Daily Archives: January 11, 2022

When was America born? Youve probably heard the argument between the adherents of 1619 and 1776, but I suggest a different date: 1863. More specifically, Jan. 1, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

How could that be the birth of America? On the conventional understanding, the United States had existed for almost a hundred years by that time, with 15 presidents preceding Lincoln.

My answer is that an America existed, to be sure, but not our America. Maybe, as Lincoln claimed in the Gettysburg Address later in 1863, the Declaration of Independence brought forth a new nation in 1776. (Maybe because what the Declaration said it was creating was free and independent States.) But it was not this nation.

Why not? Our America is defined by our Constitution and our adherence to certain principles, perhaps most notably equality. We believe that the government should not discriminate unjustly it should not segregate people by race; it should not enslave them. Those principles are in our Constitution now. But pre-Civil War America did not follow those principles. They were not in its Constitution slavery was. They were not in the Declaration of Independence complaints about slave rebellions were.

What about all men are created equal? As it was understood in Jeffersons time, that phrase meant only that in a world without governments, no one had an obligation to obey anyone else. The Declaration went on to develop a theory about where legitimate political authority came from, and when it could be rejected. It was about relationships within a political community and had nothing to say about how that community should treat outsiders like the people enslaved by the men who signed the Declaration. According to the Supreme Court, under the Founders Constitution, those people could never become American citizens.

How did we start reading the Declaration differently, so that it condemned slavery? Simple: that was the work of abolitionists, not the Founders.

How did we switch from a Constitution that excluded Blacks, even if some states wanted to make them citizens, to one that gave citizenship to anyone born here, even if states wanted to exclude them? That story is more complicated, but it starts with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The story doesnt go quite the way you might think.

We celebrate the proclamation today for making the abolition of slavery one of the Union goals in the Civil War. True, it applied only to rebel areas not under Union control, but when it declared that those people would be forever free it showed that there would be no going back.

The end of slavery is incredibly important its a victory that would be codified in the 13th Amendment, in 1865. But it did not make Black people part of the political community, and it did not change our constitutional order.

More important, more transformative, was what the proclamation said about the formerly enslaved: that they would be received into the armed service of the United States. Military service has always been a path to citizenship, and for the formerly enslaved, it was again.

It is widespread Black citizenship that truly transforms America.

The defeated rebels did not want to accept Blacks as members of their political community. Only the Constitution could make them, and to do that it would have to be amended. The 14th Amendment, proposed in 1866, granted citizenship to everyone born in the United States including at its heart those who had risked their lives to defend the nation. But the former Confederate states rejected it, and there was no way to get the required three-quarters of states to ratify. By 1867, the 14th Amendment appeared to be dead.

Congresss solution was revolution from above. The Reconstruction Acts wiped out the recalcitrant state governments, put the states under military control, and required them to ratify in order to regain their seats in Congress. This shattering of the Founders Constitution Reconstruction is what made our America. We forced the Southern states to remain in the Union, and we remade their societies against their will. That is a rejection of the Declaration, which was about independence and the consent of the governed. It is a new nation.

We celebrate the 14th Amendment today, as we should. It is what protects our right to equality, what gave us landmark decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. But we must not forget that we only got the 14th Amendment because it was necessary to protect the rights of the new Black citizens. And what made Black citizenship inevitable was the military service first announced in the Emancipation Proclamation.

As we celebrate a New Year, with hope that the great American experiment may continue, we must remember how we first started on the path of liberty and equality. A small number of brave men and women risked their lives to fight for the rights we now hold dear not Revolutionaries fighting the British in 1776, but Black Americans fighting Confederates in 1863. That is the moment a nation dedicated to equality was conceived.

Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. He is author of The Nation that Never Was: Reconstructing Americas Story.

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Birth of our America isn't when you think | TheHill - The Hill

There is a long history of right-wing forces fighting against progressive educational curricula. Now, scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley are working to level the playing field against the moneyed political interests behind the attacks.

Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in mid-December, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced new legislation that allows parents to sue schools for teaching critical race theory. You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didnt want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,said DeSantis, a political ringleader in the latest chapter of the United States culture war. In using a quote from Dr. King to justify an attack on curricula that uplifts racial justice, the Republican governor inadvertently created a strong case for why critical thinking on the history of race and racism in the U.S. is necessary.

History professor Robin D. G. Kelley is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains that he came into the profession at the height of a battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political correctness. And although hes lived through decades of conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the 2020s as dangerous times.

