By Grace Acosta
You would assume that any politician - particularly a white man from the South - running for re-election would know better than to call a person of Indian descent “macaca,” and then add, “Welcome to America,” especially when S.R. Sidarth (alleged macaca) is pointing a video camera directly at him.
I don’t know what Sen. George Allen was thinking, but as a member of the short list of top GOP presidential hopefuls for 2008, one could argue that maybe he isn’t anymore.
Even more bizarre are the explanations that followed the incident. One is that Allen meant to say a version of “Mohawk,” referencing Sidarth’s hairstyle that really isn’t one - a Mohawk, that is. Another is that the senator made up the word, playing on the last two syllables, which sound like a childish expression, albeit crude but certainly not racist. I’d throw in that “macaca” sounds a bit like “Mufasa,” the dad of Simba in Disney’s “The Lion King,” whose majestic voice was that of James Earl Jones, one of America’s premier actors. So, when you think about it long enough, the term could actually be kind of complimentary.
“Macaca” can also mean either a genus of monkey or a French slur on North African blacks. Interestingly, Allen’s mother speaks five languages and was born in French Tunisia, and the senator himself does speak French. Those facts alone don’t prove that Allen is lying when he claims that he doesn’t know what the word “macaca” really means. However, it kind of reminds me of when Mel Gibson’s dad was caught making statements about the Holocaust being exaggerated, and Gibson rightly asserted that he should not be deemed a guilty-by-association anti-Semite just because his father says
a few nutty things every once in awhile. Then, the next thing you know, Gibson the Younger is yelling out in a drunken stupor on an L.A. highway that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. In Mel’s case, the apple doesn’t appear to have fallen very far from the bigoted tree.
However Allen fares, whether his constituency believes he is a closeted racist or not, I thought his lapse was a great news story because it’s rare that you see unscripted moments on anyone’s campaign trail nowadays. Speeches and interviews seem so prepackaged and rehearsed; it’s almost not worth listening because you have to wonder who is getting pandered to this time. When President Bush got caught at a G-8 summit luncheon using a four-letter word in a conversation with Tony Blair, it didn’t bother me. Heck, if I were in Bush’s shoes right now, I probably wouldn’t be using a lot of the Queen’s English either. Plus, he didn’t try to wiggle out of it, like his mom did in 1984 with her “rhymes with witch” comment about Geraldine Ferraro. Anyway, the truth comes out (hopefully!) sooner or later, and maybe it is to some extent provoked. But that’s how it is for all of us: Unless confronted, or let’s say inspired, by others, we’d never know who we really are.
