06-11-2024, 01:15 PM
(06-10-2024, 03:46 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Everything Tom does, or doesn’t do, is selfless and done to protect others; including being whipped to death. It’s beyond ridiculous to use him to disparage people and it’s rather annoying.
I'm going to grant you one irony here. Stowe was a devout Christian who sought to present Tom as a Christ-type, always turning the other cheek. So Tom passively accepts abuse on the one hand, but defies his master when ordered to cooperate in oppressing others, on the other. That is passive disobedience, and akin to MLK-style non-violent direct action, without the direct action.
But to repeat and expand my previous point--under slavery passivity was incentivized in myriad ways, including by black family members. Christianity played a strong role in the ideology of passivity which developed. You don't dispute that, do you? As a means of survival, that is certainly understandable. I don't see why I would do any different.
However, after the Civil War, it is not clear at all that "selfless" passivity was the best survival tactic. It continued to serve the interests of white power and to inhibit the consolidation of equality, as early Black opponents of segregation like W.E.B. Dubois argued. You may not agree with DuBois, but you do agree with my history so far, right, as it represents the origins of a debate within the US Black community which continues today?
Post-Reconstruction, with the rise of Jim Crow, some Black Americans raised during slavery continued to eschew any open resistance, on the (naive in my view) assumption that, after years of good Black behavior and industry, whites would eventually come to accept Blacks as equal. (This was an original plank of Black conservatism.) But some Black Americans who would agree Christian selflessness was a great ideal, nevertheless chaffed at the idea that it was Black people who were always expected to be "selfless," not whites.
As more and more Black people began to actively resist white domination , and met resistance from those within their own community who counseled non-resistance (the "right wing" of that time), the image and style of Tom's passivity, and not his disobedience, came to be what was most remembered and actively disliked about his character--the constant "yes, masr!" and "I'd give my last drop of blood to save you masr!"
So it seems to me you are de-contextualizing and de-historicizing responses to the Tom character when you treat it as "selfless"-end-of-story and deem it "beyond ridiculous" to respond any other way. As if post-Reconstruction generations of Black activists got it all wrong when they converted him into a symbol of passivity and tool of white power for his page after page of rationalizing why he would not fight back and how he wished the best for his masters.
At the current juncture, usage of "Uncle Tom" as an epithet still harks back to this history. When Black politicians support GOP policies which restrict voting or roll back affirmative action or validate "white saviorism," other Black Americans may view that as aligning with policies that support white interests and power, and see them as "sell outs." The right wing response is to defend such politicians as independent thinkers who set race aside in consideration of policy. Clarence Thomas is probably the most controversial figure here, followed by others whose like Donalds or Candace Owens or Mark Robinson whose misrepresentation of history puts them in the spotlight. The vast majority of Black conservatives stay out of the limelight though, consistent with their tradition.
