So, what was up with that “macaca” jive anyway?

It is a real sign of hope that there is more to be lost than gained from overt racism (at least) in American politics, even in Dixieland. Former senator George Allen's foot-in-mouth routine brought to light a particularly anachronistic epithet. India's IBN shed some light, Nov. 9—although we caught a small inaccuracy:

S R Sidarth deserves a medal from the Democratic Party. S R Sidarth who? Sidarth is the young volunteer who trailed Republican Senator from Virginia George Allen for the campaign of his challenger, Democrat Jim Webb. Sidarth, who was born in Fairfax, Virginia, videotaped Allen's campaign. He was doing that in August when Allen still enjoyed a substantial lead over Webb, when the Republican singled Sidarth out and called him a 'macaca'. You can watch that video at — or here:


Now, Macaca was originally used by Belgian colonizers of the Congo to describe the native. The word is derived from the macaque monkeys and was obviously a racial slur. Actually, for lovers of comics, Captain Haddock uses that term in Tintin in the Congo.

Allen apologized to Sidarth, gave interviews to the Indian-American media, but he couldn't recover.

Sidarth is symbolic of the strong political participation among second generation Indian-Americans who are present at the grassroots at virtually every campaign.

In fact, during these elections, the leading Indian-American candidates at the federal or state level were second genners like Bobby Jindal, Raj Bhakta, AJ Sekhon and Satveer Chaudhary.

They have been proactive and given a political face to a community that is still tiny is demographic terms.

And they act quite unlike their seniors, first generation Indian-Americans – doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, hoteliers, convenience store owners, other professionals – who have made their millions and donate generously to the Democrats and Republicans in exchange for photo-ops and the ability to name-drop. Very few have leveraged the cash into real influence. Even within the Bush Administration, the changemakers have been the young Indian-American staffers who populate Washington DC.

Unfortunately, the older brigade would also rather spent ten of thousands of dollars on a political notable who gives them a smile and a pat on the back rather than supporting candidates from within their community who have a chance at the elections. Raj Bhakta is one example of how that works. This Pennsylvania Republican who contested for the House of Representatives had an opportunity to double the number of Indian-Americans in the Congress to two. He received support from some Indian-Americans like Vikram Chatwal, another second genner and a hardcore Democrat whose family is close to the Clintons. But when Bhakta, who is half-Gujarati, went to a convention of Indian motel owners to raise funds, he was ignored.

But, expect to see a lot more of these young political hopefuls. Many of them are working closely with Democratic presidential hopefuls such a Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Then there's Ro, a lawyer who grew up in Pennsylvania. In 2004, a novice, Ro Khanna took on veteran Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos in California during the party's primary. He lost but made an impact. He is now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee's Indian American Leadership Council. He could be a Congressman in 2008 or 2010 either when Lantos retires or if a district is gerrymandered to his advantage. Gerrymandering is a peculiarly American act of redrawing the contours of a district to the political benefit of a particular party. Of course, you need to be in power to get that done. And that promise of gerrymandering apparently came from a certain Democrat called Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi will be the next Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

This certainly reveals a lot about the atrocious legacy of European colonialism and its genetic links to good ol' American redneck racism. But it is very unlikely that a cracker like George Allen ever read the very European Tintin series—and we doubt the Tintin connection altogether. Even the most amateur Tintinologist knows that Tintin in the Congo came out in 1931, while the habitually drunk and epithet-slinging Captain Haddock did not even enter the series until the release of The Crab with the Golden Claws a full ten years later. And while Tintin in the Congo was a blatantly racist piece of propaganda for Belgian colonialism (so much so that Tintin creator Hergé later came to regret having produced it), it does not use the word "macaca"—or at least the English translation (released only posthumously as a special collector's edition, as Hergé tried to have the work supressed) does not. And while Captain Haddock's litany of colorful insults include plenty of racist constructions (coconut, anthracite, Zapotec, etc.), he never spouted "macaca" at anyone—again, at least never in the English translations. We think IBN's Anirudh Bhattacharyya got this angle from the notoriously inaccurate Wikipedia.

See our last post on the media culture wars.

