Uncle Tom Still Has Meaning
By
Mario Marcel Salas
How sweet it must be, like a slave owner eating a sweet chicken dinner on a plantation porch, being fanned by a slave, when white supremacists get a Black or Brown person to stand up in public and say they love Trump or wear his ugly red hat, all the while condemning other Blacks or Browns for opposing Trump. This is an example of the Tim Scotts of this country, and others, that suck up to white supremacy at the expense of the entire community. Nowadays they are called Traitors, Sambos, Uncle Toms, or Tio Tacos. This is how white supremacists get to justify their hatred by getting non-whites to go along with them on whatever racist journey they are planning. They use these political clowns to their advantage.
Who is on the list of modern-day sellouts (Uncle Toms, Sambos, Traitors)? Herschel Candace Owens, Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, Kanye West, and others. Each one of these individuals are considered brainwashed and whitewashed being programmed as feel-good puppets to help fuel the white supremacist agenda. Your skin folk ain’t always your kin folk! According to Online reports Uncle Tom refers to, “A minority’s strategy of coping with oppression from socially, culturally, or economically dominant groups involving suppression of aggressive feelings and even identification with the oppressor, leading to forced assimilation/acculturation of the cultural minority.”
Some argue that the “Uncle Tom” in the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe was a good man, but others say they are not talking about that “Uncle Tom.” According to a Grio report, “I think that it is updated, not outdated,” Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network said. He went on to say, “Updated in the since that it takes different forms because we’re in different social settings now, we have different options now.” On Al Sharpton’s show, Keeping It Real, Sharpton went into a long discussion on the modern meaning of the term “Uncle Tom,” who he really was historically, and what it can mean today. Sharpton gave a modern, “updated” definition for “Uncle Tom term. To be a Tom, Sharpton said, “An Uncle Tom is one that in a deliberate way, seeks personal favor or acceptance at the expense of his race and at the expense of what he or she knows to be right.” So, we still have some Uncle Toms running around here as Malcolm X once said! Malcolm X was clearly talking about loyalty to racists. He described his definition that Blacks who worked in the house, as opposed to those who worked in the master’s field, as the house slaves they were given privileges. So, to say we should not use the term anymore is a mistake. It still works!
According to Professor Cheryl Thompson, “Blackness in the western world as it has been articulated since our arrival in the 15th century has always been vested in this idea of us being two people: there’s the one type, and the other type, and not a lot of nuances in between.” Thompson goes further by saying that although the term originates from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, “In the novel, Uncle Tom is a character who is very loyal. He ends up at a particular plantation where he is treated brutally, and yet he’s still loyal. He befriends the plantation owner’s daughter, Eva, and is treated as her peer, even though there’s a huge age gap.” Hence, the Uncle Tom in the book was still a loyal fool! Still loyal! Ha! Saying he was just a good man is weak.
