Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

When keeping it partisan goes wrong (IV)

by Aaron Wherry on Saturday, May 30, 2009 1:11pm - 31 Comments

For what it’s worth, Marlene Jennings, the lone black MP in the current parliament, would prefer you avoid using the term entirely.

“As a Black child growing up, I was called all sorts of pejorative names based on the colour of my skin, including the ‘n-word’ and ‘tar baby’ – and believe me, it was hurtful,” said Ms. Jennings. “I am offended by Mr. Poilievre’s insensitive remarks – and I know leaders in the Black community across Canada feel the same way.”

Tags: house of commons, Marlene Jennings, Parliament, pierre poilievre, Question Period

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john g

I’ll take Jennings seriously when she goes after any of the numerous media outlets that have used the same term. She could start with Larry Zolf of the CBC.

Until then, I ask again…who is more guilty of making this a partisan issue? Poilievre for refusing to apologize for not meeting a standard that anyone else does either, or the Liberals with their faux outrage, race baiting, and grievance mongering? Perhaps this time you’ll have less of a flippant answer.

Blues Clair

john faux g.

Leo F.

She could start with Larry Zolf of the CBC.

I think Ms Jennings would rather avoid revisiting that anti-feminist crank’s record altogether.

seaandthemountains

uhm there might be some significant distinctions that make it perfectly suitable to go after PP and PP alone, including: 1) she has to work with him directly; and, 2) he holds among the highest office in the country and thus sets a standard for Zolf and all others.
Jonny B G

I doubt Jennings cares when ignorant people will begin to take her seriously; she probably knows they’ll always support the racist and other hate-driven sentiments for anything not white. She probably also knows that reasoning with the narrow-minded will get you nowhere.

http://www2.parl.gc.ca/MarleauMontpetit/DocumentViewer.aspx?DocId=1001&Sec=Ch13&Seq=1&Lang=E Steph C

Plenty of people use the word “liar,” but it is considered unparliamentary. As with the majority of Canadian institutions, the current government has shown contempt for the House of Commons on a regular basis.
bettie

In my entire life, which is getting longer all the time, I have NEVER heard the expression ‘tar baby’ used racially. When I get wound up about some situation, my husband will sometimes caution me, ‘Let it go or it risks becoming a tar baby.’ Now we have Marlene Jennings telling us to refrain from using this useful expression. Come on!! Expressions enter the lexicon when there lacks an adequate expression in the language to suscinctly describe a given situation. It’s for this reason that many foreign words have entered the English language, and English words are being used in other languages.

Poor, Pierre Poilievre used the expression ‘tar baby’ innocently enough (as I would have done)… and to have someone pounce on him like Ralph Goodale (my MP, by the way) must have been a shock. I know it would have been for me.

Now, I’m wondering, are we OK with parliamentarians telling us which word/expressions we are permitted to use? This is political correctness gone mad!! Are we soon going to have a Ministry of Permitted Words/Expressions a la Monty Python?

I think that in making such a big deal about this (and the media are culpable in playing this story to the hilt) the Liberals are making things more racist.

Leo F.

So, in other words, you’re telling Marlene Jennings and other black people how they should feel. I’m sure they’re happy with the direction you’re providing them.

john g

”Nothing is personal in politics, because politics is theater.
It is part of the job to pretend
to have emotions that you do not actually feel.”

Source: Michael Ignatieff

h/t to wilson in another thread

kc

If politics IS theatre, it’s bad, bad theatre.

http://www.jackmitchell.ca Jack Mitchell

I dunno, bettie. The fact that you may have used this expression in a non-racist way your whole life isn’t necessarily pertinent to whether it should be relegated to the back of the lexicon. Words and phrases do pick up connotations, and good manners really involve not giving offense accidentally; so if a considerable number of Canadians (as attested by Ms. Jennings) fine the phrase vulgar and offensive, it seems to me that common decency would require one not to use it. It’s not like we’re running out of words in English.

madeyoulook

I dunno, Jack. I might like to see this perspective come from someone who does not have a glaring obvious partisan interest in being so darn insulted. I will reserve judgment until then, especially since there appears to be widespread bewilderment over what exactly the problem is in this case..

And I would be very careful about this blanket universal collective self-asphyxiation anytime a group of people tells us all we must. A certain collection of Danish cartoons makes that point rather well.

