Uncle

For fans of Kevin Young’s Bunk, Claudia Rankine, and Morgan Jerkins. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a classic American novel, often credited with helping to end slavery. Yet “Uncle Tom” is now sometimes used to refer to a Black person who is too obsequious or subservient to white people. The insult has been levelled at people like Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama. Black visual artists from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Kerry James Marshall to Kara Walker have exploring the history of racial stereotypes in their work for decades. The Uncle Tom insult has been wielded everywhere from politics to sports to popular culture. Race relations will be at a fevered pitch a few months before the election, and Uncle offers a trenchant history of one of the most common tropes in that conversation. Cheryl Thompson is an extremely popular speaker, weaving together astute political and literary criticism and compelling pop culture references.