Kelley sees right-wing attacks on CRTwhat he considers an umbrella term for the teaching of any kind of revisionist or multicultural historyas a measure of the success communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

The most recent movement for such education can be traced to the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View, were intended to counter the sharecropper education received by so many African Americans and poor whites. In a civil rights history lesson created for Teaching for Change, Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40 such schools centered on a progressive curriculum designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf. In 1968, after months of pressure from student activists, San Francisco State University established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.

A movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such education is now standard fare as part of required college courses. California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education, becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to require high schoolers to enroll in ethnic studies courses in order to graduate.

Leading African American scholar Kimberl Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, coined the term critical race theory and co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to define race as a social construct and provide a framework for understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in a New York Times article that CRT, originally used by academics and social scientists to analyze educational inequities, is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.

Critical race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the form of multi-pronged legislative restrictions and even bans, as well as firings of teachers accused of teaching biased histories.

Kelley sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate any education that actually reckons with the history of American slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity. Reflecting again on the 80s, he says the attacks on ethnic studies, culture, and race didnt only come from the Right. In fact, he says, they also came from liberals, from the Left, and from those saying were not paying enough attention to class [struggles].

Kelley cites classic liberal fatigue against ongoing demands for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, We already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation, what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?

A case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing war on CRT is a new venture called the University of Austin, Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an op-ed in the Times, cited unpopular ideas, such as Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. She expressed dismay that such an opiniongenerally considered a racist oneis shunned by many academics.

To counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATXs founders say they are devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth and are promoting a curriculum that will include the Forbidden Courses centering on the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.

As if to underscore Kelleys warning about liberals joining the right-wing culture war, the nascent universitys board of advisors includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former President Barack Obamas economic adviser, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Kelley sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness and those centered on CRT today. The Right has far more political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and passing legislation on whats called critical race theory, he says.

Right-wing narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a grassroots effort led by parents concerned about bias in their childrens education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work behind the scenes. The watchdog group Open Secrets recently exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part of a network of established dark money groups funded by secret donors stoking the purportedly organic anti-CRT sentiment.

Additionally, CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz exposed how business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped fund attacks on CRT and that it is expected to be a centerpiece of the GOPs campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

In contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed in opposition to CRT, the Marguerite Casey Foundation each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like Kelley, to counter the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements.

The Foundation chose six scholars whom it describes as doing leading research in critical fields. Those include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are anathema to anti-CRT forces.

Kelley, who was named one of the foundations 2021 Freedom Scholars, agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge White supremacist and patriarchal histories.

Going beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social justice movements that are thriving. Were beginning to break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power, [which] begets radical feminism, says Kelley, citing grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past 50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention, such as the Third World Womens Alliance, the Boggs Center, the Combahee River Collective, The Red Nation, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Just in the last two decades, were seeing so many amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak, says Kelley.

He is heartened by what he calls new scholarship that is thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers, giving way instead to the political and intellectual work of those who have a different vision of the future.

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Full Surrogacy Now:Feminism Against Familyby sophie lewisverso, 224 pages, $26.95

In our dyspeptic online discourse, its relatively easy to write something that you know will tickle the outrage glands of your intended audience. From that perspective, youd think reading Sophie Lewiss Full Surrogacy Now for Americas foremost journal of religion and public life might be an easy gig.

A truly egalitarian feminism, Lewis argues, must extend the feminist challenge to sex stereotypes all the way to the origins of life itself. As long as we believe theres a special bond between women, gestation, and the desire to care for the resulting baby, the sexes can never be exactly equal. So all these must be eliminated. Doing this, she suggests, will open a space for new, communitarian forms of family unconstrained by gender, embodiment, or oppressive bourgeois norms.

From even the most milquetoast Christian perspective, this argument violates so many foundational beliefs that it would be a straightforward matter to whip my esteemed readers into righteous rage. But Full Surrogacy Now merits more considered engagement than this, for it offers an insight into a worldview that today boasts considerable cultural cachet.

Imagine, if you will, that your intellectual tradition and social circle all believe human nature to be fake news: a mystification wielded cynically to naturalize systems of oppression. Imagine you see all cultural, social, physiological, and historical patterns as prima facie evidence of this apparatus, entrenched and bedded in through the ages via economic, political, and physical violence.

If you believed that, you might wonder: Given that this is all contingent, could we not do better? Could we imagine a kinder human society, freed from the monstrous, unnecessary weight of so-called human nature and the oppressive systems it naturalizes? Could we but achieve this, life might blossom into a polyphony of free-flourishing new forms.

