With the dust-up over Joe Biden’s remark to Charlemagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club — “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black” — continuing to roil the political waters, the presumptive Democratic nominee should apologize once again for his remark and then raise the ante a bit.
If I were on Biden’s team of advisors I’d suggest that he shoot a political commercial in which he expresses remorse for challenging the blackness of these tRump supporters, and then state, with a big smile, “What I should have been challenging is your intelligence, your values, your commitment to your race. You do know that the official portrait of the only black president our nation has ever had is not hanging in the White House. Why? Because Trump wants to play to his racist base by disrespecting Obama and you’re not raising hell about it.”
If I were Biden I’d even go further, or have my female and hopefully black running mate throw the “U” bomb. I’d begin to publicly question whether black tRump supporters are Uncle Toms. Yeah, it’s an incendiary strategy, but if Democratic consultants don’t realize that the average voting black detests Uncle Toms with a passion and wants them called out for what they are, then Biden needs some new consultants, some that are willing to play hardball.
In my previous column regarding Stockholm syndrome, I cited the heiress Patty Hearst as an example of someone being brainwashed by their captors. However, my friend Kwa David Whitaker came with a better example: Black Americans. He’s right when he states that never in the history of the world has a group of people so identified with their captors as the Africans that were kidnapped over centuries and brought to the supposed “New World.”
But fortunately, the flame of freedom and liberty was never totally extinguished among our ancestral captives, not even during our darkest days of privation on this continent. Throughout the longest running holocaust ever known to man, there still were those who kept the spark of our humaneness alive. And then, during the Black Pride era of the ’60s ’70s we began in earnest to shake off the mental shackles that being enslaved had ingrained into our psyches.
However, there always have been those in our race who put personal gain in front of racial pride or solidarity, who love the captors and their captors’ families more than they did their own. And that’s why the tag of Uncle Tom still has such a robustness and vibrancy: Because the appellation is one-hundred percent accurate in describing some black Americans. They truly are pathetic.
We can quibble over the minutiae of politics — past, present, and future — ad infinitum, but the track record of racism tRump has so thoughtfully and carefully crafted in such an amazingly short period of time simply to play to his white nationalist base leaves no wiggle room. Any black person with at least half a brain knows who he is and what he represents: White Nationalism — an ideology that calls for the extinction of blacks and Jews.
During World War II those who supported and cooperated with fascism in Europe were called Quislings. In this country, at this juncture in our history, those blacks who support a candidate for reelection to presidency who has clearly demonstrated his disdain for all persons of color have earned the title: Uncle Toms, and it’s time everyone — even Biden — begins calling them out for what they actually are.
