<<And you call Powell an Uncle Tom for no other reason than he is black.
<<If he were white he would not qualify.>>
Powell is a betrayer of his own people. I could call him a BOHOP, but very few people would know what that meant. "Uncle Tom" is good shorthand, which everyone gets the first time they hear it, and it also conveys the additional information that he is a black man and the people that he betrayed are the black people, specifically the black people of America. Yet you complain that "Uncle Tom" is racist language.
Perhaps you are technically correct, in that "Uncle Tom" contains a little too much information, racial information in fact, that is not absolutely necessary. To call O.J. Simpson "a murderer" would be politically correct, to call him a "black murderer" is giving some superfluous information relating strictly to race, and I think most people would rightly consider the addition of that superfluous information to be racist. After all, what's his blackness got to do with the fact that he's a murderer? It's additional information inserted gratuitously, and for sure it's not with the intention of casting O.J. or the race he allegedly belongs to in a favourable light.
(Where the person is being described in an admiring light and the superfluous fact of his or her race is gratuitously thrown in, with the obvious intention of pride or putting in a plug for the race, I suppose, again technically, that could be considered as technically "racist" but a well-intentioned racism meant to foster tolerance and harmony rather than discord between the races.)
I suppose if I wanted my reference to Powell to be completely free even of technical racism, I would refer to him in strictly race-neutral terms as a "betrayer of his own people." Rather than deal with the almost inevitable phony questions ("Which people? He's an American isn't he? How did he betray the American people?) that would follow such race-neutral terms, from the folks who love to deny that America is a racist nation and that many if not most Americans racist in varying degrees, I use "Uncle Tom" to make my meaning clear from the outset. It's also a very evocative phrase, it doesn't belittle or degrade blacks in general or their struggle for freedom and equality, but it does degrade and belittle those few blacks who, through their own convictions have come to genuinely believe the same kind of shit that conservative white Republicans believe. That's an insight that, but for the stubborness of BT, I would not have had, so, a thank-you and a tip o' the hat to BT for that.
Which raises the question, should a racist insult which offends only a small minority within a minority and which rightly chastises a particularly despicable and pernicious and much larger minority within the larger minority, be abandoned because of the insult to the smallest group concerned? I dunno, I'm starting to have my doubts, but overall, "Uncle Tom" is such a powerful indictment of men like Colin Powell that my common sense is telling me to keep on using it. Partly because in most cases the harm to blacks and the service to white racists is so obvious that no black man can rightfully claim the mantle of "genuine belief" in the rightness or correctness of the position. And partly because everyone "gets it."