These premises, or something very like them, underpin much progressive thought today. Full Surrogacy Now is no exception, situating itself in a tradition of cyborg feminism dating back to the dawn of our current age of reliable mass medical intervention in fertility, with the arrival of the contraceptive pill and legal abortion.

Lewis draws on Shulamith Firestone, whose Dialectic of Sex (1970) envisaged women liberated from reproduction by mechanical gestation and socialized child-rearing. She explores Firestones legacy in the work of Donna Haraway, whose Cyborg Manifesto (1985) calls for human/machine hybrid visions of personhood and feminist liberation to meet the digital age. Lewis develops this techno-optimist strand of feminism, in which medical advances are envisaged as capable of freeing all humansbut especially womenfrom those inconvenient constraints of embodiment that hold us back.

Lewiss argument is not that we should embrace surrogacy as practiced under capitalism. Rather, she draws on Firestone and Haraway to argue that technology enables us to seize not just the means of production but also of reproduction, for a radical liberatory program. And the way to do so is by treating the surrogate as the central figure in reproduction, thus shifting pregnancy from the pre-political to the sphere of work. For if all gestation, not just that of surrogacy, is work, then it has no inherent or immoveable gender and thus paves the way for a final, radical uncoupling of biological sex and social gender.

With the link between gestation and womanhood dispatched, it becomes easier to denature the supposedly equally pre-political bonds of family. This is an essential project, as Lewis sees it, for Lewis stands here in the Marxian tradition of family abolition, arguing that communist struggle begins, quite literally, at home.

The claims made upon us by the supposedly pre-political affinities of family are, from this viewpoint, a core part of the systems of oppression that keep us down. The very idea of instinctive or given love is not natural but only appears so, to the advantage of capital, and of white bourgeois capitalist women, and to the detriment of everyone else.

In search of a love that transcends exclusionary affinities, she argues for liquefaction even of those affections and loyalties that are grounded in blood kinshipor, as she puts it, capitalisms incentivization of propertarian, dyadic modes of doing family. This can, in her view, be achieved by centering the provisional, de-gendered, denatured, often marginalized or otherwise ambiguous surrogate gestator. This achieved, we can dismantle the stratified, commodified, cis-normative, neo-colonial apparatus of bourgeois reproduction, in favor of gestational communism: a world where babies are not the particular obligation of family units, but universally thought of as anybody and everybodys responsibility.

A pivotal illustration of how certain Lewis is of the rightness of this task comes in an anecdote, where she recounts asking her father as a child whether hed still love her if she turned out to be the milkmans progeny. She fully expected him to say Of course, but received instead stony, awkward silence. Lewis recounts being so devastated by what this implied that for the rest of the drive, I could not speak. Implicitly, the instinctive, unconditional love of a parent for his or her genetic children is reframed as something capricious, exclusionary, and unjust.

Instead of being the foundation for life in common, to Lewis the embodied, particular solidarity of family replicates in microcosm the loyaltiesand bordersof a nation. And if global justice demands that national borders be dismantled, so too the borders of the family must fall. She thus begins from a relatively familiar feminist call to revalue care, as a form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, only to reframe all forms of care as in a sense forms of surrogacy.

For Lewis, this metaphor of surrogate care should embrace what we have in common across not just biological but political borders, and then return the dream of borderlessness to the intimate domain of family as a solvent. She cites her own friendship networks as a model for what might come to being in the wake of this shift: a polymaternally held warmth of aspirationally universal queer love, populated by beautiful mutants hell-bent on regeneration, not self-replication.

Where babies are still created, it would be via queerer, more comradely modes of reproduction than the bourgeois familythough this vision gives little attention to what any ensuing children might themselves want or need. She notes only that there is no evidence that a childhood spent out of proximity from the womb one originated from correlates with unhappiness. This may be so, though she offers no reference. But the question is less which womb gestated a baby than it is the potential dissonance between her hopeful vision of gestational communism and the elsewhere well-documented infant instinct to form an attachment to a primary caregiver and vice versa.

The most fully realized historical attempt at gestational communism to date was probably the Israeli kibbutzim, many of which raised children in separate childrens houses. The last of these closed in 1997, under the instigation of mothers whod grown up in those conditions and refused to let their babies experience the same. In other words: The principal obstacle to gestational communism is particularistic love, an emotion grounded in the attachment instinct observed not just in humans, but numerous other species as well.

Lewis has no children nor plans to have any, and states cheerfully that she is not really thinking of children. But never mind the evidence on infant attachment; theres no such thing as human nature, and we can thus safely assume that there exist no infant developmental needs that arent reducible to the cumulative weight of patriarchal and capitalist ideology.

