Stanford University Press Blog

Is Kanye West an Uncle Tom?

The Complicated Origins of a Racial Slur.

By ADENA SPINGARN

Scene from an early twentieth-century stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Kanye West’s splashy recent political turn to the right—posing in a “Make America Great Again” hat, then defending that action and claiming that 400 years of slavery must have been a “choice”—disappointed many of his friends and fans. Some, like musician John Legend, gently urged West to rethink his political support of a president who has emboldened white supremacists. Others, including rapper Snoop Dogg and English former footballer Stan Collymore, have publicly castigated him as an Uncle Tom who has used his fame and power to promote people and ideologies that hurt the black community.

Calling someone an Uncle Tom is perhaps the ultimate black-on-black insult, but the reference originated with a character very different from the conniving race traitor it invokes today. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Uncle Tom is a heroic martyr, humble before God but confident in himself and the rightness of his moral convictions. When the brutal slave owner Simon Legree commands Tom to whip an enslaved woman, Tom knows that he will be beaten if he refuses to do so, but he declines anyway, insisting that whipping the woman would not be right. Later, in a chapter entitled “The Martyr,” Legree commands Tom to reveal the whereabouts of two recently escaped slaves. Tom knows their escape plan, but he once again refuses. This time, his punishment is being beaten to death. 

SCIENCE FAKE AND REAL

On Enlightenment scientists and the forgotten role of imagination.

by TITA CHICO

March for Science in San Francisco. Photo by Steve Rapport, CCBY2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Headlines today pop with accusations that traditional sources of knowledge and even experts are biased, ideological, and unreliable. Accusations of “fake science” have become particularly commonplace. The Heritage Foundation think tank reports on the pervasiveness of fake science, laying the blame on scientists themselves. In their view, climate change isn’t caused by humans, and scientists are mere lackeys for a liberal political agenda. In response, practicing scientists and advocates have responded vociferously: the 2017 earth Day “March for Science” took place not only in Washington DC, but in more than 600 cities worldwide. The Union of Concerned Scientists has reached out through panels, such as the one on “Defending Science and Scientific Integrity ” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference.

As long as there has been modern science, there have been hoaxes. In 1726, Mary Toft, an illiterate English servant in Surrey, claimed to have given birth to dead animal parts and scores of rabbits, a wonder made all the more persuasive by the authorization of the royal anatomist, Nathaniel St. André. She was brought to London and revealed as a fraud. A year earlier, the physician Johann Beringer, Chair of Natural History at the University of Würzburg and chief physician to the city’s Prince Bishop, was duped into believing that 2000 pieces of limestone in the shape of animals, some engraved with the name of God, were fossils or were of divine origin fossils. They were really the prank of a jealous colleague.