Cial Intelligence And Identity In Phillis Wheatley's Poetry

Stained red by America's bloody birth, the 1770's was a period marked not only by the resolve of a nation's independence but also by the growing awareness of another kind of pigment—that of the skin. With the number of African-American slaves growing by the day, the 'superior' whites could no longer ignore the rising clamor of those they claimed possession over. These enslaved people had voices, and they were making it known that they knew the white man's language. One such voice was that of Phillis Wheatley, a young African girl turned slave and saved by the generosity of her owners. While not an outspoken advocate of slave rights, she was one of the first to hint that African-Americans could be more than just objects used for menial and mindless labor. Her poem "To
One of the most prominent decisions made in Wheatley's poetry is her straightforward declaration of her ethnic roots. In doing so, she both gains and loses powerful weapons of rhetoric. For instance, if she had instead presented her poems from the perspective of an anonymous writer, the audience would most likely have assumed the author to be a white male as they were the most published and credible sources of the time (). Instead, though, she manipulates her identity to provide unique advantages only her perspective can provide. While she has no control over her white contemporaries' perception of her as an African, she reshapes what those perceptions mean in the context of the poem. Immediately, she addresses the glaring controversy of her race to placate the automatic suspicions of the white readers. By being self-deprecating, she assumes the traditional role of African-American inferiority--a sort of unthreatening and complimentary offering of peace. Rather than claiming religious authority due to her perceived strength of faith, she chooses to cast herself into as a humble outsider. She takes little credit for her own abilities, claiming, "The muses promise to