Keeping blacks in check

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views September 23, 2002]

In the Guardian (3/30/02), black journalist Gary Younge reflects on the strange transformations of the term "Uncle Tom." He claims the expression has less to do with the original Harriet Beecher Stowe character than with a desire of blacks to control fellow blacks. In an excerpt, he writes:

The fictitious Tom's actual attributes and flaws soon became incidental. Black America had another use for him in real life. He was to represent the lackey, the moderate, the conciliator and the sell-out. If Stowe had not invented him, African-Americans would have had to. . . . Black radical Malcolm X once said: "Just as the slavemaster in that day used Uncle Tom to keep the field negroes in check, he was the same old slavemaster who today has negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms--20th-century Uncle Toms--to keep you and me in check." But the truth is it was the term "Uncle Tom" itself that was really designed to keep black people in check. As a defensive response to racism, those who use it seek to enforce allegiance and cast out dissent purely on grounds of race.

Black people are not alone in this desire to police their borders in this way. Many cultures that feel on some level embattled will attempt to proscribe behaviour deemed equal to betrayal. That is how Zionist Jews get to brand anti-Zionist Jews "self- haters"--"They're people of Jewish extraction who've had most of the Jewishness extracted," one academic explained to me recently. Similarly, those not deemed to be sufficiently Irish become "West Brits."

Malcolm X was not talking about Uncle Tom the character but Uncle Tom the construct. The Tom of the novel had preferred to die than oversee his fellow slaves. But to Malcolm X, and many others before and since, Uncle Tom was the man preaching reform when others were preaching revolution; the one who advocated peace instead of war; the person who urged others to stay at home instead of taking to the streets; the leader who preached racial equality instead of Black Power.

In short, Uncle Tom is whoever you want him to be. Arbitrary in application--who decides who is an Uncle Tom and on what basis?--and prohibitive in nature, it exemplifies the very limits of race-thinking. Even though it is an insult that falls most readily from the lips of self-avowed radicals, it is in fact a reactionary form of psychological and behavioural racial policing within black communities.

Here is Younge's article on this site.

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