This twenty-seven page book was first published in 1990. In an era before the Internet, it still “went viral”— at least in lesbian and feminist communities in the US. How did that happen?
 
First, there is the author herself: Amoja Three Rivers—teacher, healer, craftswomon, elder, lesbian, force of nature.  Here is what she said about herself on her Facebook page:

I am an american-born African, Choctaw, Tsalagi, Ojibway Jew. I live in a magical 3-room rainforest with Schmuely, chatul katan sheli (my little cat). I love exploring the interesting sounds my mouth & throat can produce--like overtones, African yodels, melodic growls & throat singing. I'm into Judaism, buddhism, quantum physics, linguistics, speculative fiction, microbiology & history, especially Indigenous & African. Also, for brain-play, into dismantling social constructs like--time, space, race, money, boundaries & hierarchies. I LOVE music & dance of the Roma, the middle east, Africa, flamenco & salsa. I am one of the thousands of spiritual & cultural offspring of Michfest. And I need to know where to buy some med.-large realistic rubber(y) lizards & snakes. I'm serious. See rainforest ref. above.--Amoja Three Rivers

Three Rivers (or, alternate spelling “ThreeRivers”) traveled around the country, offering herstory presentations at festivals, conferences and colleges. With Blanche Jackson, she founded Market Wimmin, a cultural crafts and merchandising business, and the Accessible African Herstory Project. She also co-founded Maat Dompim Womyn of Color Land Project. And, of course, wherever she went she sold copies.
 
Second, there is the book itself: Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned. The book is a miracle of user-friendliness… starting with the title, “Cultural Etiquette.” It cut right through the bullshit of the day. White liberals, for fear of saying the wrong thing, often self-censored, forfeiting valuable opportunities for establishing dynamic alliances with people of color. Meanwhile, this silence was being filled by aggressive rhetoric from conservative, mainstream racists who were attempting—and who still attempt—to frame cultural competency as a pandering to “political correctness.”
 
Three Rivers radically shifted that polarized paradigm with the title of the book. Etiquette is defined as a code of polite behavior. She was telling us that saying the wrong thing need not be a permanent moral indictment after all, but  that it might just be a question of etiquette:

"Racism and the racial stereotypes it spawns are so subtly interwoven into the fabric of Western society that very often, even those with the best of intentions will display bad cultural manners. This does not necessarily mean one is a bad person. Sometimes people just don't know any better."--Amoja Three Rivers
 
It was possible for a person to be well-intentioned and ignorant, and that if one needed to go out and acquire the etiquette, this was no cause for shame or defensiveness. Furthermore, in addressing her book to the “well-intentioned,” she was assuming the best about us. Personally, I found that reassuring.  
 
The book is brief. Again, user-friendly. For some, it was an invitation, piquing curiosity and offering a key to and language for further discovery. Others would use it as a kind of travelers’ guide to other cultures. We could carry it with us, refer to it, read it in its entirety in just a couple of hours.

The book is organized into sections that build on each other: “What is Ethnocentrism and What Can I Take For It?,” “A Few Lies Laid Bare,” “Just Don’t Do This. Okay?” and so on. And the prose is conversational, but without mincing words:
 
Columbus didn’t discover diddly-squat. There were millions of Native Americans who have known for countless generations that what they were living on was land, and that where it was—was right here.--Amoja Three Rivers
 
Three Rivers walks her well-intentioned readers through spiritual appropriation, so-called “reverse racism,” separatism, assumptions, stereotypes, and double standards. Her epilogue is as direct, honest, and thoughtful as everything that came before:
 
Does reading this guide make you uncomfortable? Angry? Confused? Are you taking it personally? Well, not to fret. Racism has created a big horrible mess, and racial healing can sometimes be painful. Just remember that Jews and people of color do not want or need anybody’s guilt. We just wante people to accept responsibility when it is appropriate, and actively work for change.--Amoja Three Rivers.

Reading Cultural Etiquette enabled me to see much, much more clearly my ethnocentrism. The book prompted me to concrete action. I gained more confidence in my ability to be an accountable ally to Jewish people and to people of color, and, because of the paradigm that Three Rivers offered her readers, I lost the everlasting terror of “saying the wrong thing.”
 
Which leads me to that third reason for the popularity of the book: Word-of-mouth. Many of us began to buy multiple copies, whole bundles, to give to our friends. We shared it, we talked about it, we cited it. We wanted our friends to experience the same transformation that we had. It’s twenty-five years later, and I still feel the same zeal.
 
Amoja ThreeRivers died this week, surrounded by her many, many friends. She had been taking orders through the Cultural Etiquette Facebook page for the book. At this time, there are several of her friends and colleagues discussing the options for keeping the book in print and available. Check with the FB page (above), and I will also update this blog with info.

