Tar Baby

N. A difficult problem that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it. (Oxford American Dictionary)

I  accept that plantation reasonably conjures up images of slavery.  I am dismayed but accepting that a word like niggardly, which has no racial connotations, might be better avoided.  I am thoroughly dismayed, however, that a word like tar baby, one which celebrates the African American culture, is somehow deemed racist.

Tar baby is most often recognized from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, but it dates back much further than that.  Historian Lawrence W. Levine, in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness, discussed its roll as a cautionary tale for young blacks during slavery.  In the dangerous world that  slaves were raised in, caution and cleverness were key skills for them to learn, far more important than brute force and defiance.  The Br’er Rabbit tales served to teach young slave children those skills.  Br’er Rabbit always found ways to outfox his enemies, who surrounded him on all sides.

The Tar Baby was a sticky doll created by Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear.  When Rabbit meets the Tar Baby, and gets no response, he kicks it for rudeness and finds himself ensnared.  All of his best attempts to free himself only trap him the worse.  It is only when the other forest animals came to kill him that Br’er Rabbit was able to trick them into thinking the worst punishment would be to throw him in the thicket where he can escape home.

Somewhere along the line, however, tar baby has also come to have negative connotations toward blacks, despite the completely ass-backward nature of the insult (far worse than the turnaround of Stowe’s poor Uncle Tom).  Even though the story quite possibly stems from black roots, black leaders have attacked politicians for using the reference as it was intended to be used in the story.  Mitt Romney in 2006 said of the Big Dig disaster, “The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can.”  Civil Rights activist Larry Jones was one of many who criticized him, saying “Tar baby is a totally inappropriate phrase in the 21st century.” Do your homework, Mr. Jones! A white man was paying homage to black folklore! Even CBS News, my source for the details,  gets it wrong on the website, attributing the story to Harris, as if he invented it himself.

Virginia Republican Tom Davis found himself in the same hot water over this word two years later.  Here is one site criticizing him for that choice of words.

Is this just a way for Democrats to paint Republicans as racist? As a staunch Democrat, I think the party can do better than that.

In a society that does not give nearly enough credit to the contributions of black culture, it is very sad to me one such contribution would be rejected by the community itself.  It is also sad to me that in a society that has so many clear examples of discrimination and racism against blacks, that leaders feel the need to invent slights out of words with deeper meaning.

Niggardly

adv.:  stingy

Yesterday’s post about the word “plantation” reminded me of what was one of the most famous examples of good words gone wrong.  While plantation was a victim of contrary definitions, however, niggardly was a victim of the American public’s limited vocabulary.

The incident is now famous: in 1999, Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams accepted the resignation of one of his top aides, David Howard, a white man, because he said in a meeting, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund because it’s not going to be a lot of money.”  Apparently his staff did not score very well on their SATs, because one lodged a complaint leading to Howard tending his resignation.  Howard was eventually offered his job back, but only after much public debate about political correctness.

According to the New York Times, where I reminded myself of the details of this case, Jesse Jackson advocated for Howard getting his job back, but asked the word to be avoided.  ”You’ve got to be pretty heavy to get into the Scandinavian roots of a word from two centuries ago,” he said.  There it is — a request that our politicians speak less intelligently so that America can follow along.  Worse than anything else, to me, Howard felt the need to publicly apologize for using the word.

This issue aside, it is worth wondering if there is any real need for this word in the English language.  It seems to carry no connotation not offered by the words miserly or stingy.  In fact, most of the places where I looked it up seemed to have only a one or two word definition.  If a word does not have a unique definition, either literal or semantic, then it should, in theory, naturally die off.  Maybe the semantic difference is that it separates people who know its origins, and those who think it is a racist slur.

Plantation

A word whose meanings we all know.  The larger issue, however, is what definition comes to mind, and if the most common thought of meaning has negative connotations, should we continue to use it?

This issue was raised in the New York Times yesterday in an article about the formal name of Rhode Island, which is the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  Several politicians are pushing for the name to be updated, because of the slavery connotations of the word plantation.  Others dismiss the complaints arguing the use of the word comes from a different meaning altogether.  I am going to stay out of the debate, because I don’t see it as a big deal on either side, but the history of the word is interesting.

Look up plantation in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the first definitions all deal with the physical act of planting something into the ground.  It is the obvious and original meaning of the word.

Definition four in the O.E.D. is a colony.  The idea is that individuals were lifted up from one part of the world and transplanted in another.  The action of moving to the new world was seen as planting oneself into new soil.  This sort of metaphor was quite common in the language of early American puritans.

It is not until definition five that the most commonly used images of the word come into play (interestingly enough this is definition number one in the Oxford American Dictionary).  The idea is that on a large farm, there is much plantation going on, so it was an appopriate name.  A large farm also needed a lot of hands, and it was easier to enslave them rather than pay them.  Plantation very quickly became associated with slavery.

This is not dissimilar to the Spanish settlement word encomienda.  The word means “commission.”  Because these commissions consistently took the form of the right to force the Indians into labor, the word becomes entwined with the horror of slavery.

Obviously, Rhode Island took the word plantation from the historical meaning of a colony.  In the eyes of all Americans, however, a different definition comes to mind.  Should then, we retire a historical definition of a word when a more prevelant meaning comes about?