At a public reception at Grinnell College in 1967, a militant black student confronted Ralph Ellison, insisting that the ending to Invisible Man (1952) was anti-revolutionary: “You’re an Uncle Tom, man. You’re a sell-out. You’re a disgrace to your race.” Ellison reacted stoically at first, but then broke down, bursting into tears. “I’m not a Tom,” Ellison wept as he rested his head on a friend’s shoulder, “I’m not a Tom.” (Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, 2007, 440; Maryemma Gramm and Jeffery Dwayne Mack, “Ralph Ellison, 1913–1994: A Brief Biography,” in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, 2004, 44).
Ellison’s tearful insistence that he was not a “Tom” indicates Uncle Tom’s power as a political accusation. Brando Simeo Starkey’s fascinating new book, In Defense of Uncle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty, details how the epithet is a political weapon—a tool used by black Americans to discipline other black Americans for breaches of racial solidarity.
The book interweaves two levels of analysis. The first is historical—tracing changes in our popular imagining of Uncle Tom and in how the epithet has been politically deployed. The second is evaluative. Starkey argues that Uncle Tom has—on balance—been a constructive force in black politics. At the same time, he acknowledges that it has sometimes been used to impose insidious forms of racial conformity. How does Starkey distinguish constructive uses of Uncle Tom from destructive uses? A use is constructive if it (1) punishes those “consciously advancing” the interests of white supremacy, (2) “penalizes inexcusable meekness in the face of racism,” or (3) “censures blacks for lacking concern for the race” (25).
Starkey advocates a “big tent” conception of racial loyalty: “Because no person has the answer to the many ailments that beleaguer blacks, my goal is to shape an environment where blacks, animated by mutual concern, debate solutions. Unpopular ideas are welcomed” (21). Support for particular policies—such as busing or affirmative action—should not be a litmus test. One can be ideologically conservative on the question of means while fully devoted to the end of racial equality. Political conservatism, in other words, does not make one automatically guilty of racial disloyalty.
Starkey historicizes Uncle Tom along two dimensions. First, he shows that the popular image of Uncle Tom as a white-haired, asexual “happy slave” does not reflect the original character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel. That character was a “somewhat strapping gent” who chose to die “rather than assist in the recapture of runaways” (33, 30). The popular image of Tom actually derives from the way minstrel producers “perverted” Stowe’s character as they adapted it for the stage and screen. They stripped Tom of agency and put words into his mouth—“I was born a slave, I have lived a slave, and bress de Lord, I hope to die a slave!”—that never appeared in Stowe’s novel (31). Starkey thus provides a genealogy of Uncle Tom as a trope.
Starkey historicizes Uncle Tom, second, by periodizing its use as a political weapon. From 1865 to 1959, African Americans used Uncle Tom to condemn group members who accepted segregation, worked against black labor interests, and reinforced racial stereotypes on the big screen. Tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and actor Stepin Fetchit were pilloried on this last count. Though many African Americans admired the technical virtuosity of Robinson’s footwork, they hated his “off-color jokes” about black folk and demeaning references to his “educated feets” (143). Stepin Fetchit was worse: “The man who coined the catchphrase, ‘Yas’m, I’s a comin’ . . . Feets do yo ‘stuff’ . . . ended his life dismissed as an Uncle Tom” (144).
From 1960 to 1975, integrationists used Uncle Tom to punish opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1966, for example, Cleveland Call and Post editor William Walker branded black college presidents—such as Dr. R. W. E. Jones at Grambling—who discouraged their students and faculty from participating in civil rights activism as “Uncle Toms with college degrees.” Starkey observes: “Walker’s belief that black educators danced whenever their white bosses played music had real merit. Segregationists were known to deliver speeches claiming that they had local black allies in their fight” (172–173).
The period of 1960 to 1975 also saw black nationalists use Uncle Tom to attack integrationists. Malcolm X labeled Martin Luther King, Jr. a “handkerchief headed Uncle Tom” and further exclaimed: “What are all you ‘Toms’ doing all this demonstrating and picketing for? A desegregated cup of coffee? This is not revolution . . . this is a ‘beg-o-lution’ . . .” (196).
From 1976 to the present, black citizens have used Uncle Tom mainly to punish black Republicans. The book’s most interesting chapter—Chapter 7—is devoted entirely to Clarence Thomas. Starkey is judicious throughout the previous chapters in assessing whether Uncle Tom accusations are justified. He takes pains, for example, to defend Booker T. Washington against the charge of racial disloyalty. Washington may have been mistaken about the best strategy to realize racial equality, Starkey contends, but he was nevertheless sincerely devoted to that goal. It is therefore all the more striking when Starkey zealously prosecutes Thomas as an Uncle Tom. Thomas’s conservatism is not the basis of the charge. It is rather the way that Thomas crafted “an anti-affirmative action persona” that he knew would secure his advancement within the conservative movement (261). Thomas recognized that that movement needed black faces to inoculate it against charges of racism and to expedite its assault on both civil rights law and the welfare state, and he gladly stepped into that role. During his time as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), for instance, Thomas “ended the EEOC’s use of timetables and numeric goals” and “relaxed rules for employers already found guilty of violating civil rights law.” He also falsely characterized his own sister as a welfare queen: “‘She … gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check … That is how dependent she is’” (273). Starkey chronicles other times when Thomas dissembled to build up his persona as a self-made man who—against the orthodoxies of black politics—carried the banner of the Reagan Revolution. “Although opposing affirmative action is perfectly acceptable,” Starkey concludes, “fashioning an anti-affirmative faction persona to benefit oneself, without concern for its impact on the race, is disloyal, violating the norm that blacks care about the group” (261).
Starkey thinks the most recent period of Uncle Tom’s use has been increasingly destructive. Citizens deploy the term casually to punish the least divergence from black conventional wisdom. Starkey hopes his book can inaugurate a new period of Uncle Tom’s use “where supporting evidence always accompanies accusations of betrayal. The days when blacks are deemed sellouts merely for being conservative, for disagreeing with majority thought, or for otherwise being outside the mainstream must cease” (321).
In Defense of Uncle Tom is a deeply informative book that should be widely debated in the black public sphere. Citizens will surely clash about the merits of Starkey’s argument, but after reading the book, they will be hard pressed to deny Uncle Tom’s significance as an institution of black life.
