Whoa, are we moving too slow?

I was disappointed last week to hear John McCain apologize for using the expression “tar baby.” Whatever happened to straight talk? Brother rabbit is the arch-typical trickster that appears in every cultural tradition throughout world history. Uncle Remus may be off color in today’s light, but like seeing the Marx brothers in blackface, it’s a reflection of its time, hardly hate speech.

Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus books 120 years ago, but this story came from West African mythology. Harris read it to Mark Twain’s children.
Mark Twain used the n-word in his books, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read them.

When Ralph Bakshi made a satire of Disney’s “Song of the South,” featuring Scatman Crothers and Barry White, it won praise from Richard Pryor and Spike Lee, but didn’t get distributed because theatre owners were afraid that Al Sharpton would picket them.

Back when folks complained about Clarence Darrow’s colorful language, he replied that
“there’s damn few enough words everybody understands.” Our language and culture are going down the tubes fast enough without us blue-lining it out of existence.