What were two Republicans thinking, calling Obama 'tar baby' and 'boy'?

Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn of Colorado and commentator Pat Buchanan, a former candidate for the presidency of the United States both apologized on August 3rd to using racially charged language when referring to President Obama.

The specter of two national Republican leaders apologizing for calling President Obama respectively a “tar baby” and “boy” gave more credibility to the rising realization that underneath much of the criticism of the President and his policies lurks the beast of racism.

In the week prior to his apology while on a Denver talk radio show, Congressman Lamborn said, “Even if some people say, “Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,” they will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”

The term tar baby comes from the 19th century Uncle Remus stories, where B’rer Fox uses a doll made of a lump of tar to trap B’rer Rabbit, who gets more stuck the more he punches and kicks the doll tar baby. From that characterization of the baby doll and in more recent parlance, tar baby has become widely regarded as a racial slur that white Americans use against black Americans.

Other Republican notables, including Senator John McCain of Arizona and Republican candidate for President in 2007 and former Massachusetts Governor, Republican candidate for President in 2011 have in recent years apologized for using the phrase “tar baby,” although in reference to various government policies and projects, not a black man per se.

And then on Tuesday night, August 2nd, former GOP presidential candidate and now MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan, in a televised argument with the Reverend Al Sharpton, referred to President Obama as “your boy.”

“My what?!” the Reverend Sharpton shouted back. “My President, Barack Obama? What did you say?

Mr. Buchanan tried to crawl away from the racial slur he had just uttered by lamely stating that he was just using a boxing analogy, stating that the President was “your boy in the ring.”

Congressman Lamborn, who apologized to the President in a letter, said in a separate statement last Wednesday that he should not have used a term “that some find insensitive” and that he meant to criticize presidential policies that have “created an economic quagmire for the nation and which are responsible for the dismal economic conditions our country faces.”

“Some folks took what I said as some kind of slur,” Mr. Buchanan said on Wednesday, “None was meant, none was intended, none was delivered.”

Nevertheless, these moments of self exposure as to what the speaker really thinks are illuminating bits of evidence that underscores what many Americans are coming to realize is an essentially racist view of President Obama in not only America’s crazed fringe right but amongst simply conservative Republicans and their Tea Party allies as well. As for those conservatives and Tea Party members who happen to be black, and join in with their hateful fellow racists, or show up at an Arizona town hall meeting with an M-16 strapped to their back, we all know what a kapos is. Inside the concentration camps there were Jewish police, prisoners known as kapos. In return for special privileges, kapos forced other Jews to obey Nazi orders, just as the Jewish police had done in the ghettos. Some of you may cringe at the analogy, I offer no apologies. I think the comparison is appropriate and historically correct.

Given that language is the primary purveyor of people’s thoughts, as well as the fact that language use is often unconscious, “Even a slip of the tongue can reflect the kind of prevalence of racism that still exists in our culture,” says Shawn Parry-Giles, director of the Center for Political Communications and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland in College Park. “Progressives would say it is part of a larger conspiracy to target voters to use Obama’s race as a means to help defeat him.”

For especially conservative critics of the President, these moments of self exposure demonstrate how the shifting sands of language and perception have become intensified in the not nearly post racial Obama era, when some attempts to criticize the President have far exceeded the boundaries of political correctness and civility.

Republicans and their supporters like to claim that much of the fuss is a result of Democrats lacking a sense of humor, of being too sensitive and of not understanding satire. The reality however is that deep down (and for some not so deep down) a majority of Republicans have not and will not forgive Barack Obama for daring to be a black man sitting in the White House as President of the United States of America.