[img]1640|right|Arthur Christopher Schaper||no_popup[/img]What do you imagine when you hear the names of former Congressman Allen West, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and radio host Larry Elder?
I see three strong, capable African-Americans of faith. They believe in free markets, in free enterprise, in free people.
Their liberal peers see sellouts, modern-day slaves reintegrating themselves into a plantation of white supremacy. Denigratingly, they call them Uncle Toms.
They disparage blacks who act white, who seem to accommodate a white narrative, who are willing to do what they are told to get ahead.
Rather than running a racket with race-baiting activists like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters, black conservatives like Mr. Elder, an attorney and the longtime KABC talk show host, hold black communities accountable for their thoughts, actions, and deeds. Then they expose the real source of societal rot among African-Americans, big government getting bigger, encouraging reliance on government handouts, assuring permanent impoverishment.
Reveals More About the Accuser
Still, the slur Uncle Tom stings. It connotes shameful self-loathing. In truth, men and women attacked with the term should be proud. Uncle Tom was the title character in American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s only successful work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. While Ms. Stowe explored the wider political, culture and eternal context of slavery in the ante-bellum era, she depicted the evils of the peculiar institution more concretely through the life of the slave Uncle Tom.
For greater appreciation, we must recognize the book’s significance rests on its historical impact, which highlights the respect worthy of the main character and all blacks. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the first book to treat slaves as sentient persons instead of in broad, offensive stereotypes. Or, in the words of Chief Justice Roger Taney, “A subordinate class of human beings with no rights that a white man was bound to respect.”
Ms. Stowe wrote the novel out of outrage toward Justice Taney’s majority opinion in the dreadful Dred Scott decision. The Court not only ruled slavery unconditionally constitutional, it struck down any limits to that inhumane perversion.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin exists because the author wanted to demonstrate that blacks have rights. They should be allowed to choose their own places in life.
Despite its historical importance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin still receives mixed literary reviews. The novel’s prevalent evangelical undercurrent offends modern critics. Others decry a “dark vein of intolerance” that distorts the depiction of blacks. They forget that Ms. Stowe’s seemingly superficial renderings were deeply controversial in her day. To readers of her time, such arguments as “a black man has a soul” and “he deserves as much respect as a white man,” were inflammatory. Even Abraham Lincoln used the n-word. During his 1858 campaign for the Senate, Mr. Lincoln affirmed his resistance to the equality of the races.
No doubt, liberals who deride their conservative black peers never have appreciated the novel named after the character. If they had, they would have discovered a strong central character who refused to confess the hiding place of two slaves. At the end of the book, two other slaves under the order of a wicked slave-master beat Tom to death for his willful civil disobedience.
In a sense, liberals are quite right when they denounce black conservatives as Uncle Toms.
Justice Thomas and Mr. Elder argue convincingly that a work ethic, a commitment to living free and responsibly, making the most of any situation in spite of racism, will allow a person to excel. When they relate fact-based truths, they are pilloried by liberal black activists. But these conservatives stand stoutly for the liberty of the black man, for his freedom from race-based resentment that seduces one to blame another for his ills.
Uncle Tom, in the Stowe novel, is an estimable figure who never caves on his convictions. He was beaten by other blacks for not doing what the white man told him to do.
Uncle Tom should be a moniker of honor. It could be a rallying cry for black conservatives who refuse to give in to the narratives of self-pity and race-baiting.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a teacher-turned-writer on topics both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A lifelong Southern California resident, he currently lives in Torrance.
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