Fosheezy;8546540 said:
"Uncle Tom" was originally a hero character. was anti-slavery and got beat to death by slavemaster because he didn't reveal where the runaway slaves were. He wasn't portrayed as a traitor or oppression apologist until the white folk that did shows in black face. And apparently now "Uncle Tom" is used interchangeably with "coon" ? Interesting.
I always got the impression that Blacks resented the Uncle Tom character from the jump because he was an unrealistically over-the-top sympathetic character, like something from a 1980s After School Special about drugs.
Also the book was always filled with classic black stereotypes, the minstrel show adaptations just emphasized them more. Mammys, happy darkys, pickaninnys, they're all in the book.
It was a protest novel designed to give other whites a glimpse of exactly how savage the system was, but it doesn't have any depth to it. James Baldwin's essay where he calls it "a very bad novel" was etherous:
"Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed
the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.
But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth? …
[T]he avowed aim of the American protest novel is to
bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of credibility."
^^^ lol @ James Baldwin doing the writing equivalent of pointing out that Immortal Technique's flow sucks
LUClEN;8549084 said:
That state has open carry laws. The cops should be facing manslaughter charges at the least.
wrong thread cuz
i suppose it gets confusing with about 10,000 threads about police murdering black men in cold blood.....