Memorandum To Tony Snow On The Use Of The Term ‘Tar Baby’

This is off Think Progress. Apparently, the new White House press secretary Tony Snow had made two references to the racial slur "tar baby" in his first press conference:

SNOW: Having said that, I don'’t want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program, the alleged program, the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny.

QUESTION: What are your personal goals? What do you hope to achieve here? Will you continue to televise these briefings? And would you put into English the phrase (OFF-MIKE) the tarbaby?

SNOW: Well, I believe hug the tarbaby, we could trace that back to American lore.

Crooks and Liars has the video link here.

Good Lord--what a racist slur! "Tar Baby" came from a series of Uncle Remus stories that were based on the African-American folklore in the South. According to Wikipedia:

The tar baby was a trap -- a human figure made of tar -- used to capture Br'er Rabbit in a story which is part of American plantation folklore. Br'er Fox played on Br'er Rabbit's vanity and gullibility to goad him into attacking the fake and becoming stuck. A similar tale from African folklore in Ghana has the trickster Anansi in the role of Br'er Rabbit.

In Southern black speech in the 19th century, the word "baby" referred to both a baby and a child's "doll." Thus, the expression "tar baby" meant a tar doll or tar mannequin.

The story was originally published in Harper's Weekly by Robert Roosevelt of Sayville, New York.

Years later Joel Chandler Harris wrote of the tar baby in his Uncle Remus stories.

The problem here isn't that the stories themselves are racist due to their referencing the African-American folklore here. The problem is that when the folklore was adapted into the Uncle Remus stories, they were told in the Deep South dialect of African-American slaves. According to Wikipedia:

The stories are told in Harris' version of a Deep South slave dialect. The genre of stories are the trickster tale, which has roots in West Africa. The term "uncle" was a patronizing, familiar and often racist title reserved by whites for elderly black men in the South, which is considered pejorative and offensive. At the time of Harris' publication, his work was praised for its ability to capture plantation negro dialect.

The stories were the subject of a Walt Disney movie in 1946, Song of the South (now uncirculated and little known in the US).

The animal stories are not overtly racist and had considerable popular appeal, but by the Civil Rights era of the 1960s the dialect and the "old Uncle" stereotype of the narrator, long considered demeaning by many blacks, as well as Harris' racist and patronizing attitudes toward blacks and his defense of slavery in his foreword, made the book indefensible. Without much controversy the book and movie simply disappeared from American popular culture. Few children born after 1970 have heard of them.

And the new White House press secretary Tony Snow picked up on this racist dialect, and used it in his first press conference.

Incredible.