Now that George Allen is running for his old Senate seat, you're going to be hearing the word "macaca" all over again.
This is one of those political scandals that REALLY puzzles me. I mean, you pretty much have to believe one of two highly implausible stories.
The first story is that Sen. Allen made up a gibberish nickname for an opposition researcher who had been following him around, videotaping everything he said, waiting for him to screw up. (Courtly southern gentleman that he is, the good senator ultimately obliged.) And the gibberish nickname he came up with was "macaca."
Okay, so, maybe I'm the weird one here, but I have never, ever in my life made up a gibberish nickname for anyone, nor have I ever heard of anyone making up a gibberish nickname for someone. That's because the whole point of a nickname is that it has some meaning. You don't just say to a friend (or an enemy) "I think I'll call you 'sildafez' from now on...no reason in particular. I just scrambled together some letters and came up with that. Hope you like it, because that's your new handle."
Ridiculous, right?
The alternative, though, is that Allen specifically chose "macaca" because the oppo researcher was an Indian American (i.e., a kid with ancestors in India), and, in the words of Wikipedia, "'macaca' is a pejorative epithet used by francophone colonialists in Central Africa's Belgian Congo for the native population."
Obvious place to begin on this one: The researcher was Indian American, not Belgian Congolese American; Allen is not a francophone colonialist; and it's no longer the 1900s.
Beyond that, the point of using a racial epithet is that people KNOW it's an epithet. It causes pain because its pejorative connation is understood. Recognizing that, what good does dropping a "macaca" bomb do you?
The supposed smoking gun here, of course, is that Allen's mother is of French Tunisian descent (Tunisia/Congo; potato/potahto). So, naturally, she must have learned the word "macaca" as a child, must have used it freely around George when he was a boy, and must have modeled the acceptability of using the term to describe anyone with dark skin. And of course, George picked up the word and just never stopped using it...because nobody ever taught him that it was bad or wrong, and because he never learned any other words you could use to put down someone different from you.
This is pretty plausible to me. After all, I refer to people I don't like as "Jackeens." Just to lay out the whole chain of causation here, my mom's ancestors were from rural Ireland, and people in rural Ireland used to refer to Dubliners as "Jackeens" ("city slickers," very roughly). And yeah, I use the word to this day, even though across the entirety of the English-speaking world, only a handful of professors at Trinity College know what it means, even though I'm the ONLY guy who still uses the word, and even though my usage of it is at odds with its historical meaning. It all makes perfect sense, right?
As I said, two competing--and utterly implausible--explanations. The mystery remains.
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