Black Conciousness

Introduction

After the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement is the most important political phenomenon in the 20th-century history of African-American politics. In its origins, evolution, and consequences, the movement known as black power had profound and enduring consequences on the cultural, ideological, and structural relationships between blacks and whites in the post-civil rights era. The Black Power movement also profoundly altered the internal ethos and organizations of the black community; shaped its identity, consciousness, and political culture; and for a brief time helped to give rise to genuinely revolutionary ideas and organizations. The paper discusses and analyzes the poetry and poet in Black Consciousness.

Discussion

Phillis Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America

Phillis Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America” investigate extremely into the psyche of the adolescent African American slaves narrator who attempt to come to term with her being torn from her native African soil and being forcibly relocated to colonial America. The first quatrain sets the tone for most readings of the poem by seeming to parallel spiritual and physical rescue. The speaker's “mercy” was the underlying factor that took her from her home, her “Pagan land,” and brought her to a world centered upon “redemption [which she] neither sought nor knew.” The result of her resettlement, the narrator says, was her becoming aware “That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too.” This resulting understanding, no doubt, echoes the rationalization that many who brought slaves to the new world used to vindicate their actions.

The second and concluding quatrain moves Wheatley's meditation to a new realm, in which the narrator places herself and her race into context with the views of those who eventually enslaved them. Regardless of intention, the takers of slaves held the blacks in low esteem. To illustrate her point, Wheatley uses such terms as “our sable race,” (Lasky, p.89-95) “diabolic die,” and “black as Cain” as descriptors for those thrust into slavery. The perceptions depicted in the second quatrain seemingly intensify the significance of the situation presented in the first.

Taken together, these two quatrains set up a rhetorical paradigm by which many readers confront Wheatley and this poem and come away with the perception that Wheatley is writing a poem of gratitude, much in the vein of her many elegies that address important individuals who have passed from the scene but whose influence continues. In “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” (Renfro, p.127-132) Wheatley mourns the passing of freedom in spite of the superficial thanks expressed by the narrator.

The conflict between racial reality and perception is most vividly and artistically presented in Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America” when she uses such poetic devices as irony, italics, and first-person narration to express her unwillingness to be cast into a second-fiddle role. In order to magnify the discrepancy between the whites' perception of blacks and the reality of the situation (Renfro, p.127-132), Wheatley guardedly speaks of the good the whites have done in bringing blacks into the Christian ...