Wickham: GOP shows disdain for blacks

JACKSON, Miss. — Not enough has been said about former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour's use of the words "tar babies" to describe the policies of Barack Obama, this nation's first black president.

When it got out that he had used the tainted language during a conference call with clients of his Washington-based consulting firm, Barbour, who once headed the Republican National Committee, quickly apologized. But his mea culpa was as mealy mouthed as his supporters' defense of his choice of words.

"If someone takes offense, I regret it. (But) neither the context nor the connotation was intended to offend," Barbour said. His verbal slushiness, used by other Republicans as well, was meant to draw attention to the dictionary description of "tar baby" as a sticky situation. But for many blacks, its use — like that of coon, spear chucker and jigaboo — is seen as a euphemism for the more venous word: "nigger."

But Barbour should, and probably does, know better.

In 2006, during Barbour's first term as Mississippi's chief executive, Mitt Romney — then the Republican governor of Massachusetts — stumbled into the national spotlight when he used "tar baby" to explain a troubled construction project in Boston to an audience in Iowa. Romney apologized.

The following year, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., used "tar baby" while discussing federal involvement in custody cases. He later said he was "wrong" to have used those words.

You have to believe that Barbour knew of the news media attention these gaffes got.

If he didn't, Barbour — one of this nation's leading Republicans — surely must have noticed during the 2011 federal debt ceiling standoff when Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., plunged the GOP deeper into the "tar baby" muck. During a Denver radio interview, Lamborn said being associated with Obama was like "touching a tar baby." Soon after, Lamborn issued a "heartfelt" apology for "using a term some find insensitive."

Despite this sick GOP history, Barbour apparently didn't think "tar baby" was an insensitive term until someone on that conference call outed him. The connotation of those words is obvious to a lot of people in Barbour's home state, according to Robert Luckett, director of the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience, at Jackson State University.

"Tar baby," Luckett said, is a term that has a long history of use in Mississippi, both in a "seemingly non-racialized way" and as a racial slur. "That language is very much loaded, and (Barbour) knows it," Luckett told me.

The use of such race-based double entendres seems to have increased in recent years as the GOP has become a political party with virtually no black support. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., said of the possibility that Obama might win the election: "That boy's finger does not need to be on the (nuclear) button."

While sparring with Al Sharpton on MSNBC in 2011, Pat Buchanan referred to Obama as "your boy." This characterization of the president drew a sharp rebuke for Sharpton, but Buchanan — a two-time GOP presidential candidate — offered no apology. Unlike other Republicans caught mouthing such insults to Obama, Buchanan holds no elected office — and has no chance of winning one. He sees no need to appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans.

For too many Republicans, their dislike of Obama is rooted in a visceral contempt for blacks. They won't admit it, but it is so deep-seated that they can't keep it contained. It's what I call the Jim Crow Jr., syndrome. In most public settings, these Republicans act as though they've actually accepted the end of the Jim Crow era.

But then there are those loose-lip moments when they take on Obama and allow the unreconstructed bigot inside them to rear its ugly head.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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