Re: “So that’s the definition of ‘Uncle Tom’”, March 28th.
Gregory Kane claims that “[Jalen] Rose, by his statement, shows there is no further evidence needed to prove that black Americans have overused, misused and abused the term ‘Uncle Tom.’ The term used to mean a black person who was exceedingly servile, obsequious and submissive to whites.” As his is wont, Kane overstates the case. Rose, in a voicemail following the documentary, made it clear that the statement was in the context of how he felt as a nineteen year old: “I know a lot of people are trying to circumvent a great documentary that was two hours of quality content and paraphrase a statement that I made and look at the headline but not read the story. That’s basically when I talked about my recruiting as a high school student as it related to Duke. I just wanted to make sure that I verify how I felt about that. I was clearly talking about a framework from 1991 to 1993, not about 2011.” Given Kane’s musings on racial matters, I believe that there is an autobiographical element to his noisy protest, for I suspect he has found himself more than once on the wrong end of the epithet. To paraphrase the Bard, Kane “doth protest too much.”
Re: “Why liberals hate Clarence thomas and Sarah Palin”, March 26th.
Just as Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings running back, was severely criticized last week for trivializing slavery, comparing it to the National Football League owners treatment of its players, so too does columnist Star Parker deserve a similar reaction for mindlessly invoking the slavery analogy in describing the liberal mainstream media’s apparently scandalous treatment of former Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. Parker whines that “Thomas and Palin are particularly threatening to liberals because their lives fly in the face of liberal mythology.” “According to this mythology,” Parker continues, “the essential and ongoing struggle of interests between ‘haves’ and ‘have-not,’ rather than an ongoing struggle for human freedom.” This is impenetrable nonsense. Both Palin and Thomas have done extraordinarily well, notwithstanding their legions of liberal detractors: Palin, a remarkably incurious woman, has managed to parlay an abbreviated and undistinguished stint as chief executive of the state of Alaska and an ill-advised stunt of being selected as Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, into celebrity resulting in the lucrative enterprise known as Brand Palin; and Justice Thomas, despite a legal career of no particular distinction before being nominated by Bush the Elder for the High Court and despite a kinky preoccupation with porn, pubic hairs, and Coke cans, enjoys lifetime employment, where he isn’t required to say anything during oral arguments and where he occasionally cranks out nutty, reactionary opinions that pass for constitutional interpretation. So much for two slaves fleeing the plantation.
In her paean to George Washington (letter, March 5th), Ellen Latane Tabb attempts to gloss over Washington’s involvement with slavery, writing “He opposed slavery and was faced with the problem of how to deal with hundreds in the Custis estate. His solution was to prepare them for freedom as much as possible.” This is nonsense. First: George Washington was mired in slavery for most of his life, inheriting slaves from his father at aged 11 in 1743, bequeathing 316 slaves at Mount Vernon their freedom upon his death in 1799. Second: Washington’s attitude toward slavery was typical of Virginia planters of the time namely, slavery was a commercial enterprise and the slaves themselves, subhuman and mere property to be used or abused as the slave master desired. Third: in what cannot be construed as a profile in courage, Washington, despite his standing and influence in the new nation, never went public with his reservations and misgivings about the institution of slavery.
In the editorial criticizing President Obama for failure to call for madman Moammar Gaddafi’s removal (an omission subsequently overtaken by events), you write that the dictator “has used mercenaries from Africa and Libyan soldiers still loyal to him to slaughter demonstrators in street.” For your edification, Libya, like neighboring Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria, is located in the continent of Africa; so, if it matters to be perceived as having a rudimentary knowledge of geography, it should have been read “mercenaries from other African nations.”
