I find it fascinating that the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s protagonist, a kind, loving man and ultimately an obvious Christ figure, could get twisted over time into an insult. I am curious to know how prevalent the term “Uncle Tom” is today, because I had entirely forgotten about it until Onno brought it up in class. But even though I hadn’t heard it in awhile, I immediately felt its nasty connotation.
I wondered if the insult in “Uncle Tom” came from black people. I know that in the civil rights movement, Malcolm X was a prominent voice, and that he rejected the idea of blacks ever being able to integrate into white society. Instead, he believed the only way for blacks to obtain true freedom was to separate from white society completely, and create their own society; that even the whites sympathetic to issues of civil rights could not help the oppressed blacks. I wondered if it was someone like Malcolm X who condemned Uncle Tom for his passivity, for his close relationship with some white people.
In the end I found an article, here, which confirmed my suspicions that it did seem to have been a black man who first used the term– as early as 1919. The article also interestingly talks about how both Southern whites and Northern blacks detested Uncle Tom; the South, for how his character condemned their system of slavery, and the North, for how people like him came up and got their jobs because they were more obedient workers. Unknowingly, it seems, Stowe created a character that both the North and the South could detest, in addition to one that had the potential to inspire a sense of justice in the racist. If the twisting of Uncle Tom’s name into an insult means anything, I’d say that it indicates how complicated the issue of slavery was– that a single character could be integrated into opposing arguments in the North and the South, among both blacks and whites. In that way, Uncle Tom is almost like the Bible itself– a symbol invoked by slave-owners and abolitionists at the same time.
Thanks for the link; I was curious about the same thing. It definitely is interesting how a name can receive so many different meanings and interpretations.
ReplyDeleteLike Joseph said, thanks for posting this link. I think this is really interesting, especially since one of the first footnotes in the text says "'Uncle' does not mean an old person, but an honored person." I found this contradiction to the way we understand the term now to be really interesting, so thanks for looking into this!
ReplyDelete