Ahhh, George Allen’s America. Where the borders are secure and dark-complected Americans are derided as monkeys.
What did Allen mean? We now know that not only is ‘macaque‘ a French language slur used to describe North Africans but Allen has a dizzyingly direct way of being familiar with the word. His mother is French Tunisian. Given that it would be amongst the French colonial population in North Africa that the word would have the greatest currency (even if only by familiarity rather than use), it seems close to impossible to believe that Allen didn’t become familiar with the word growing up.
Last night a friend asked me if it’s really believeable that Allen teed off on Sidarth with a racial epithet while he knew he was being videotaped. (My understanding at least is that it was Sidarth himself, the Indian-American Webb campaign volunteer, who was videotaping him as this happened.) I had a couple thoughts along these lines. No, I don’t think Allen would have done it intentionally, at least not in the narrow sense. He may be a closet racist (and there’s actually a pretty good case to be made (sub.req.) that he is, quite independent of this incident) but I don’t think he’s intentionally self-destructive.
What I do think, what I know from experience, is that all sorts of things come out of your mouth when you’re speaking extemporaneously. Ask anyone who’s spent much time on TV or radio. Not things that weren’t in your mind somewhere to say, but some things you might have thought better of if you had a few moments to consider it. If you’re not a racist, in most cases racial slurs don’t come pouring out or, like one conservative yacker, fantasies about sterilizing African-Americans.
I suspect that Allen started off with a pretty crude effort to make fun of Sidarth as an immigrant, an outsider, perhaps by snidely but in his mind jocularly mispronouncing his name. Who knows? But in the moment, when he was looking at this kid who was clearly getting on his nerves, and amongst a lilly white crowd, this is the word that came to his mind and he used it.
To me, that’s actually the most innocent explanation I can think of.
