• 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.