  1. Alleged Slur Casts Spotlight On Senator’s (Jewish?) Roots’s-jewis/

    E.J. Kessler | Fri. Aug 25, 2006
    When Senator George Allen of Virginia used a racial slur for dark-skinned North Africans, “macaca,” during a recent encounter with a young Indian American cameraman from his opponent’s campaign, many wondered where he had learned the word.

    Macaca means “monkey,” but Allen’s campaign insisted that the word was made up, an inside joke on the young man’s hairstyle. But some commentators noted that Allen’s mother is “French Tunisian,” speculating that Allen, who speaks French, had picked up the epithet from her. (Allen’s late father was famed Washington Redskins football coach George Allen.)

    Allen’s mother, Henriette (Etty), whose maiden name was Lumbroso, is indeed Francophone and Tunisian born, a heritage that forms a romantic theme in “Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter” the memoir of Allen family life written by Allen’s sister Jennifer. What’s more, it is likely that she’s Jewish by birth, although no acknowledgment of that heritage appears in the memoir.

    Allen’s campaign spokesman, Bill Bozin, did not return several detailed messages, left over two days, that asked what the senator and his family know about his mother’s heritage.

    Depending on what additional information comes out on the matter, the controversy could end up resurrecting a dominant theme of the Democratic primaries four years ago, when it turned out that no fewer than four presidential hopefuls had significant Jewish ties: Senator Joseph Lieberman was an Orthodox Jew; Senator John Kerry was descended from Jews and had a brother who converted to Judaism; former general Wesley Clark had a Jewish father; Howard Dean was married to a Jewish woman and raised Jewish children.

    For now, some political analysts are predicting that the macaca flap could sink what until now had been viewed widely in Washington circles as Allen’s strong chance of emerging in 2008 as the conservative standard-bearer in the race for the GOP presidential nomination. And judging from recent polls, it is putting a crimp in what was supposed to be a handy re-election bid in Virginia.

    The incident is not the first time that Allen has faced criticism for supposed racial insensitivity. The New Republic recently reported that when he was a high school student, the senator, a native Californian, wore a Confederate flag lapel pin; it further reported that even as an adult, Allen sometimes displayed the Confederate flag as part of a flag collection. In the 1980s, he stirred ire by opposing the establishment in Virginia of Martin Luther King Day. But Allen points to more recent efforts, such as a push to increase funds for Virginia’s historically black colleges, as evidence that he seeks to better race relations.



    “If it was discovered that Allen knew this family history, but attempted to keep it under wraps for whatever reason, it could do great harm to any political campaign,” Mercurio wrote in an e-mail. “He’d face serious questions, in the wake of the Macaca incident and his history with the Confederate flag, of whether he’s both racially prejudiced and anti-semitic. Given the intensely pro-Israel sentiment that exists in this country today, that could be a huge political liability — but on the other hand, if this is something he discovers and promptly reveals about himself, and does so with a sense of pride in his family history, I don’t think he’d face much backlash at all.”

    According to information compiled from several Sephardic genealogical Web sites, the Lumbroso family originated in Portugal but made its way to Livorno, or Leghorn, in Italy after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. “Lumbroso” means “luminous” and is a translation of the Hebrew word “nehora.”

    Allen is aware of at least the Italian connection, and trumpets it. On the campaign trail recently, according to the online journal Salon, Allen said: “I have my grandfather’s bloodlines. My grandfather is French-Italian. I have about one-sixteenth Spanish in me.”


    Among the most famous members of the family, Malka said, was Itzhak Lumbroso, an 18th-century rabbi and rabbinic judge who wrote a commentary on the Talmud, “Seed of Isaac,” that was the first book printed in Hebrew in Tunis.

    If Allen wants to research his heritage, there are many resources available. The marriage contracts of many Lumbrosos, for example, can be found in historical compendia including “Registres Matrimoniaux de la Communaute Juive Portugaise de Tunis, XVIII-XIX siecles.”

    Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows users to draft and edit the entries, takes Allen’s mother’s Judaism as a given, saying that “Henrietta Lumbroso was a Jewish immigrant of Tunisian/Italian/French background.”

