By Paul Weiser
The big insult among race-holding blacks is "Uncle Tom." If they understood its context and origin they might hesitate - or even aim it at the right people instead of their present targets.
In Harriet Beecher Stowe's blockbuster novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Uncle Tom is an older black man, a slave. He conforms to the image his master, Simon Legree, has of him in every way but one: he is deferential, courteous, "knows his place" as a slave and subsists on gruel in life and hope of Heaven. His only unconformity is that, where Legree thinks him cowardly, he bravely lets the master torture him to death rather than betray other slaves. Even Legree must have thought race/servile loyalty in character - conforming to the image.
Now, what is today's image of blacks among both their facilitators and their detractors? Not servility but surliness; not meekness but boastful violence; not hope of heaven but nihilistic vandalism: the pimp, the thug, the rapper portraying both. And there is no mutual loyalty: the stereotype ghetto black's victims, regardless of what he sings about killing policemen, are in fact black women, children, and other men.
Who valorizes this stereotype, as Legree did his servile Uncle Tom? Democrat politicians and liberal entertainment executives: it's what they expect, demand, fund, seek and portray. Who, then, are today's Uncle Toms, its exemplar conformists? The thug rappers, and actual thugs who emulate them in a circle of mutual portrayal. And who are the masters? Those to whose stereotype they conform.
Today's vicious nephew Toms (they have no fathers, only "uncles") are vain, violent paragons of secular evil just as Stowe's Uncle Tom was a paragon of Christian virtue. It is the unforgivable sin of entertainment executives and liberal politicians to have aided and abetted them in their stereotyped malice.
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