The one thing that’s irked me all week about [tag]George Allen[/tag]’s “[tag]macaca[/tag]” flap is Allen’s choice of slurs. Sure, Allen has a race problem. And sure, Allen clearly hoped to demean and humiliate S.R. Sidarth with an ugly insult that the senator almost certainly knew quite well.
What’s more, it also seems clear that the slur was not just intended for Sidarth, but also for Allen’s all-white audience near the Kentucky border. As Eugene Robinson explained today, “Allen instinctively or subconsciously believed that drawing a line between his white audience and the darker, foreign-looking [tag]Sidarth[/tag] was at that moment good politics. It was a way of defining ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and the thing is that it worked, drawing a hearty laugh from the crowd.”
But therein lies the catch: chances are, no one in the audience had a clue what “macaca” meant. Of all the racial slurs Allen could have used, he picked the one foreign word that sent etymologists to their reference materials.
With this in mind, I think TNR’s Michelle Cottle touches on an important point that’s gone largely overlooked: Allen’s racism not only makes him irretrievably stupid, but also “such a hopeless fraud, such a transparent redneck wannabe, that he can’t even get his racial epithets right.”
What kind of hoity-toity, Frenchified, North African slur is “macaca“? Allen, whose maman is French Tunisian, may have heard this term bandied about in his childhood, perhaps so long ago that he hardly remembered its meaning when he reached into his mental quiver of spontaneous insults. But I guarantee you none of the rednecks I grew up with would have come up with something so obscure and cosmopolitan. They tended use simpler, more classically American terms.
But faux hickness is what Allen is all about: Despite the omnipresent cowboy boots and that gag-inducing dip habit of his, the wealthy California native is not some backward good ole boy. He just desperately wishes he were. And, while such cultural delusions may not be as absurd as, say, the scion of the preppiest political dynasty in modern U.S. history somehow passing himself off as an Average Joe Texan, they’re still pretty pathetic.
Good point. Allen isn’t even from the South (ironically, Sidarth is from Virginia and the senator isn’t), but he’s been trying to pretend otherwise for decades. The “macaca” controversy is just part of the pattern of him failing to pull it off.
And speaking of Allen, is there any chance this flap will undermine his campaign? I’ve assumed not, but there’s some evidence that [tag]Virginia[/tag]ns have noticed the story — and they’re not particularly happy about it.
A News-7 SurveyUSA poll found that a majority of Virginians (56%) had heard about Senator George Allen’s remarks to a campaign volunteer for his opponent, Jim [tag]Webb[/tag].
Of the 309 people who were familiar with the story, two-thirds (67%) thought it was inappropriate for Sen. [tag]Allen[/tag] to refer to the college student of Indian descent as “Macaca,” but the respondents were more evenly divided over whether the comments were a racial slur.
According to the poll, Allen’s overall approval rating is down to 47%, which is his lowest approval rating in over a year. Maybe this controversy is making a difference after all.