Stepping in "macaca"

With his Confederate-flag-draped past, Sen. George Allen is in trouble for using a term for monkeys -- and a racial slur elsewhere in the world -- to ridicule a dark-skinned man at a campaign rally.

By Michael Scherer

Read more: Politics, News, Virginia, George Allen, Michael Scherer, 2006 Elections

S.R. Sidarth (left) and George Allen

Aug. 16, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- On the campaign trail, Sen. George Allen can be a marvel to behold. He'll do nearly a half dozen stump speeches a day, shake a few hundred hands, and be ready for more. With his stiff boots and square sideburns, he comes off as easygoing. Down home. Macho. Red blooded. He tosses around the football and dips tobacco. The people love him in southern Virginia. He speaks their language.

He'll talk about the "real America," the one without homosexuals, movie moguls or Ivy League professors who want to ban guns and burn flags. He'll talk about an America where people have "values" and don't run away from the terrorists when the fighting gets tough. At his best, he begins to inhabit a symbolic fantasyland, becoming the lead cavalryman in a two-century-old culture war between North and South, city and countryside, the New York Times and the local church. He becomes a walking, talking American flag with a clear shot for the White House in 2008.

He is so good at it that he can get carried away. And like so many other talented people, he can sometimes lose control. That's when George Allen the senator is revealed as George Allen the man, the unruly jock who likes to act tough and intimidate -- maybe to a fault.

Last Friday, it all began innocently enough at another outdoor rally with a hundred or so people just a few miles from the Kentucky border. As is the habit of both campaigns, Allen's Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, had sent a 20-year-old volunteer named S.R. Sidarth to cover the campaign event with a camcorder. Sidarth, an Indian-American who was born and raised in Virginia, affirmed in an interview with Salon on Tuesday that he had introduced himself to Allen and his staff earlier last week. They all seemed to be getting along well, Sidarth thought at the time.

Then Allen took the microphone. "My friends, we are going to run this campaign on positive constructive ideas," Allen said, before pointing in the direction of Sidarth, who stood in the crowd, the only nonwhite person on the scene. "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is: He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere."

In three syllables, ma-ca-ca, Allen burst a hole in his front-running Senate campaign, and possibly sank his chances for a 2008 run at the White House. He uttered sounds from another time and place. No one seemed to know what he meant. Was the senator speaking Latin? Did Sidarth have a funny middle name? Five days later, Allen, whose campaign did not return Salon's calls Tuesday, continued to plead ignorance about letting loose the utterance, as if he had suddenly been taken over by an evil spirit and spoken in tongues. "I don't know what it means," Allen said of the word in an interview with the Washington Post on Monday.

But those three syllables do not often come together by accident. In fact, George Allen may well have been the only one at the rally whose family background would have introduced him to the word "macaca."

Though he doesn't like to use it, the senator's full name is George F. Allen. He gets the middle initial from his grandfather, Felix Lumbrosso, a French-Italian who was incarcerated by the Nazis during World War II. Felix raised Allen's mother, Etty, in Tunisia, a French protectorate in North Africa. As a child, Allen's grandparents lived near the family home, and Etty spoke five languages around the house. Allen makes no secret of his heritage on the campaign trail. "I have my grandfather's bloodlines," he said at a recent swing through a suburb of Richmond. "My grandfather is French-Italian. I have about one-sixteenth Spanish in me."

In North Africa, the word "macaca," often spelled "macaco" or "macaque," is far more than a string of random syllables. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word dates back to the mid-1600s, as a Flemish approximation of the Bantu word for monkey in the Congo and southern Gabon. The word migrated north, taking on all the racist connotations that followed African colonization. By the early 1800s, Jacko Maccacco, a famous fighting monkey, could be found on display in Westminster Pit, a notorious London arena for dog fights. The word had entered the common vernacular, and it eventually became a racist shorthand for blacks.

Today, the word is used mainly by two groups of people: scientists studying African and Asian primates, and bullies looking to insult others for the color of their skin. An online dictionary of ethnic slurs lists "macaque" as a French and Belgian word for black North Africans. In the Oxford Spanish Dictionary, "macaco" and "macaca" carry the colloquial meaning of "little devil," "Chinaman" and "ugly person." Anthropologists who study Brazilian street slang have noted that the police will call the local kids "macaco," or monkey, in reference to their African heritage. Robin E. Sheriff, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, has written that the purpose of it is to demonstrate "interpersonal domination" and signal "the historically entrenched structures on which that domination is based."

Next page: Did Allen in fact once dangle his sister over a railing at Niagara Falls?