Recently I started doing a little research into the usage of the word "Uncle Tom". I read Harriet Beecher Stowe's book about 37 years ago and needed to refresh my knowledge after hearing an NPR story on the term. Here is a partial transcript of that discussion:
MARTIN: What is it that African-Americans hate about this story?
Prof. TURNER: Many African-Americans don't hate the real story that Stowe wrote. The Uncle Tom character that she gives us is extraordinarily Christian. The climax of the story really comes when Uncle Tom is asked to reveal where two slave women are hiding, who had been sexually abused by their master. And he refuses. Knowing that he is going to be beaten to death, he refused to say where they are. And African-Americans who have read the novel can appreciate what kind of heroism that took for a black man to sign away his life to save two black women.
Unfortunately, the stage depictions don't include that part of the story. They grossly distort Uncle Tom into an older man than he is in the novel, a man whose English is poor, a man who will do quite the opposite, who will sell out any black man if it will curry the favor of a white employer, a white master, a white mistress. It's that distorted character that is so objectionable to African-Americans.
MARTIN: How did that happen? It is quite remarkable that this is a book which was intended to, and in many ways succeeded in revealing to people who were not aware or chose not to pay attention to the horrors of slavery, I mean, the unimaginable brutality, the exploitation of women, the physical violence, all of that. It was meant to reveal this, and somehow or other this character, who is meant to be very brave and an example of, you know, Christian forbearance, turned into this - the sell-out. How did that happen?
Prof. TURNER: The producers of the early stage shows didn't think that they could attract an audience for the Uncle Tom as he was depicted by Stowe. They couldn't sell tickets to a theatrical production, the climax which would have been this man dying, rather than the revealing the whereabouts of these women.
They could sell tickets, as they had been successful by showing blacks in minstrel depictions, showing them liking to dance more than they liked to work, showing their insensitivity to each other, showing their willingness to tell the master or mistress what he or she wanted to hear. That sold tickets, and so those were the shows that they produced, staged and circulated throughout the world.
I continued to do additional research and have been reminded that just as the narrative about many of our "founding fathers" and Confederate statues can be traced back to a rewriting of history, this may very well be the case with terms like "Uncle Tom". I have NOT come to an absolute conclusion on how I feel about this term as I have discovered it has a complex meaning to many people and not all people are in agreement as to what Uncle Tom represents to them. I would recommend doing some independent research on your own to see if it is really the term you choose to use in these types of scenarios. ****caveat. I would provide additional links, but I think this is like my 9th posting on DU and I don't want to overly hijack your thread. I do think I will continue to research the usage of the phrase, however, because for now it is not a term I am comfortable using. Very best to you.
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