Insensitive language and public discourse

I got an email from an acquaintance and Word Nerds listener yesterday, alerting me to a flap created by the brand new White House press secretary, Tony Snow. A Google News search lists a report in the ThinkProgress.org blog as the first reporter of this unfortunate gaff.

(Bizarrely enough, the Washington Post largely ignored this moment, at least in the print edition. Dana Milbank, in his gushing review of the new press secretary, mentioned in passing, deep in the middle of his column, that Snow “risked some loaded language.” According to the Post website, this piece appeared on page A2 of the print edition, although I did not see it. A more critical piece by Dan Froomkin appeared only on washingtonpost.com, not in the print edition.)

In his very first briefing Tuesday, Snow casually used the term “hug the tar baby,” apparently to refer to refer to what might more neutrally be termed a “sticky situation.” His reference seemed to be to an old children’s story by Joel Chandler Harris, in which Brer Rabbit tricks Brer Fox into hugging a baby made out of tar, and thereby traps his nemesis the fox.

However, it is probably more commonly understood in American discourse as a racial slur, a very rude term for African Americans.

The thread of comments on ThinkProgress.org (at the time of this writing already numbering 291 comments) shows how racially charged this careless use of language is. While a lot commenters claim the whole flap is an instance of political correctness run amok, many others hear in the off-hand remarks by this occasional substitute for Rush Limbaugh an extraordinary insensitivity to the perception of this phrase.

Even if Snow was only thinking of the Brer Rabbit story, which is generally perceived nowadays to be somewhat racist on its own, he seems to have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the voice and lexicon of 21st-century America.

Race is still the big taboo of American life. This country, which was founded on a slave economy, is still trying, 142 years after our Civil War, to figure out who we are and how we should talk to each other. The Word Nerds did a show recently on Race and Language in which we tried to explore the edges of this taboo zone. In the back of our minds, Howard Chang and I know that there is a wide spectrum of possible reaction to racially charged speech, from very sensitive to very thick-skinned.

But whether you think the uproar is obviously justified or is a case of exaggerated political correctness, one would have to acknowledge that the choice of the term “tar baby” was a rather bizarre turn of phrase for Snow to use on his very first day on the job in front of the White House press corps. Whether Snow was subconsciously using the phrase as a racial slur or simply recalling the Brer Rabbit story, there is no way he should have let it pass his lips.

In our podcast, Howard Chang introduced the concept of “homophonic creep,” which is what happens when words that sound like offensive words become taboo, just because of their sound. One very well known example is a controversy in the Washingtron, DC local government in 1999 over the use of the non-offensive term niggardly.

But the Tony Snow flap this week is nothing like that. “Tar baby” is either a nasty racial slur, or else it’s a plot feature in a story that no one tells any longer because of its racial overtones. It is certainly not a phrase any educated public speaker should get away with using nowadays.

Certainly not a White House press secretary.