I didn’t follow the news much this weekend, and what I caught was wall-to-wall Mel Gibson, so I missed the whole Romney “tar baby” comment and reaction. Dan Kennedy catches me up, fortunately. He’s measured in his judgment, giving Romney benefit of the doubt, but adding, “I don’t know whether Romney was speaking off the cuff, but if he was reading prepared remarks, well, shame on his staff.”
I’ll go further in the governor’s defense. I don’t fully get the negative, hostile reaction. If Romney’s comment was direction at anyone or entity identifiably black, I’d understand the parsing for connotation. At it was, the way Romney used it was clearly a reference to the Uncle Remus story. Now, the popularization of the Remus folktales, first by Joel Chandler Harris and much later by Disney in Song of the South, has its own complicated, problematic racial politics, as an appropriation of African-American folk culture in a way that a) gives its authors insufficient credit (Harris and Disney get the profits) and b) transforms black self-abnegating tropes (as in “the dozens”) into a patronizing projection of naivete by white readers. However, ultimately the fact that the tales still hold relevant in discourse today is a credit to African-American folk culture, whether Romney was thinking that far ahead or not.
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