What does 2Pac and a Racist White Southern Scholar have in common? A lot, actually. They both believe the Civil War was not fought because of slavery, and they both probably use the slur Uncle Tom.
Let's just go down the line.
First, the Civil War was fought over Slavery. There can be no other reason for the war to be fought. Mark Twain, having joined the Rebel Army, left the army the very same day. Why? Because he was told it was about protecting the South's right to own slaves. Abraham Lincoln couldn't avoid civil war because the die had been cast. Slavery would be abolished soon. The South, forecasting those devices, preemptively started the bloodiest war in American History.
Uncle Tom, as it were, was a widely disseminated tract in support of abolishing slavery. Uncle Tom was a Christ Like Figure who died in service to his fellow blacks, dying so they could run free. Then, the war garnered such support for the abolition of slavery, that people actually joined the Union army in droves because they had read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and felt sympathy, as the work humanized black people in the eyes of white Northerners.
Also, the Battle Hymn of the Republic was written for the express intent of freeing blacks. The Northerners had the song, sung the song---as did the South, but they just appropriated the song---and the North sung in the lyrics, "He died to make men holy, LET US LIVE TO MAKE MEN FREE, His truth is marching on."
Also, the reason Uncle Tom is a pejorative, is because racist Southerners created journals which stigmatized Uncle Tom, and they began making satirical plays called "Tom Plays" Throughout the South which made Uncle Tom into a racist figure. It was, for express intentions, the White Southerners who created these Tom Plays, as they were salty for having lost the war due to the enormous recruitment by the sentiment Uncle Tom's Cabin created.
Then, if that weren't bad enough, those same journals created the stigma against sentimentalism in art. Bleeding into our current situation where gaudy and grotesque and bathos and scatological art is patronized. Because beauty, and all sentiments of feelings which are pure and awesome and right have been deemed as "Kitsch" by a group of racist White Southerners looking to do as much damage as they can.
Now, the Black Lives Matter movement is a propagate of these same Racist Southerner's ideas, by calling productive Blacks "Uncle Tom", by scathing beautiful art, by hating intrinsically well formed material. 2Pac couldn't be more wrong about the Civil War. Every drop of blood spilled was in the aim of ending Chattel Slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment was drafted as a direct result of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation was created because of the war.
What's truly racist, is Black Lives Matter because it is the invention of the White Southern Racism, to create a straw man, enemy image to burn down as an effigy of rage in the face of White Nationalism. Do not be fooled.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852. With Introduction, Notes and For Further Reading, by Amanda Claybaugh. Barnes and Noble Books, 2003. Text.
Mark 13:51Jesus saith unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They say unto him, Yea, Lord. 52Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.
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