Booker T. Washington Was an Uncle Tom

Last quarter we read an excerpt of W.E.B. DuBois' book "The Souls of Black Folk." We read some of his sharp criticism of Booker T. Washington, specifically Washington's "Atlanta Compromise." This quarter Booker T. makes another appearance in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The narrator says in the second paragraph, "they were told they were free...in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand." That last part is a direct quote of Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech where he essentially told his fellow southern african-americans to stay in the south and help white people rebuild it. He advocated separate but equal segregationist policy, and white southerners loved him for it. This is why I call Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom, he was an assimilationist that capitulated to the racist demands of the southern whites of his time.

Ralph Ellison's protagonist is raised in a family that upholds Washington's values, though the protagonist's grandfather seems to realize on his deathbed that this lifestyle is harmful to him and his people. Despite the grandfather's warnings, the protagonist lives the life of submission that whites demand blacks live in a white society. He is commended for his behavior, because his behavior maintains the inequity of power in the times of Jim Crow. The protagonist seems to go so far as to experience Stockholm Syndrome when he says, "I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks..." He feels guilt when a naked white woman is revealed at the Battle Royal because in the time of Emmett Till, even looking the wrong way at a white woman can be a death sentence.

This is the life of a black person in Jim Crow south. It is one of internalized racism, de facto and de jure societal racism, and constant fear. When the protagonist simply implies that "social equality" is a worthy goal as an abstract concept, the crowd of white men clamps down on him. "We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times" one of them tells him.

But perhaps the most troubling part of our reading was when the protagonist is involved in the boxing match, and is the last of two men standing. When he asks the other man to take the fall, even promising him all of the pay, so that they can get this stupid brutal skeptical over with, the other guy refuses. "For them?" he asks. "For me, sonofabitch!"

I may have been reading too much into this, but it seemed like a metaphor for the internalized conflict within the black community. The ways that America's power brokers have fomented strife within the lower classes so that they don't realize that their true enemy is the bourgeois and the capitalists. The white folks force these black men to fight one another for their amusement. And while some participate out of fear, and some have bought into the pride and machismo of winning, even though you never really win anything. The game is rigged.