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What’s in a name?

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

First, let me preface this by saying that I cringe every time I type the word Tarbabes.

OK here goes: Compton needs a new mascot.

Or, at least, it needs to get back to using a more formal variation of the school’s official mascot, the Tartar.

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I don’t know about anybody else, but every time I think of the word Tarbabes -- without referencing any research I did or information I got in an effort to find out what the heck a Tarbabe is -- the only thing that comes to mind is an unbidden image of somebody being tarred-and-feathered.

Now, what that says about me, I’m not quite sure. But frankly, I gotta think I’m not the only person who got the wrong -- really wrong -- first impression of what a Tarbabe is.

It’s one of those things where I just find the term vaguely offensive. Left uninformed, I may not be quite sure why, I’d just know that I do.

And given how uninformed some people are, whether by choice or circumstance, this would seem to be a veritable powder keg of political incorrectness that, to me, at least, seems worse than any reference to Indians, Warriors or Braves. At least those are all words that are, at least, noble-sounding, even if you have no idea of what they are, or of American history, or of anybody’s true intent in using such characters school mascots.

Of course, in the current climate of political correctness, even the Tartar -- a reference to Mongolian warriors -- might engender more protest than Tarbabes apparently ever has, given how such Indian-related mascots have all but disappeared, been changed or wiped out in an effort to minimize any perceived disrepect for Native Americans or wrong usage of such images.

Speaking of images, the Tarbabe is supposed to be a ‘baby Tartar,’ who wears a diaper and carries a big sword. (Yeah, a little too much information there, I know).

Anywy, since my one voice of protest over Tarbabes probably won’t carry very far, here’s a little history and perspective on the term.

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Maybe my pen will still be mightier than that Tarbabe’s sword, after all.

First, there is the Tar Baby story as told by the fictional character of Uncle Remus among the controversial post-slavery era writings of a white author and journalist, Joel Chandler Harris, in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In the folk tale, set and told among slaves in the Uncle Remus books, the character of Brer Fox makes a contraption called a Tar Baby that is covered in tar and turpentine in an attempt to catch another character, Brer Rabbit. Sure enough, the rabbit gets stuck to the tar, becoming seemingly easy prey for the fox, until the latter is outwitted when the rabbit prompts the fox to toss him in a briar patch, where the rabbit makes its escape.

That was just part of the search for an explanation of a Tarbabe, and apparently, not the right roots of Compton’s mascot.

I turned to a long-time school official for that.

I learned that Compton College and Compton High once were located on the same site, adjacent to each other in the same place the high school still stands now. And because the college’s mascot was the Tartar, the high school’s mascot was considered a baby Tartar, or, in a juxtaposition of those words, a Tartar baby.

OK, things are beginning to make a little more sense, right?

Well, Tarbabes, it turns out, is just a shortened, more casual slang variation of those terms, developed over the years of kids rooting for their teams.

‘The kids loved it, so we all just kind of got used to it, and decided to go with the flow,’ said Compton Athletic Director Maxine Kemp, who has been at the school for 41 years.

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That doesn’t mean the name has always been so beloved. There was one attempt, years ago, to officially change the school’s mascot to a Tartar Lion.

‘We tried, but all the alumni came out against that,’ Kemp said. ‘Everybody was just like, ‘What’s a Tartar Lion?’ And once people know the history, they just go, ‘Oh.’ My thing is, it’s not what people call you, it’s what you answer to.’

OK, then...

How about a Tartar?

That, by the way, is what the always careful and politically correct Southern Section calls the Compton mascot in its directory of member schools.

In this case, I’m with them. I still don’t see what’s wrong with that name.

-- Lauren Peterson

-- Image from www.profumo.it

-- Image from www.reddeerbookexchange.com

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