Uncle Rube on the Race Problem
Clara Ann Thompson’s poem, Uncle Rube on the Race Problem, uses examples of what Houston Baker calls “mastery of form” and “deformation of mastery” as a rhetorical strategy to commission the reader to see Rube’s strong racial standpoint and beliefs. The poem starts “in medias res,” right after Uncle Rube is asked how he would solve the race problem. The dialect poem then follows with a lengthy argument on racial questions asked by a group of whites to Rube, the first person narrator. Thompson uses Rube to manipulate the stereotypes whites had of blacks, and as a way to counter the oppression of her race via the minstrel mask or trope. These strategies are most prominently illustrated in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.Webster’s dictionary defines the word rube as an “unsophisticated country person, and not very intellectual” (Guralnik 648). Thompson lets the reader know the character of Uncle Rube by his name and his diction. In the first two stanzas, the reader is told about slave times where “de white man wus de lo’d,” (Thompson 322) and the abuse the slaves beheld by their masters. A couple lines later, Uncle Rube says the way to solve the Negro problem is “to let the bla
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1011
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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