Can Don Lemon Be Redeemed?
Don Lemon gets on my last nerve. However, I did not sign the petition to get him removed from CNN.
Don’t get me wrong: he really does grate at my nerves. And I know this is true for many others, including the more than 30,000 people who added their John and Jane Hancock to that petition. I recognize that a lot of people also call him an Uncle Tom. Most memorable, the “Angry Black Woman” in South Carolina who during a live broadcast called him one to his face.
Now, I am not going to say for sure whether or not I think he is an Uncle Tom. But I will say for the sake of argument that even if what many – and I mean many – folks think of him is true, an Uncle Tom can be reformed.
No, really.
To understand what I am getting at here, let’s consider for a second: Who is Uncle Tom?
In its current semantic definition, an Uncle Tom is a Black person who is willfully complaisant in White supremacy. Arguably, a couple of examples of this are U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson.
But in the literal sense, the slur itself was derived from the classic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book, which was published in 1852, is thought to be the quintessential moral argument against the institution of American slavery. And as the title suggests, the story revolves around an enslaved Black man named Tom. He is a gentle and deeply religious man most loyal to his benevolent master and his Christian God.
Things change for Tom after his “good” master loses his money and sells his most loyal slave down the river. From there, Tom is bounced around from plantation to plantation, where the masters get crueler and more dastardly. But through it all, Tom does not run, and he remains a dedicated servant to his masters.
That was until one of his masters attempts to make him an overseer and commands him to whip a Black woman. Tom refuses. And he is beaten to death by Sambo, another slave who gladly takes the orders and the promotion.
Although the story is fiction, Tom’s tragic life, particularly the end of his life, is a reminder of the abject inhumanity of slavery. It proves that no matter how strictly Black people follow the rules and respect authority; no matter how obedient and loyal we are to the system, White supremacy will still find reason to kill you.
This capitulation to White supremacy is one of the reasons why, in spite of his heroism, many Black people still vilify the character of Tom to this day. Most notable was author James Baldwin, who in his essay entitled “Everybody’s Protest Novel“ called the book “theological terror” that had robbed the character Tom of his “humanity and divested in his sex.”
But Tom’s story also holds another truth. In particular, the truth about transformation. The idea that even in the direst of circumstances where seemingly all parts of our humanity have been torn from us, there are opportunities for us to gain our humanity back. And in an instance when Tom could have opted to spare himself (while throwing a Black woman under the bus) and gain favor from his new master, he chooses death.
Through that single transformative action, Tom has been redeemed. He is no longer the wide-mouth grinning “yessir…” house negro holding a glass of fresh lemonade for his massa while he beats and kills the rest of his people. But through his transformation, we get to see him again as one of us. Unfree. And just like the remainder of the unfree folks still stuck on the plantation, Tom was trying to figure out how to survive the best he could under what are impossible to survive circumstances.
It’s hard to say for sure what kind of Tom Lemon could be (again, this is if he is a Tom at all). In some ways, Lemon’s constant victim-blaming and antagonism of Black people, including chastising us for not picking up litter and our pants, makes me believe that Lemon is definitely jockeying to be overseer.
However, there have been moments when I see the other version of Tom in him. Like during an interview, last week with Avery Jackson, one of the Black Lives Matter protesters who recently disrupted a Hillary Clinton speech. As usual, Lemon was in his right-wing playbook, talking about respect (particularly of the other civil rights leaders who have virtually co-signed Clinton’s presidency), and making lame arguments against the usefulness of the BLM disruption strategy (in particular, he asked Jackson the question: “If you’re yelling at me, why would I listen to you?”).
Like many who passed around the video, I was ready to dismiss this as just another pre-transformative “Tom” Lemon moment. But after watching the video again I began to pay attention to the tone of it. In particular, how Lemon was actually assuming the role of a devil’s advocate and how he had prefaced many of his questions with “Some people may think…”
And I also noticed how he let Jackson respond to his questions completely. Lemon never interrupted him. He did not try to belittle Jackson. He was not angling for a “gotcha” moment. And, in fact, it was the most respectful interview I have seen with a BLM protestor on CNN in a while. He even ended the interview with a sincere “Thank you.”
Perhaps this is a sign of a Machiavellian spirit? And that beneath all the foot-shuffling and Tomming he does, perhaps Lemon still sees himself as one of us?
Just to clarify: This is not an apologist post. I do acknowledge that unlike the character Tom, Lemon has yet to definitively experience a transformative moment (also known on the streets as his Negro Wake-Up Call). But I am getting a bit dismayed at how easily we can discard one of us from our collective oppression, just because they might handle their oppression in a different way than the rest of us handles our own. [Note: this also includes myself, who at one time, had dismissed folks as just unredeemable Toms].
I mean, is Don Lemon, a powerless cog, really the threat here or is it CNN that keeps hiring people, regardless of color, with these anti-Black views? In my opinion, that is who we need to be starting petitions against. And yet, our continued lashing out at him specifically for what CNN ultimately controls is engaging in the same sort of victim-blaming behavior that we accuse Lemon of doing.
The truth is that we are all – including the militants, the Hoteps, the Black Christians, the respectables, the conservatives, the progressives, the independents, the transcenders, and the anti-isms – trying to figure out how to break free in a system that offers us very limited options for actual freedom. And unless you were born “woke,” we are all recovering Uncle Toms. And each day we have to learn how to unravel and disconnect from some pretty regressive behaviors, attitudes, and traditions.
That includes Don Lemon.
And while I don’t give this Tom a pass and will continue to call him out when he is wrong, I will still regard him as my brother and give him enough space to grow. Who knows? He might come through for us one day in a very big way.
