Wheatley the Satirist Anonymous College

In early African-American literature, there is a consistent theme of gaining freedom through assimilation that as an idea slowly wilts and becomes militant as it continues to be ineffective in the black struggle for freedom and equality. Phillis Wheatley is the first canonical African-American female poet and she is able to write in this time period because her poetry is the opposite of critical. Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” demonstrates not just the conformity enforced upon early slaves, but also the immediacy of the indoctrination of slaves to white European religious philosophies and poetic rhetoric.

Wheatley wholeheartedly embraces the idea of Christianity in its basest understanding in that she uses the rhetoric of the bible to argue why she should be equal, and that is because she and other African descendants also “may be refin’d,” (Wheatley). Modernly it is an atheist habit to formulate philosophical and scientific argument against the basis of a Judeo-Christian god, this stems from the religious indoctrination perpetrated onto the masses in the early stages of America. This is exemplified by Jupiter Hammon, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, even the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior....