The Lessons of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Trump Administration's Plan to Deport Millions

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“I am George Harris. A Mr. Harris, of Kentucky, did call me his property. But now I’m a free man, standing on God's free soil; and my wife and my child I claim as mine. Jim and his mother are here. We have arms to defend ourselves, and we mean to do it. You can come up, if you like; but the first one of you that comes within the range of our bullets is a dead man and the next, and the next; and so on till the last.” ?Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe?

I recently listened to an excellent audio version of this classic 1852 book by Harriet Beecher Stowe that was motivated by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that allowed Southern slaveholders the ability to track down runaway slaves, wherever they might be, and bring them back into bondage, regardless of the consequences to the slave and the unity of their families. Ms. Stowe was an outraged abolitionist who knew her book, by highlighting the barbarity and inhumanity of white Southern slaveholders and their Northern industrial collaborators, would demonstrate and lay bare the fundamental and deep contradictions between American slavery, the American Constitution, and Christianity. ?

There were two reasons for my revisiting this classic work that sold more copies than any book published in the 19th century except, ironically the Bible. The first was to re-read and better understand the troubling image of Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, as imagined, particularly in the minds of 21st century Americans is someone that resides deep in the psyche of Black Americans. And secondly to help me imagine what a stated?Trump?Administration policy of hunting down and rounding up one million “illegal” immigrants could look like based on the very real history of Americans hunting down Africans who sought refuge in free states and Canada. (The Ohio River was known as River Jordan to Blacks who sought to cross from Kentucky and slavery to Ohio and freedom.)?

On the first reason, Uncle Tom is probably the most derogatory definition that one Black American can attribute to another Black American. It is often spoken with derision and disgust at an individual who through their actions is a traitor to his race and a denier of Blackness. If this is your view of Uncle Tom, it is a common one, and it is also wrong. And if you do not believe me, you probably have never read the book and therefore have based your opinion of Uncle Tom, probably on the portrayal of him by some racist plagiarist who stole the character and completely reversed their view of him in some minstrel show designed to dehumanize and make Blacks feel inferior to Whites. In the mid-19th century, authors had no protection for their work. There were no fewer than a dozen books, plays, shows, and stories that stole Stowe’s work and revised it without permission. These bastardized copies were done specifically to justify slavery and its brutality and transform Uncle Tom from a?Christ-like hero to a fool. ?

The real Uncle Tom was a principled Christian man who willingly sacrificed his body, but never his soul to protect his fellow slaves and his family. In my re-reading, I grew to admire Uncle Tom, even though I am a non-Christian. The admiration is not because of what he believed, but because he believed in something and lived his beliefs when most people just talk about what they believe and are quick to throw those beliefs out the window at the first sign of distress. I doubt I would have his courage, or many of you would in the face of the physical brutality he experienced. Read the book.?

The second reason for re-reading was because I see in the incoming Administration the same forces that America experienced during slavery about to take place now. Instead of run-away slaves being hunted down and returned to hell on earth, it will be immigrants who will be hunted down and returned to countries we had a hand in destroying. Slavery, notoriously separated mothers from children and husbands from wives. What will happen when one million immigrants are hunted down? Who will do the hunting? Where will they be warehoused? What will be permissible for hunters to do to the immigrants??Will you shelter a fleeing mother and child; one with papers and one without? And what will come of their souls, your souls, and the soul of America? ?

Stowe’s book brought the reality of slavery to American homes. When she visited newly elected President Lincoln, he reportedly said to her, “So you are the little lady that started this great Civil War”. Immigration is a problem, but the “solutions” being considered by the incoming Administration will prove more destructive than anything this country has ever experienced since the end of slavery. ??

“Those who do not learn from history?are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana?