An Uncle Tom is a black person accused of being servile or overly deferential towards white people, or more broadly, of betraying their own community by currying favour with those who hold power over it. It is almost always used as an insult, and it carries real force within black communities in particular, where it marks someone out as a collaborator with the very system others are trying to resist. The phrase can also be stretched loosely to describe anyone seen as selling out their own group to please an authority, though its core sense stays racial.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’?
The name comes from the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. According to Etymonline, the derogatory use of “Uncle Tom” for a servile black man is recorded from 1922, and it calls this “somewhat inaccurate” given that Stowe’s own character was humble and pious but also strong-willed, not the cringing figure the insult implies. Etymonline suggests the negative image owes less to the novel itself than to the many stage versions of the story that toured through the late nineteenth century, since these minstrel-style adaptations reached a far larger audience than the book ever did, and it was through them that the softened, comic “Uncle Tom” figure became familiar.
For a long time scholars credited Rev. George Alexander McGuire, a supporter of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement, with pioneering the term as a direct insult. In a 1919 speech to the first convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association he declared that “the Uncle Tom nigger has got to go.” The Root notes that at that same convention, marchers in the opening parade carried signs reading “Uncle Tom’s dead and buried,” showing the phrase was already in the air as a rallying cry against subservience, not something coined on the spot by McGuire alone. More recent scholarship has cast doubt on whether McGuire really was first to use it this way, so the precise moment the name turned into an epithet cannot be pinned down with certainty. What is clear is that by the early 1920s the shift from Stowe’s sympathetic hero to the modern insult was complete.