Phillis Wheatley, White Victimhood, and Black Belonging in the Age of The 1776 Report

Abstract

When insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, they were continuing a tradition of white Americans figuring themselves as victims, a narrative whose connection to the American Revolution would be crystalized in The 1776 Report, released just days later. This article argues that responsible teaching of Phillis Wheatley's poetry can reframe for contemporary students their understanding of the Revolutionary period, of African Americans' role in the nation, and of crucial issues still at the center of public debate. Wheatley's very existence as an enslaved Black woman poet at the nation's founding—one who was in literal conversation with the vaunted Founding Fathers, no less—gives the lie to the myth of a white national origin story. Made from within a space of belonging as a moral voice in a religious community, her critique of the new nation's most privileged casting themselves as victims reminds us to assess such claims skeptically and to bring the weight of history to bear on them. Reading Wheatley as a Revolutionary poet, I point out how Wheatley's identification with the Patriots was conditional, predicated on her wariness about white colonists' claims of "slavery" at the hands of the British and her full-throated critique of literal slavery. Drawing from Koritha Mitchell's notion of "homemade citizenship," the article emphasizes Wheatley's literary accomplishments not as efforts to counter racist notions of her intellectual limitations as expressed by Thomas Jefferson—as Henry Louis Gates has argued—but, rather, outlets to pursue her own genius and inventiveness, which she used to imagine an artistic space beyond Black victimhood. Study of Wheatley's oeuvre reveals clearly that critique of the nation has been part of the nation since its founding, and we need not fear it or label it un-American.