    Malka, the Sephardic expert, said, “Interfaith marriage and/or baptism was extremely rare among the Jews of Tunisia in the early 20th century — mainly because the sense of being Jewish was very strong and it would have been greatly frowned on.”

    There are intimations in Jennifer Allen’s book of the family’s Jewish connection. She writes that when the Germans invaded North Africa during World War II, “the Nazis took away my mother’s father,” although he escaped from harm.

    Senator Allen told the Richmond Times Dispatch in 2000 that his grandfather was imprisoned because “he sympathized with the Free French and the Allies and coveted the concepts of freedom of thought, expression, religious belief and enterprise.”

    In another of the book’s anecdotes, George Allen Sr., a practicing Roman Catholic, encounters problems when he wants to marry his fiancee, Etty, in a Catholic church.

    “The priest said he would marry them only if Mom agreed to raise as Catholic any children the marriage might produce,” Jennifer Allen wrote. “As a young woman, my mother had an ‘incident’ with a priest in Tunis, so Mom said ‘Over my dead body’ to the priest. My mother and father were married by a justice of the peace in a Jewish friend’s home with two witnesses.”

    Why was there any question as to whether Etty Allen would raise the family Catholic, unless she herself wasn’t baptized in the faith?

    An e-mail message to Jennifer Allen came back with an automated reply saying that she was on vacation and not reading her messages.

    Senator Allen has been addressing the recent controversy. He issued a statement to CNN in which he apologized to “anyone who may have [been] offended by the misinterpretation of my remarks” and said the jibe at the cameraman “was in no way intended to be racially derogatory.” The young man, S.R. Sidarth, has said that he perceived the name as a racial comment.

    Allen said in the statement that another comment he made to the young man — “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia” — was actually directed at his Democratic opponent, James Webb.

    “In singling out the Webb campaign’s cameraman, I was trying to make the point that Jim Webb had never been to that part of Virginia — and I encouraged him to bring the tape back to Jim and welcome him to the real world of Virginia and America, outside the Beltway, where he has rarely visited,” Allen said.

    Despite Allen’s explanations, the macaca episode appears to have damaged him. Before the incident, polls had the senator leading Webb by about 19 percentage points; two polls taken afterward show him up by only three to five points.

    Fri. Aug 25, 2006

  2. hmm…
    Someone on French Wikipedia has gone thru an awful lot of trouble to list all of Haddock’s insults:

    to quote:


    Macchabée d’eau de vaisselle, macaque, macrocéphale, malappris, malotru, mamelouk, marchand de guano, marchand de tapis, marin d’eau douce, marmotte, mégacycle, mégalomane, mercanti, mercenaire, mérinos, mérinos mal peigné, manœuvre à la graisse de hérisson, mille sabords, mille millions de mille milliards de tonnerre de Brest (les dérivés sont multiples), misérable, mitrailleur à bavette, mouchard, moujik, moule à gaufres, moussaillon, mufle, Mussolini de carnaval, mé-jambon rien.

    Two points — perhaps not everything made it into English from the original French. Also, I have a vague memory of the word Macaca from somewhere, and I wonder if it came from a Tintin book. What’s the one where some baddie, a dr. who injects people with truth serum (which backfires) is amused by a monkey’s big nose on an island somewhere, thinking it resembles Rastapopulus — was that a macaque?

    1. You may be on to something….
      Yes, it appears some of the Captain’s insults were rendered rather differently in translation. For instance, I’m pretty sure Mussolini de carnaval was rendered as “fancy-dress fascist.” Some of the racist/xenophobic ones were left intact (Zapotec, Mamluk, Bashi-Bazouk), but this list would indicate that some simply irresistable (if off-color) ones were mysteriously dropped (e.g. interplanetary zouave). Certainly some of the African-American criminals in Tintin in America became white in the English version, although this was more a capitualtion to American racism than political correctitude—the concern was less that African-Americans were being portrayed unfavorably than that American audiences would object to race-mixing! Nonetheless, it is possible that translaters considered “macaca” beyond the pale.

      The episode you are thinking of is in Flight 714, and the monkey was a proboscis (hence the resemblance to large-nosed villain Rastapopulous), not a macaque.

      I think we are sending the geek-meter into tilt here, but at least we aren’t alone.