Uncle Tom

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is superb, unlike what I expected; the book is not just a polemical treatise against slavery, but a moving, dramatic tale that showed how slavery enslaved everyone, Whites as well as Blacks—and indeed, the memory, and continuing effects of slavery on American culture, still entangles everyone regardless of race or color.
Over time in America, beginning a few decades after the publication of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," a pejorative term emerged, Uncle Tom, for the Black who kowtowed to Whites, who like the stereotypical Sambo would do whatever was necessary to fit into to the dominant White culture.
The Uncle Tom stereotype, however, seems in no way to be based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book.
Uncle Tom in the book is anything but a cowering, subservient Black dedicated to ingratiating himself into White culture. Indeed, I find his character to be quite the opposite.
Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a heroic figure, a person whom I wish I could be like, a person who will do right no matter what the cost, who is good in all ways, who has not allowed an evil institution to drive away the divine spark of goodness and righteousness within him.
Often over the years, slavery has been interpreted by scholars as a total institution that would, like Nazi concentration camps, attempt to make the slave a childlike blithering idiot whose only goal was to please his/her master.
Subsequent scholarship has shown this was far from the case, as Harriet Beecher Stowe knew, for her Uncle Tom has been able to rise above the total institution of slavery to keep his dignity and humanity.
It would be nice if there was a new stereotype of Uncle Tom, to represent self-sacrifice, for doing what is good and right, for Christian virtues, for love of fellow humans.
Uncle Tom was able to see that all humans are children of God, that all lives matter.