I kind of figured that when Larry Elder, the black conservative who had a radio talk show in Los Angeles, got a syndicated television talk show, somebody black would be on the show calling him an Uncle Tom.

Black conservatives are used to it by now. We figure that rather than debate us on the merits or flaws of our arguments, some black folks have no arguments at all. They go straight into “call him an Uncle Tom” mode.

When we point out that the fictional character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” died resisting, not being subservient to, a white man, it goes for naught. Our suggestion that these nitwits read John Oliver Killens’ “Black Man’s Burden” to get the correct literary analogy they’re so desperately seeking falls on deaf ears.

So I wasn’t surprised when Elder had a black man on his show accusing him of being an Uncle Tom. The attempt to root out black America’s “Uncle Toms” has been our obsession for years, so much so that we overlook another metaphoric literary figure who is doing some real damage: Bigger Thomas.

The character from Richard Wright’s “Native Son” — a novel which one critic said changed American culture forever when it was first published in 1940 — killed a white woman and then killed his black girlfriend. Much of “Native Son” involves the manhunt Chicago police engage in to catch Bigger Thomas, which Wright said was based on actual events.

In fact, Wright said the Bigger Thomas character was a compilation of several black men he had encountered in his life. All rebelled against the Jim Crow system Wright grew up with in the South. All flouted the law in some way. A few met with some very bad ends.

Today’s Bigger Thomases — that would be the drug dealers, gang bangers, stick-up boys, hood rats, thugs and criminals running rampant in our communities — may, like the Biggers of Wright’s day, be rebelling against society. It’s time for them to end that rebellion, because they’re also the ones raping our women, snatching purses from our grandmothers, murdering our youth and keeping our elderly prisoners in their own homes.

Bigger Thomas is wreaking far more havoc, creating far more chaos and doing far more damage in black America than Uncle Tom ever could.

If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — black America’s Uncle Tom-in-chief, for many of us — died tomorrow, the Bigger Thomases would still be here terrorizing, murdering, robbing and raping.

Wright himself predicted the proliferation — on an almost nuclear scale — of Bigger Thomases across America. In an introduction to “Native Son” called “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright wrote “… Bigger Thomas would loom as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future. I felt strongly that he held within him, in a measure which perhaps no other contemporary type did, the outlines of action and feeling which we would encounter on a vast scale in the days to come.”

Those days are now upon us. It wasn’t an Uncle Tom who broke into the Detroit home of our civil rights heroine Rosa Parks and terrorized her. It was a Bigger Thomas.

It wasn’t an Uncle Tom who tossed a firebomb into the home of the Dawson family in Baltimore and killed two adults and five children. It was a Bigger Thomas.

It wasn’t a bunch of Uncle Toms who beat Charles Young Jr. to death in Milwaukee two years ago. It was a bunch of Bigger Thomases, ranging in age from 10 to 14 years old, who brutally bludgeoned Young with everything but a kitchen sink — and that’s probably because a kitchen sink wasn’t available.

As if to prove Young’s lynching was no fluke, another group of Milwaukee’s Bigger Thomases struck again this year, beating a 14-year-old boy into a coma. There were no reports of any Uncle Toms anywhere on the scene.

It’s not our Uncle Toms who are responsible for black America’s homicide rate. It’s, as Wright predicted all those years ago, our Bigger Thomases.

Think about that the next time you get the itch to call any black person an Uncle Tom.