In a video posted on the USA Today website, columnist DeWayne Wickham interviews Jackson State University professor Dr. Robert Luckett regarding former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s “tar babies” reference to President Barack Obama.
In the opinion piece, titled “What’s behind Haley Barbour’s ‘tar babies’ comment?,” Luckett tells Wickham that segregation and segregationists “didn’t just disappear” in Mississippi and the South after Jim Crow, but became embedded and “internalized” in conservatives regarding race and politics.
Racialized politics became “coded” in the South and nation, says Luckett, director of JSU’s Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience, so references regarding white power aren’t as overt as during the civil rights struggle but are understood by those using them.
Barbour, a Yazoo City native and ex-chairman of the Republican National Committee, made the “tar babies” remark during a Nov. 6 conference call with clients of his Washington-based BGR lobbying firm about the 2016 political landscape.
“There is no one who will run for president who will endorse Obama’s issues, because Obama’s issues are ‘tar babies,’” Barbour said, according to Politico, which was first to report the story.
The racial slur made headlines after it was revealed and Barbour later apologized, saying, “neither the context nor the connotation was intended to offend.”
But Luckett, an assistant professor in the Department of History and Philosophy, said Babour is “a very smart man” and it clearly has racial references. “It’s absolutely an offensive term” in Mississippi and elsewhere, says Lucket, and it has implications regarding racial power and white hegemony in this state and nation.
“He certainly knows the damage and the danger of using language like that,” says Luckett, “so it’s really not excusable even from a man who is now a former governor, no longer governor, but still has incredible power in this state.”
Barbour, governor from 2004 to 2008, was instrumental in the establishment of a world-class civil rights museum in this state, Luckett said, which might have itself been prompted as political cover due to another slip he made regarding the notorious Citizens Council of Mississippi.
Wickham interviewed Luckett while attending meetings on the JSU campus Nov. 9-12 with The Trotter Group, an organization of distinguished black journalists from around the country.
Comprised of top columnists and opinion makers, the Trotter Group gathers once a year to discuss current events and ensure important local, regional and national black stories are told.
See the video, at: https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/19192585/whats-behind-haley-barbours-tar-babies-comment/