 PROLOGUE
 
As a child, I collected Classic Illustrated Comics, and every time there would be a new release, I would pester my mother to buy it for me. I remember the day in 1967 when the comic book adaptation of  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared on the drugstore shelf.  As usual, I asked my mother to buy the latest comic. When she saw the title, she suddenly became very frightened and, lowering her voice, she explained that it was a story that was very popular in the North, but that it was hated in the South. Born in Connecticut, my mother had fallen in love with a Southern sailor on leave in New York, married him, and moved to Virginia after the war.  Pegged as a Yankee, she had initially been viewed with suspicion and snubbed socially. Apparently, my mother was afraid that someone might see her now, twenty years later, buying a children’s comic book, and that this could destroy her hard-won acceptance into Richmond society.
 
Fast-forward nearly forty years. The university theatre department in the city where I live is in an uproar. There had been a public reading of the dramatic adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a collaboration between a drama lit class and a pop culture class. Some of the students felt that they had been compromised, because they had not been adequately informed about the historical context and controversy of the work before agreeing to participate.
 
I saw that reading… and here, as a playwright and an activist, is my reaction: 

Preaching to the choir is not a bad choice for a playwright. In fact, it can be a radical act if one is writing for a marginalized community who rarely see representations of themselves or their lives in the mainstream.
 
But what if a playwright wants to preach beyond the choir, to write a play for an audience that may actually be hostile to the message or paradigm being presented?
 
To answer that question, I am going to look at a play that is more than a hundred and fifty years old and still requires a trigger warning: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe and adapted by George L. Aiken.
 
Yes, I know that this play is considered the fountainhead of toxic stereotypes of African Americans that have poisoned the well of American drama and continue to seep into plays and films. I know that these stereotypes are so prevalent and so pernicious that the titular character’s name has become synonymous with “an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be complicit in the oppression of their own group.”

But, as a dramatist who attempts to effect social change, I cannot ignore the fact that this abolitionist play was being performed somewhere every single night, continuously, from 1852 until 1933-- by both African American and white theatres.  As a dramatist, I cannot ignore the fact that it was seen by three million people, ten times the number of the book’s first-year sales. Most of all, I can’t ignore that President Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” is supposed to have said, upon meeting Stowe, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?”

Apocryphal or not, the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its forty-two translations and four-generation track record, put the subject of abolition at the heart of the popular culture of its day.
 
Here is the irony: The very same dramaturgical strategies that enabled the play, back in the day, to preach so effectively beyond the choir are the reason why the play is vilified today.
 
African American writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote, “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” She did not say that the job of the writer was to make sure that whatever strategies she employed in this work would remain revolutionary two hundred years later.
 
Stowe and Aikins managed to make sabotage, destruction of property, escape, armed resistance, and passive resistance irresistible to a population that would be the targets of these actions. They made revolution irresistible.
 
How?

Let’s break it down by the categories:
 
1) Escaping. This is the least confrontational response, and therefore the one least threatening to white audiences. Stowe maximized this potential for identification by having her escapees legally married and light-skinned enough to pass. In other words, these characters would look like her audience. The couple has an infant son, and the family is threatened with forcible separation at a slave auction. The wife will be forced to submit to repeated rapes. Something we may forget today is that, up until the twentieth century, white audiences banned any representation of serious love between dark-skinned characters—just as they rejected the presence of Black actors in classical dramas. The denial of romantic or family ties was an ideology critical to the logistics of the slave auctions. This romantic, committed relationship at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in 1852. Stowe got away with it, only because she scripted it for light-skinned actors.
 
There is an adage in theatre that there is no right or wrong; there is only "boring" or "compelling." Aikins put Eliza’s flight across the semi-frozen Ohio River on the stage. With her pursuers and their dogs close behind, the distraught mother clutches her infant to her breast as she leaps to freedom from one chunk of ice to the next. Irresistible.

2) Sabotage and destruction of property. This was going to be a tough sell for anyone with servants—not just the enslavers. Clearly Stowe was going to need a different strategy than the one she used for escape. Audiences will not identify with the perpetrator of these actions, but they may be compelled to laugh with her. Stowe created a comedic character that today is considered one of the noxious stereotypes: Topsy.
 
Topsy is a wild child. She is paired with a racist, “Miss Grundy,” white, spinster stereotype. Her scenes are comprised of stock vaudevillian turns, where the working-class, down-to-earth stock character puts one over on their prissy and clueless, supposed “betters.” Topsy lies, cheats, steals, and intentionally destroys property… and audiences roar with delight every time she does. She gets an ovation for her standard defense: “I’m wicked, I guess.”
 