Mike T.

Just because you have no idea about the connotations of the meaning of the words you use in casual conversation doesn;t mean an MP, when making prepared remarks in the House of Commons, has the same leeway. I am perfectly willing to accept PP didn’t know exactly what he was saying. But I’m having trouble thinking of an excuse for that.
Jonny B G

Ah, yes, the ignorance excuse: “I’m too lazy (or stupid) to bother learning the meaning of the words I am using so I can’t be held accountable.”

http://www.savedarfur.org Sophia Geffros

How is it we have only one black MP?

http://prairiewrangler.wordpress.com/ Olaf

I can only assume it’s because we’re all so racist.

http://www.savedarfur.org Sophia Geffros

Actually, I was going to attribute it to socioeconomic factors, the same things which come into play when we see the general lack of women in Parliament- women and ethnic minorities tend to earn less (ergo, less able to finance a campaign) and are less likely to work in a job where they are able to take time off to run a campaign and still have a job to return to (there is a much higher percentage of women and minorities in low-paying service industry jobs where, if you can’t come to work, you’re out of luck.)

Jonny B G

Um, socioeconomic factors have far less to do with it than you think. Politics in Canada is a white man’s game, designed by and for white men. Women and other people, like Aboriginal peoples, were initially excluded from holding office and even voting until long after white men established the customs, traditions and rules of politics in Canada.

Pete Tong, It’s all gone

Maybe I’m ignorant but would Hedy Fry classify as black.

http://dredtory.blogspot.com/ Sir Francis

I find it fascinating that what “tar baby” means to Westerners and suburban Ontarians appears to be entirely different from it means to Maritimers and urban Ontarians.

This whole imbroglio seems to flow from a phenomenon that is actually more interesting than its immediate source–the extent to which imported (i.e. American) idioms are assimilated and internalised by Canadians in ways that display key regional and class differentiation.

Some blog-frequenting readers might remember a germane case two years ago, when a quite highly literate progressive blogger from British Columbia used the word “porch monkey” in the thread to one of his posts. He meant it as a cognate of “hick” or “redneck” and was shocked and embarrassed when its racist thrust was pointed out. Clearly, the term’s British Columbian meaning is the exact inverse of its Ontarian meaning. Thus, the Canadian meaning of the slur is vexed, whereas its original American meaning is absolutely stable.

I wonder how much scholarly work has been done about this process. I also wonder if a controversy like Poilievre’s could ever occur in a nation whose idiomatic vernacular discourse and popular culture are organic and indigenous rather than rootless importations.

Sean Stokholm

I don’t know if there’s been any particular study of slurs and linguistic dialects and codes, but there’s plenty of interesting stuff out there about the whole manner in which languages diverge according to regional, class, and contextual divisions, to name a few factors. Not to mention some really fascinating works dealing with language and power, pidgins, diglossia, and creoles – the latter being an interesting case, because the term itself refers to a pidgin that becomes a language in its own right, but technically means “blackened”, and was originally something of a slur itself!

All languages change, diffuse, and borrow terms to varying extents, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a nation where all citizens shared a purely homogenous language – the way we speak is simply too influenced by a myriad of generational, class, gendered, occupational and regional distinctions to remain static and completely shared across large populations. The history of state-enforced writing systems and Mandarin in China is an excellent case study of the relationship between states, languages, and power, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. All of this is a long way of saying that regardless of the extent to which Canada has “rootless imports” (like you, I also blame Iggy!), this sort of thing is going to happen from time to time, because the variation can just as easily emerge “organically” (from within).

http://dredtory.blogspot.com/ Sir Francis

creole… refers to a pidgin that becomes a language in its own right, but technically means “blackened”, and was originally something of a slur itself!

Absolutely. Even more interestingly, “creole” became an ethnic term, applied to all those who spoke creole regardless of skin colour. Josephine Bonaparte (née Beauharnais), Caucasian but born and raised in Martinique, was described as a Creole.

This speaks to the crux of what interests me, though–the way in which a people are defined by their language and the fascinating complexities inherent in that process when so much of a people’s language is borrowed.

I’m not sure I agree with you that the variation implied by the Poilievre fracas could “just as easily emerge “organically” (from within)”. I would doubt that there’s much empirical evidence for that thesis.

