This is a dense quote, but it essentially means that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is too sentimental, too cheesy, and too cliché to effectively portray the African American experience.

Baldwin starts off here by critiquing the use of sentimentality in the book. Sentimentality is the state of being extra nostalgic or affectionate about something. Baldwin defines the term here as a form “the ostentatious parading” of emotions. This is an opinionated definition, as the description “ostentatious” defines sentimentality as pretentious. This suggests that the use of so much nostalgia and emotion in the book was a deliberate way to show off and gain attention rather than an attempt to depict authentic reality.

Baldwin goes on to describe such use of sentimentality as “dishonest” meaning that it does not depict things as they really are. He argues that in getting so wrapped up in emotion, people who are sentimentalists actually play a role in covering up and perpetuating how bad and how inhumane some experiences are. Consider how simplistic and stereotypical the characters are in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe portrays African Americans as passive bystanders coping with difficult circumstances. This did inspire many people to critique of slavery, but Baldwin points out how it still failed to humanize African Americans as intelligent, capable people.