Topsy can be seen as a white fantasy of the unchristian savage, untamed and untameable, justifying the harsh abuse of enslavers. Both book and play, however,  derail that interpretation by making explicit that Topsy was sold away from her parents as an infant, “raised by a speculator, with lots of others.” If Topsy has no loyalties except to herself, it is her enslavers who are to blame. Audiences are not allowed to forget that she has intentionally been deprived of any intellectual or moral instruction, and subjected to emotional, physical, and mostly likely sexual abuse.

3) Armed resistance. Southerners, even non-enslavers, lived in terror of uprisings by captives. It was going to take more than skin shades or vaudeville to sell this to a national audience. In the book, Stowe resolves the issue by having the escaping husband push one of his pursuers off a cliff and then, with his wife’s urging, take the man for medical treatment to a Quaker settlement. Aikins must have realized that, if he built the scene effectively, the errand-of-mercy turnaround would give his audiences dramaturgical whiplash. Wisely, he departed from Stowe’s text.
 
Aikins pairs the escaping husband up with Phineas Fletcher, a white, working-class man who has recently converted to Quakerism in order to please his Quaker fiancée. Phineas is in the tradition of Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals,” and his struggle to follow the pacifist teachings of the Quakers is a source of ongoing mirth for the audience.  In the course of aiding George’s escape, the two men set up an ambush for their pursuers. George shoots one of his enemies, but audiences never know if the wound is fatal, because Phineas wrestles the man off the edge of a cliff. The killing is scripted as a moment of high comedy, because Phineas, mindful of his new religion, remembers to call out, “Friend, thee is not wanted here!” even as he heaves his enemy off the brink. White audiences roar their approbation.
 
What Aikins did was brilliant: The escaping captive shoots his enslaver, and does it onstage. The coup de grâce, however,  is delivered by a white man sworn to a life of non-violence. The audience can choose where to put their focus. It doesn’t hurt that the scene, set in a mountain pass, is staged like a Western melodrama.

4) Civil disobedience. This actually posed a greater threat to the enslavers than armed resistance, as Gandhi and King would have understood. Civil disobedience goes to the root of oppression, challenging the legitimacy of white supremacist doctrine and entitlement, and because of this, it would be the toughest sell of all.
 
Civil disobedience is no laughing matter, and so Stowe and Aikins turned to pathos. And hence the genesis of one of the most hated stereotypes in American drama: Uncle Tom.
 
Stowe and Eakins took pains to depict Tom as an enslaved man whose conversion to Christian ideals of loyalty, forgiveness, and meekness is absolute. His enslaver boasts that he can send Tom on errands to free states and count on him to return.  Tom appears to be the ultimate white fantasy of an utterly subservient person of color.
 
But what people forget today is that, for all his over-the-top deference and humility, Tom is murdered for defying orders in the name of  loyalty to a higher law. His first act of civil disobedience is refusing an order to whip an enslaved woman who is resisting the sexual advances of her enslaver. As a result, Tom is tortured. His second act is refusing to betray the escape plans of another enslaved woman who is faced with being sold away from her child. This time Tom is murdered. White notions of chivalry and Christian morality are pitted against audience members’ identification with being law-abiding citizens. When they approve of Tom’s defiance, they are assured that his disobedience is not motivated by self-interest or even disrespect. They are assured of this by the extravagant lengths to which Stowe went in characterizing Tom as a living saint.

The stereotype of Uncle Tom that has come down to us is a corruption of the original trope. Tom gave up his life to stand in solidarity with enslaved women of color whose oppressions were specific to their sex. 
 
The horrific sexual violation of African American women is the engine that drives the play. From Eliza’s flight to Topsy’s wildness to the actions that precipitate Tom’s murder, the book and play portray rape and women’s subsequent lack of ownership of their children as the great evils underlying the institution of enslavement. Too often the abuse of African American women has been entered as an historical footnote to the Black Freedom Movement, if entered at all.

2011 saw the publication of  Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. For the first time, there was a history book that wrote this violation back into the record. Few know that long before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. The previously unwritten history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a story of horrendous, ongoing sexual harassment and assault of Black women in these public conveyances.
 
Was this focus on women a passion of Stowe’s, a plea for historical accuracy, or a strategic device for recruiting audience outrage?
 
As a playwright, I come away from a study of this play with a different perspective on it, with a better idea of what it takes to preach beyond the choir, and the sobering realization that this preaching must engage with stereotypes and caricatures borne of my audience’s prejudice--in the risky hope of transforming them. This appears to be the price of making revolution irresistible.