Tar Baby ...by Margaret Kimberly

Tar Baby
by Margaret Kimberly

Fox News is the television news mouthpiece for the Bush administration. When the White House recently announced the departure of press secretary Scott McClellan rumors immediately surfaced that his replacement would be Tony Snow of none other than Fox News. The rumors were true and now it is official, Fox News speaks for Bush.

At his first press briefing Snow was asked about the NSA program that has allowed the federal government to spy on thousands of Americans. In his response Snow couldn’t resist throwing in references to white supremacy fantasy in order to defend government supremacy over our lives.
“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.”

You can take the man out of Fox, but you can’t take Fox out of the man. Like his former colleagues at that network Snow doesn’t pass up an opportunity to openly espouse racist doctrine....

Bill O’Reilly doesn’t want to be left out of the white supremacy band wagon either. He complained about efforts to destroy “the white power structure.”

“. . . many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.

“According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will.”

Perhaps we should thank O’Reilly for confirming that there is a white power structure in existence. The world should be so lucky to have it swept away....

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0525-27.htm

The tar baby is construed as a racist symbol derogatory of African Americans. Many of the old stories are from the slave fields parables symbolic.Not being able to speak out slaves created these stories to point out the fallacies and vulnerability of their white masters. Brer Fox created the trap of the tar baby and Brer Rabbit attacked him viscously. Brer Rabbit tried to teach the tar baby how to talk respectfully and failed.

The GOP Brer Rabbits have not mastered respect, they continue to attack the tar baby and become trapped deeper in their lies, bigotry and corruption. I suspect the field slaves of the South who created these stories would recognize the symptoms if they could time travel 170 years to today. Those without respect cannot demand respect.

That blacks don't have respect, so they can not demand respect?

I think what he meant was, if you don't show respect for others, you cannot demand it from them.

The White masters had no respect for those they victimized. They the white masters deserved no respect. Those who engage in closet racism today cannot resist beating the tar baby. The trap of the tar baby is that those who engage in beating the tar baby show themselves as the despicable scum they really are.

A field slave 170 years ago would have been killed for these types of statements. Brer Rabbit took on many roles in these stories. The Uncle Remus stories are a form of protest. The message gets lost on modern ears, partly the fault of Walt Disney and movie stereotypes.

I like your answer better than mine... good stuff

He/She died unknown, not credited for a parable that works today.

I was working on a contract with a disreputable construction firm, with which the board insisted on continuing--so I said that the amended contract should be written so tightly that in the event they didn't fulfill it, they had no rights to the "pound of flesh". Lord, you'd have thought that I'd reopened Treblinka (and none of these people are Jews, and of us all, I have the best chance of having any genes from that pool!)

And the word "shyster" (a perfectly good Yiddish word) was confused with Shylock and taken to be another racial slur. That's what comes of a "Catholic" education, mixed with Liberal politics.

In my next life, I'm going to be a hermit, or a Carmelite nun under a vow of silence. I am taking a vacation from stupid, nasty people.

Like, "Iraq was an obvious tarbaby. Touching it means you're stuck in it." or something like that.

Perhaps she's merely saying, "If I didn't know a what a word means to somebody else, it's impossible for the word to have that meaning." Seems to me it's more likely that latter than the former.

Claiming 'tar baby' must be a racist expression when used by any person in any contexts is as arrogant as my claiming that because I couldn't recal having ever heard it used in a racist way, it can never a racist expression when used by any person in any context.

Sometimes people say things without really thinking them through. For example, to say that someone welshed on a deal or gypped someone is pretty insensitive if you know where the phrases came from, but a lot of people use phrases like that without thinking about it. :shrug: