Pesky language
It has reached the point of comedy, this racism thing.
In the beginning, some DC politico got into trouble for using the word niggardly. Turns out, some ignorant twits just needed to buy a damn dictionary as it’s merely a synonym for stingy. Then, there was the time where some school official used the term yard-apes, and everyone called her a racist. Yard-ape, they said, was a derogatory term for black people. Well, it’s also a derogatory term used for children, which was her intent. Then I recall the time when someone asked if the phrase That’s Mighty White of You is racist. turns out, one definition of white is Honourable; square-dealing.
Now, comes the latest. It seems that George Allen called some Indian fellow a Macaca. I didn’t know what that was either. Turns out it’s a species of monkey. Kevin tells us:
Macaca, in case you did not know, is an old and well worn racial slur
Trouble is, when you hit that link, it says:
Macaque
(Belgium & France) a Negro (originally) or a person of North-African origin (more recently); derived from macaque monkeys
So, it 1) is spelled differently; 2) is slang in other countries; and 3) doesn’t reference Indians. The cool part, though, comes from the WAPO article which says:
Asked what macaca means, Mukherjee said: “What it means, I don’t know. But it’s going to cause him some grief.”
Muhkerjee called the comments hurtful but doesn’t have any idea what it means. Ah, feigned ignorant outrage. My favorite. Idiot.
Meanwhile, the Allen camp says it was a reference to Mohawk because this guy apparently has a mullet or some such.
Keep it moving people, nothing more to see here. Well, except partisan political hackery.
Update: In comments, kevin says:
First, the original article has the phonetic spelling. The phonetic spelling that is a common mispronounciation among racists.
And the racist certinaly seme to now what the word means:Here
And Allen speaks French and his mom is a French colonial from tunisia, where tword is a racist slur along the lines of n*gger.Any more excuses?
You be the judge.
Update 2: AC has video.
August 15th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Uncle
First, the original article has the phonetic spelling. The phonetic spelling that is a common mispronounciation among racists.
And the racist certinaly seme to now what the word means:Here
And Allen speaks French and his mom is a French colonial from tunisia, where tword is a racist slur along the lines of n*gger.
Any more excuses?
August 15th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
If they issue a correction, I’ll buy that
Yes, in other countries.
Ah, now you might be onto something. Should have made that clear in the post.
August 15th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Yeah, I was going to say that same thing. Our homegrown racists seem to be in the habit of throwing the word around the same way.
August 15th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
The haircut thing was a nonsense excuse—they said it was in reference to a “mohawk,” but the guy he said it to has nothing even REMOTELY resembling a mohawk, not even a fauxhawk. The man in question said something to the effect of “I don’t have a mohawk, I have a mullet,” but if you see a picture of him, you can see he does not even have a mullet. He has a normal short haircut.
My PERSONAL take on it was not that Allen was calling him a macaque, but that he was just trying to come up with a quick “foreign-sounding” name to mock him with—Makaka. Still unacceptable, of course, but pretty different from calling him the equivalent of a nigger.
What I think was more ignorant was telling him “Welcome to America.” The man was born and raised in Virgina. So I don’t think it was inherently racist to call him Makaka (unless he really was using it that way) but I think it WAS racist—or ignorantly stupid and offensive—to assume that anyone who is not white is a foreigner.
August 15th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
see, I sort of buy the whole Allen defense on “Welcome To America.” It wasn’t really a reference to his ethnicity so much as in the general spirit of the entire speech he gave – basically Jim Webb is a creature of washington, New York, and Hollywood all places that are most definitely not part of the America the average Virginia voter (or at least South Western Virginia voter) knows. heck it was either the previous or next line in the speech when he pointed out that Webb was actually in Hollywood looking for advice and campaign donations and could only send the indian fella.
May have come off bad, but I doubt people in the South west will care – or that Webb still has more than a snow balls chance in hell of winning (even though I plan on voting for him as a protest to an incompetent Republican Majority)
August 15th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Getting offended and calling people a racist are becoming national pastimes.
I don’t care if he called the guy a nigger, a homeboy, or a drunk Indian, or that it offended
the guy who was trailing him around or anyone else.
I get offended by seeing Muslims kidnap journalists and cut off their heads, blow up pizzarias full of Jewish teenagers, blow up subways and resorts, treat their women like goats, and glamorize sending their children to die for their screwed up causes.
I get offended by seeing modern Europe treat Jews not much better than they did in the 1930s and 1949s when other European nations shipped Jews back to Nazi Germany for imprsionment and extermination.
I get offended by seeing France treat Muslims and Africans like the South treated blacks in the first half of the last century and not hearing any complaints about it from the EU or the media.
I get offended by having to work for the Federal, state and local governments through most of July and having our friends on the other side of the aisle say that’s not enough.
Take that back to your piss ant liberal blogs and whine about it.
August 15th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Chris, what in the hell does any of that crap have to do with how our leaders conduct themselves in totally unrelated matters?
So because you don’t like Muslims nobody should care if GWB said “Gosh darn I sure do hate niggers”?! One has nothing to do with the other.
August 15th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
I don’t care that words offend you or anyone else.
I find splitting hairs as to the derivation of words to determine whether you, I or anyone else should be offended is ridiculous.
Looking for reasons to be offended over what someone else says is a cottage industry.
There are considerably more important things to talk about.
And I didn’t wake up and decide I don’t like Muslims, as you have concluded.
I don’t like or respect what I see a good many of them doing today.
I don’t care if someone is gay, straight, white, black, Indian, Christian, Jew, Muslim,Hindu, agnostic or atheist.
What people do, as opposed to what they say, is what gets my attention.
I hear a lot about Islam being the religion of peace, but I sure don’t see it, and the peaceful Muslim majority that I hear about seems to lose its voice whenever they have the chance to decry the barbarous acts of the violent minority of Muslims.
I had this discussion with a Muslim friend last week after listening to his rant about how Israel was responsible to Hezbollah’s killing 8 Israeli soldiers to take 2 prisoners.
I asked him to name one thing that an Arab or nonArab Muslim nation had ever done for the Palestinians, and he went silent. His answer was correct.
So, no, when I go home tonight and watch all of the trouble that Muslim fanaticism is inflicting on our nation and a good bit of the rest of the world, I find looking for reasons to find offense at what someone else says to be a little trivial.
August 15th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Mitt Romney got into a hullabaloo because he said “tar baby”. There are some people with the racism chip on their shoulder. If we keep revising the language what happens to the society? I would rather keep the language and ignore the fringe lunatics that try to use their faux outrage as a media tactic.
August 16th, 2006 at 9:35 am
I agree.
I think that it is pretty ridiculous to undertake a linguistic and etymological analsysis to determine whether someone is a racist.
BTW, I saw the film clip of Allen last night, and I also saw the “victim” on Good Morning America this morning behaving in a very offended manner and demanding an apology.
For a political operative whose job is to spend time in the enemy camp, he has extremely thin skin.
August 16th, 2006 at 10:50 am
Chris, then by your logic, nobody should be concerned about anything less than total nuclear armageddon. Why stop with Muslim extremists? After all, there are considerably more important things to talk about.
There are ALWAYS “more important” things to talk about, that doesn’t mean that nothing else matters or is important. It’s just a ridiculous argument.
I guess when my friend came over with blood streaming down her face and a broken nose because her ex-boyfriend beat her up and tried to rape her, I should have just said, “Oh come on, don’t be a such a pussy—there are people getting hacked to death with machetes in the Congo, this is trivial.”
Sure, from a perspective completely removed from any context or emotion, I would be objectively correct. But we don’t ACTUALLY conduct ourselves that way or contexualize everything that happens in our life in comparison to global issues—they’re two different things.
August 16th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Guav-
Why don’t you just migrate on over to Daily Kos?
I think that you will be very happy there.