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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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I've seen it. Saw it as a kid, once in the theater I think. I remember a character named Tar Baby, a pretty pejorative term to the modern ear. "Bear Necessities" was a memorable song. (edit: a memorable song that had nothing to do with that film, thanks for the corrections, I got it. Please insert Zip a dee doo dah)

Isn't Song of the South a Brer Rabbit retelling?

I'm not sure how you tell Brer Rabbit without the story with the tar baby. It's the most famous Brer Rabbit story by a wide margin, isn't it? When I read Brer Rabbit when I was a small child, I genuinely didn't realise it had any connection to African-Americans at all. It wasn't until I was in my 20s, in an unrelated context, that I discovered the stories that had delighted young-Olive came out of an African-American folk tradition. At the time, then, I took the story about the tar baby entirely at face value - it was an effigy made of tar and dressed up that Brer Rabbit genuinely mistook for a child, hit, got stuck on the tar, and thereby was trapped for Brer Fox.

Wiki tells me that the story predates any use of 'tar baby' as a slur, so... I don't know, it seems silly, to me. It is actually a story about a baby made of tar, and nothing in the story has anything to do with race.

Maybe I'm naive here, but... there is just genuinely nothing in the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby that involves race. It's a pretty classic trickster archetype story - the fox traps the rabbit, and the rabbit cleverly tricks his way out of it.

'Bear Necessities', incidentally, is from The Jungle Book. Nothing to do with Song of the South. I thought the famous ear worm from Song of the South was 'Zip-a-dee-doo-da'?

I'm not sure how you tell Brer Rabbit without the story with the tar baby. It's the most famous Brer Rabbit story by a wide margin, isn't it?

I would guess it's similar in familiarity to the briar patch story.

It is the briar patch story. The tar baby is how Brer Rabbit was captured - "please don't throw me in the briar patch!" was the trick he used to escape.

Enough B'rer Rabbit stories start with him escaping capture that you sometimes see it separated from the Tar Baby story, and it's probably a little more famous because it's been transposed to so many other settings and works where the tar-mix wouldn't. But at least in the Uncle Remus stories version, yeah, it's very explicitly two separate halves of the same incident (cw: it's... a 1880s Southern work).

Correct on the song. My mistake.

As for Tar baby, I haven't checked the etymology of when it came to be considered a (rather dated now) slur, but as early as the 70s.

(edit: spelling)

Bear Necessities is Jungle Book not Song of the South.

You're right! I hang my head in shame.

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