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  • In Defense of Uncle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty by Brando Simeo Starkey
  • Renee Romano
In Defense of Uncle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty. By Brando Simeo Starkey (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015) 360pp. $85.00 cloth $29.99 paper

On the Oberlin campus last fall, a student demonstrator protesting police brutality created an uproar when he labeled another black student who declined to walk out of class to join a march an “Uncle Tom.” Such episodes, Starkey demonstrates in his simultaneously fascinating and frustrating study of blacks’ historical use of that epithet, have persisted since Frederick Douglass first used the term as part of what Starkey views as a vital effort to create norms in the black community to police racial loyalty. In this descriptive and prescriptive study, Starkey lays out the bold argument that what he calls “constructive” social norms must be enforced within the black community in order to bolster a racial solidarity that is “vital in promoting collective legal interests and ability to affect public policy” (3). This book—which he describes as a “biography of Uncle Tom” (2)—both analyzes the epithet’s meaning in three distinct eras of racial policing (1865 to 1959 to 1960 to 1975, and 1976 to today) and assesses when it has been hurled destructively at African Americans “in situations devoid of even a whiff of duplicity” (5).

The result is a work that offers the odd combination of a fascinating historical compendium of seemingly every utterance of “Uncle Tom,” as recorded in newspapers and organizational records, and an openly didactic tract that implores blacks to deploy the epithet more responsibly or risk losing a powerful tool to advance racial loyalty. The great strength of the work lies in Starkey’s exhaustive survey of the epithet’s use in the period since the Civil War. In a fascinating chapter, Starkey explains how “Uncle Tom” morphed into a symbol of racial duplicity, transforming the suffering martyr in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s [End Page 607] Cabin (Boston, 1852) into a happy, loyal slave through minstrel shows based on the novel. By the 1860s, black leaders began to use “Uncle Tom” to describe the servility and obsequiousness of blacks toward whites. Tracking “Uncle Tom” in the decades thereafter, Starkey shows how blacks wielded the epithet effectively during the Jim Crow era to compel other blacks to join the struggle against white supremacy and to punish those who aided segregationists.

Starkey argues that since the 1960s, the slur of “Uncle Tom” has become increasingly vindictive, stigmatizing behavior deemed to be racially inauthentic, like intermarrying. According to Starkey, this use of “Uncle Tom” impedes black solidarity and unfairly narrows the range of acceptable behavior for blacks. He dedicates much of the book to lengthy and careful explorations of whether or not certain historical figures—such as Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, and Clarence Thomas—deserve the label of “Uncle Tom.”

Starkey’s extensive historical research is compelling, although he might have devoted more analysis to why norm management has changed in recent years and why the insult of “Uncle Tom” is routinely aimed at people who are not guilty of what Starkey sees as racial betrayal. Moreover, Starkey is on far stronger ground when revealing how blacks employed the term than he is when claiming its political effectiveness. He also might have paid more attention to gender; most of the “Uncle Toms” in the book are men. Starkey does not discuss the ways in which the label has affected the regulation of gender behaviors within the black community. But his many examples of the changing perspectives on “Uncle Tom” are a rich resource, and his insistence on the need for blacks to rehabilitate the label for the sake of “policing racial loyalty through social norms” should spark debate among cultural and political critics today (321).

Renee Romano
Oberlin College
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