July 27, 2020

‘Uncle Tom’: A Quiet Earthquake

Townhall - July 27, 2020

Albert Einstein once said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and five thinking about the solution. The “race problem” in America is pretzeled into such a Gordian knot because we’ve spent decades thinking up solutions to a problem that no longer exists. And it’s not working.

Black oppression is dead in America. The good guys won. Yet political vultures in white hats still drag around the gangrened corpse of oppression, using it like kryptonite to disarm the gatekeepers of the nation’s fragile load-bearing institutions. With attacks on black cops, the toppling of abolitionist statues, and the ho-hum attitude toward the killings of blacks and black babies by other blacks, it’s clear that all this mayhem has nothing to do with skin color.

“Racism” is the paint they use to color over dark motives that are as primitive as Cain and Abel.

Think about it: For decades we’ve spent trillions to implement anti-discrimination policies and poverty programs. America is home to the wealthiest group of blacks, likely, in all of history. Black mayors, black police chiefs, black law enforcers, black attorneys, black school officials and black politicians are stuffed into every crevice of city and state governments across the nation. A black man was elected to Earth’s most powerful office – twice! Yet somehow, the screech for “racial justice” is louder now than it was when black oppression was real.

Race will always be a ticking time bomb as long as America buys into the Al Sharpton version of the black experience – that blacks are still hobbled by race-based inequities rooted in slavery.

That narrative always leads to the same two dead ends: 1) guilt-ridden whites bending so far backward that they break their spines to solve the wrong problems, and 2) angry blacks shouting that America will sink without an “honest conversation” about race, while kneeling on the necks of black conservatives who point to the hole in the boat.

Thanks to the new documentary called “Uncle Tom,” blacks are finding it a little easier to breathe and think for themselves. The film is not just a shake-up of the old narrative; it is seismic activity warning us of a coming cultural earthquake.

Produced and co-written by radio talk show host Larry Elder, “Uncle Tom” is quietly shifting the tectonic plates of racial attitudes in America. The mainstream media has, so far, treated the film like it treats black conservatives – as if it doesn’t exist. But “Uncle Tom” is finding audiences anyway.

Here’s what viewers said on IMDb, the influential movie site where the film is the No. 1 most popular documentary in the world:

“This is one of, if not the most important films of the 21^stcentury. I don’t say that lightly. Everyone has to see this. It’s truly life changing.”

“The film can start a revolution within the black community, which is why it must be spread as far as it can go!”

“Powerful. The Most Dangerous Documentary of Our Times. I say ‘dangerous’ because there are forces that desperately wish a film like this would go away.”

“This documentary was unreal. I could watch this 100 times.”

“A MASSIVE EYE OPENER! I’m a documentary junkie and this is one of the greatest I’ve seen.”

“Quite simply the best 105 minute education I have ever received.”

“Uncle Tom” features a diverse group of conservative blacks who tell compelling stories about their personal lives, the principles that shaped their political philosophy, the mangling of black history, and about the insults they get for being conservatives.

“I think the most hated political person in America is a black conservative,” Elder says in the film. “And that’s because we refute the entire philosophy of the Democratic Party. The left claims that it advocates for black people, but they really advocate for left-wing black people.”

Black conservatives in the film say rather than being treated as thinking people with legitimate political differences, black liberals use the force of insults to keep them enslaved to a “liberal plantation.” They are called sellouts, coons, and Uncle Toms who are “lost, disturbed and self-loathing,” as one black critic snarled in the film. Yet, “Uncle Tom” is far from an angry, woe-is-me film. Popular conservatives like Bob Woodson, Col. Allen West, Herman Cain, Dr. Carol Swain, Candace Owens, Brandon Tatum and Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson are funny, articulate, and unapologetic in extolling the virtues of hard work, discipline, persistence, self-sufficiency, and family.

“I grew up being told my disadvantages – that this country is unfair to black people,” said Chad O. Jackson, a self-employed plumber whose story is threaded throughout the film. “My parents didn’t teach me that I was a victim. But there were other influences … uncles, aunts and the hip-hop industry, the media – it painted a picture of the black man in America as being in a constant state of distress – a constant state of disadvantage. … So long as black people continue to have their psyche filled by that nonsense, we won’t have an awakening.”

The brilliance of “Uncle Tom” is that it divorces political philosophy from skin color so that the history of the black experience is understood in the context of principles that operate the same on all human beings, regardless of color. It exposes Black Lives Matter for the fiasco that it is – an angry, headless movement built on the myths of godless Marxism that thrives on class conflict.

“Uncle Tom” paints a version of black history that shows viewers that Black Lives Matter is not the continuation of the ‘60s Civil Rights Movement, but it is the Frankenstein of that movement. It is a monstrous patchwork of dead slogans and ideas, brought to life by the electric shock of George Floyd’s horrible death. BLM is not a movement that is changing the course of history; it is the shriek of political misfits shouting a narrative in its death throes.

“Uncle Tom” is so effective at killing the victim narrative that you are forced to choose between two approaches to race: Einstein or Frankenstein. Either surrender to sober reason or surrender to the tyrannical theocracy of “white fragility,” “microaggressions” and “anti-racism.”

I dare liberals to watch “Uncle Tom.” I don’t see how liberals of any color could walk away and not be deeply disturbed by how tragically fraudulent the victim narrative has been. With the noblest of intentions, it treats blacks as subhuman.