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Thursday
Like many who grew up during the civil rights movement, I am appalled at the way the GOP’s one Black senator smiles in the face of Donald Trump’s periodic humiliation of him. It feels like a flashback to that earlier time and brings to mind various poems about the Uncle Tom stereotype. More on those in a moment.
To be sure, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of our foremost experts on authoritarianism, has one thing to say on Trump’s behalf. He is an equal opportunity bully, just as likely to humiliate his White allies as his Black ones:
Trump has used ritual humiliation to make the GOP his personal tool, and the list of Republicans he has mocked publicly is long. In classic autocratic tradition, the more submissive Republican elites are with Trump — supporting him through impeachments, indictments and a coup attempt that sent them running for their lives — the more he openly scorns them, losing few opportunities to cut them down.
Ritual humiliation, Ben-Ghiat notes, is characteristic of authoritarian leaders:
Authoritarian politicians are fragile and insecure creatures, always looking over their shoulders to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter potential challengers, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand. They apply this same vicious treatment even to their most loyal collaborators, so that no one ever feels safe and thus everyone continues to act in a slavish manner.
Ben-Ghiat observes that, throughout history, there has been an unending supply “of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play this game, even to the detriment of their dignity.” In her article, she notes that Trump has been particularly keen to enact humiliation on South Carolina’s two Republican senators, the Black Scott and the White Lindsey Graham.
One note on Graham before returning to Scott. For all Graham’s groveling, it appears that, deep down, he is troubled by how he has sold his soul. Trump, sensitive to the slightest sign of disloyalty, knows this. Because there are occasional signs that Graham’s conscience is bothering him, Ben-Ghiat writes,
he will likely continue to be a target of Trump’s scorn. Trump knows that ritual humiliation breaks down the morale of his enablers, who try so hard to please him but never receive absolute validation and at any moment can be taken down again.
But back to Scott, who was publicly humiliated by Trump on the night he won the New Hampshire primary. “I just love you,” Scott said after Trump baited him (“You must really hate her”). But Scott doesn’t need direct prodding from Trump to grovel. Ben-Ghiat reports that
Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight. “I’m far better encouraging and being excited and motivated for President Trump than I was for myself,” Scott said after voting in the South Carolina primary. And at the post-primary rally, he assured the audience that he would keep his speech short because “the longer I speak, the less you hear of him.”
Trump is infamous for believing that African Americans should “know their place.” There were his racist housing policies and his persecution of “the Central Park Five” (even after DNA proved them innocent of the rape with which they were charged) and his birther charges against Barack Obama. What is discouraging is that 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, a Black man would still behave this way. Which brings us to Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton.
Hughes is repulsed by Blacks who play Uncle Tom, although he at least blames Whites for some of it:
Uncle Tom
By Langston Hughes
Within—
The beaten pride.
Without—
The grinning face,
The low, obsequious,
Double bow,
The sly and servile grace
Of one the white folks
Long ago
Taught well
To know his Place.
Clifton, writing in the militant sixties, is less kind:
robert
By Lucille Clifton
was born obedient
without questions
did a dance called
picking grapes
sticking his butt out
for pennies
married a master
who whipped his mind
until he died
until he died
the color of his life
was nigger
It’s worth noting that, in a poem written four years later (“All of Us Are All of Us”), she has evolved to a kinder stance, choosing not to make a hard separation between, on the one hand, Malcolm, Martin, and various Black activists and slave revolutionaries and, on the other,
Stepen Fetchit
Amos and Andy
Sapphire and
Uncle Tom
In the poem, it’s as though she’s saying (to quote an old Joan Baez song), “Be not too hard for life is short, and nothing is given to man.” Or put another way, we’re all in this together. Here’s the poem:
All of Us Are All of Us
By Lucille Clifton
Malcolm and Martin
George
little Emmett
Billie of the flower
the flower Bessie
all of us are
all of us
Nat
Gabriel
Denmark
Patrice and Kwame
Marcus
black Hampton
all of us are
all of us
Stepen Fetchit
Amos and Andy
Sapphire and
Uncle Tom
all of us are
all of us
Orangeburg
Jackson
Birmingham
here
my Mama
your Daddy
my Daddy
your Mama
oh all of us are
all of us and
this is a poem about
Love
So can we love Tim Scott, with his “grinning face” and his version (when in the presence of Trump) of “the low, obsequious, double bow”? I suspect Clifton would say that even love may have its limits. Maybe the answer lies in the degree to which Scott is willing to enable fascism.
Additional note: The Uncle Tom stereotype, while originating with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is based on the character as he appeared in the “Tom shows,” theatrical versions of the novel in which white actors in blackface offered up degrading caricatures of African Americans. The original Tom is a man of dignity and a Christ figure who is willing to die to protect his fellow slaves. While some, including James Baldwin, still critiqued the novel, Frederick Douglass saw Stowe as an important ally while Hughes saw the book as “a moral battle cry” as well as “a good story, exciting in incident, sharp in characterization, and threaded with humor.”