The current controversy deals with the semantic universe of racial epithets, which is bound by a very tight cultural and historical discipline. No American could misinterpret “porch monkey”, for instance, yet it is clearly possible for a Canadian to do so.

The fact is that Americans share a history of racial oppression much longer, more intense, more violent and more divisive than ours, and their language has been accordingly conditioned. In Canada, it so happens that virtually all of our racial epithets are borrowed from other cultures, and the sloppy, unmotivated process of cultural borrowing is sure to give rise to an interpretive variability to which idioms generated by our own shared history are not subject.

I think Canada’s colonial status needs to be kept in mind when assessing situations like Poilievre’s; his lapse was not strictly one of “ignorance” (even less than it was one of racism); it was merely the product of the inevitable semantic jaggedness of cultural borrowing. How many Canadians know that the word “Canuck” (with which we have an unmediated cultural identification) is actually an American slur, originally used against French-Canadian migrants working in 19th-century New England?
We’ve even had to borrow what we call ourselves!

Critical Reasoning

Kudos to Sir Francis and Sean Stockholm for their truly fascinating discussion.

http://dredtory.blogspot.com/ Sir Francis

And jeers to Macleans for priggishly mutilating a perfectly respectful and disciplined dialogue merely for the sake of suppressing the occurrence of an epithet–used in a purely analytical context–certainly no more offensive than that which sparked the controversy this thread is discussing. I've never witnessed an act of blog moderation as sloppy, arbitrary and juvenile as this.

This is a magazine that features Mark Steyn, remember. The gall here is amazing.

Angelle

Frog is an innocent enough word, but when it is use to refer to a person who is French Canadian as in : Did you see who came with Bettie? It is that frog from the next village?

It is an insult and it is never perceived as slip or a just a joke no matter what rationale is given.

You can mount any defense you can imagine, your friends who use the phrase as well, will surely stand by you but a bigot you will remain.
http://deleted Sandi

1. Tar baby is a synonym for nigger, except that it is only used in bigoted manners, whereas nigger can be a sign of respect, if the speaker is also African American.

It comes from a children’s story in which the dark skin and seeming ignorance (caused by a lack of schooling) of slaves were explained by the idea that black children were baptised in tar, which made them dark and dumb.

2. Tar baby
A dummy made of tar, which cannot be struck without getting oneself hopelessly stuck to it–from the story “Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox” by Joe Harris, as told by his fictional narrator, Uncle Remus.

Tar baby has become short hand for a situation better avoided than confronted.
The issue of immigration has become a tar baby for president Gearge W. Bush.

3. Tar baby a situation almost impossible to get out of; a problem virtually unsolvable;
catherine

This description, on a blog from the time McCain used the term, seems most connected to Poilievre’s use:

Tar Baby is not only a racist slur, and a euphamism regarding a sticky situation, but also regarded a most reprehensible inference to an unwanted child [of color].

Substituting “sticky situation” into Poilievre’s sentence doesn’t really fit, whereas “unwanted baby” would fit. It would still be an offensive sentence, but without anything to do with race. To use the idea of a baby whose paternity is being disputed in connection to policy is likely to cause offense, in any case. To inadvertently couple that to a term which has been used as a racial slur should make issuing an apology a no-brainer.
Stewart Smith

I find all this bashing of PP to be offensive. To say he is racist is almost as crazy as saying Tom Lukiwski is still homophobic.

james

Would that be the same Tom Lukiwski who promised to spend the rest of his life making amends for his homophobic comments? The one who *still* won’t take a meeting with GLBT reps in his riding?

Just wondering…

matt

This is disingenuous. Does noone have access to google and wikipedia? The term was popularized by the Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit tale and refers to a situation best avoided. It has also been a racist term. It also, apparently, is common in folklore ranging from Asia to the Cherokee. It's fairly obvious Mr. Poilevre was not trying to insult anyone.
PolJunkie

The fact of the matter is that this is not the first time that Poilievre has been caught making statements viewed as having racist connotations. Remember his outrageous comments about aboriginals needing to learn the value of hardwork?

If Harper is going to allow this idiot to speak for his government, he might want to consider some sensitivity training for his golden boy.

Poilievre is an embarrassment.