The Complicated Origins of a Racial Slur.
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.
My new book, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor, tracks this dramatic transformation of Uncle Tom from Stowe’s heroic martyr to a powerful slur. Uncle Tom is arguably the most controversial character in American history. For many years, scholars have assumed that Stowe’s Christ-like hero became a submissive old fool because of minstrel stage conventions in the countless, wildly popular dramatic adaptations of Stowe’s novel. But historical records of how these dramas were received reveal a different story. Even in the early twentieth century, black audiences saw many of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramas as works with radical political potential. And white southerners often organized against the staging of these adaptations—and later film adaptations—banning them from their towns.
It was not in the theater but in the black political debates of the 1910s that “Uncle Tom” took on negative connotations. There, the figure encapsulated a traumatic slavery past from which younger generations struggled mightily to distance themselves. In a context of unjust and inhumane structures of oppression, this transformation in meaning was shaped by demographic, educational, cultural, and political shifts: a younger generation of New Negroes was increasingly assertive in its resistance to Jim Crow as well as more disparaging of the “old Negroes” who came before them. As Jim Crow hardened restrictions on black life, “Uncle Tom”—once a generic term in the American vernacular for Southern blacks born under slavery—became an epithet used to criticize any black person, representation, or political strategy perceived as keeping the race from moving forward. Over time, just about every powerful black man, and even a few women, have been called Uncle Toms.
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.
The story of Uncle Tom’s transformation tells us why a nineteenth-century literary character would be invoked in a contemporary criticism of Kanye West’s politics; it also helps us to understand where West’s controversial and historically incorrect contentions about slavery come from in the first place. Uncle Tom’s cultural transformation resulted from his symbolism of a traumatic collective history that many people experienced as degrading, humiliating, and shameful. His name became a slur because of a deep fear that the legacy of slavery was too powerful and too close.
West’s refusal to accept the historical consensus that slavery was compulsory, and often violently so, echoes a perspective that has threaded through black politics since long before Donald Trump, a perspective that surfaces in the history of the slur itself. For more than a century, some black leaders have staked their claims by deriding past or competing leaders as Uncle Toms complicit with white systems of oppression. In doing so, they’ve blamed racial injustices on those who did not resist as much as they could and should have. This rhetorical tactic serves the complex psychological purpose of allowing irrational yet deeply held feelings of shame about the past to be translated into blame. Historically, shame about slavery has provoked some black Americans to view spirituals, and later the blues, as a cultural remnant that should be left behind. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, a firm believer in the importance of preserving the memory and cultural traditions of slavery, described the period of the race’s enslavement as “The Valley of Humiliation” in his historical pageant, The Star of Ethiopia (1911).
West’s refusal to accept the historical consensus that slavery was compulsory, and often violently so, echoes a perspective that has threaded through black politics since long before Donald Trump, a perspective that surfaces in the history of the slur itself.
Shame over oppression, which Above the Law’s Elie Mystal aptly points out has parallels in the responses of some young Jews to the Holocaust and some Japanese-Americans to internment, is more universal and common than we often assume. It is the reason why other marginalized groups have adapted the Uncle Tom figure for their own policing of group allegiance: “Aunt Tom” for feminists, “Uncle Tomahawk” for Native Americans, “Uncle Chan” for Asian Americans.
West’s critics have rightly condemned him for his fundamentally incorrect interpretation of American history, pointing out that his comments about slavery not only drastically underestimate the vicious power of the institution, but worse, imply that African Americans were enslaved through some fault of their own. West’s “Make American Great Again” hat and denial of the true nature of slavery may make him an Uncle Tom according to the contemporary use of the term, but they are also evidence of the shame that the history of the Uncle Tom slur reveals. In his TMZ interview, West defended his support of Donald Trump as an expression of “free thought.” He suggested that when African-Americans see constraints in their blackness, they are voluntarily embracing “mental imprisonment.” Yet his denial of the forced oppression of slavery suggests that he, too, carries the weight of that past.
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