understand its origin and lighten up. For anyone who has lived in the United States over the last few decades, it’s not hard to guess which outcome is more likely.
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