Lewis is a skilled, mercurial, and often witty prose stylist. Taken on its own terms, Full Surrogacy Now is an elegant and well-written text. And if you believe theres no such thing as human nature, its vision for family life is a logical extension of egalitarian ideals into new territory.

The principal obstacle to her utopia is the danger that human nature might not be a self-serving invention of white cisheteropatriarchy after all, but an irreducible fact of our existence. And if, in fact, human nature does exist, Lewiss book is to be condemned for the idealistic coloration it affords what would then be a vision straight out of a horror movie: the technologically-enabled push to demolish all bonds of given, unconditional loveeven of a mother for her baby.

Doing so in the name of freedom and desire, with no regard for what that baby might need, would be to frame a dog-eat-dog world of selfishness, force, loneliness, and caprice as one of infinite richness, possibility, and satisfaction. As with the free-market optimists of the 1980s and 1990s, this vision ignores the role played by norms, constraints, and givens in shielding the weakest among us from predation by the strong. Its utopian sleight of hand is thus profoundly neoliberal in spirit.

This neoliberal drive for deregulation of human nature is already at work today, in pursuit of a world in which all biological givens and relationships are opt-in, and none ever command special loyalty. Marriages may be dissolved if they are merely boring; bodies may be remodeled at will; parents have no special duty to or authority over their children. In this world the only argument against commercial surrogacy is a critique of capitalism, and infants can safely be entrusted to a string of faceless caregivers without harming their development. Underpinning all this is a vision of human biology as radically plastic, where all of us are hybridized blends of human and machine. I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is utopian.

Mary Harrington is a columnist atUnHerd.

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Return of the Cyborgs | Mary Harrington - First Things

Most Rev. John C. Wester, Archbishop of Santa speaks at a virtual press conference Tuesday morning. Screenshot/Los Alamos Reporter

BY MAIRE ONEILLmaire@losalamosreporter.com

Archbishop John C. Wester early this morning released his pastoral letter Living in the Light of Christs Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament and later held a livestreamed press conference to discuss the letters contents.

During the press conference Archbishop Wester said for him personally the time is now for his letter because when he came to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, he saw right away the disparity here and the challenge we have as New Mexicans.

Here is where the nuclear arms race in many ways began the manufacture of nuclear armaments and having been in Japan and seeing the devastation that was caused by them. I think theres that sense and again its such an important topic that we really cant dally, he said. The Los Alamos National Labs are beginning already to take in money from the federal government to build these new pit cores for the nuclear bombs and theyre just expanding now and several of the offices have opened up in Santa Fe.

Archbishop Wester said he felt there was an urgency brought by Pope Franciss talk in Hiroshima about nuclear weapons and because of the expansion of the work being done at LANL right now.

I think its extremely timely. I think its clear that were all entering into a new, second arms race that is far more dangerous than the first, really, and with far more devastating consequences. Its clearly that the machinery for perpetuating this whole nuclear arms race is moving on. Clearly the tensions internationally with Russia, China and other nations, the possibility of terrorist attacks, rogue use of the bombs, these things are all imminent, he said.

Its one of those things we dont think about because the nuclear armaments are hidden. Theyre all in big bunkers and underground and we dont see them ever, but theyre there and theyre very real. I think the urgency is clear. We need to initiate the conversation now, Archbishop Wester said.

In his summary of the pastoral letter, he recalls traveling to Japan and visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2017.

It was a somber, sobering experience as I realized that on August 6, 1945, humanity crossed the line into the darkness of the nuclear age. Historically, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe has been part of a peace initiative, one that would help make sure these weapons would never be used again. I believe it is time to rejuvenate that peace work. he said.

We need to sustain a serious conversation in New Mexico and across the nation about universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament. We can no longer deny or ignore the dangerous predicament we have created for ourselves with a new nuclear arms race, one that is arguably more dangerous than the past Cold War., Archbishop Wester continued. In the face of increasing threats from Russia, China, and elsewhere, I point out that a nuclear arms race is inherently self-perpetuating, a vicious spiral that prompts progressively destabilizing actions and reactions by all parties, including our own country. We need nuclear arms control, not an escalating nuclear arms race.

He said the Archdiocese of Santa Fe has a special role to play in advocating for nuclear disarmament given the presence of the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories and the nations largest repository of nuclear weapons at the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

At the same time, we need to encourage life-affirming jobs for New Mexicans in cleanup, nonproliferation programs, and addressing climate change. Pope Francis has made clear statements about the immorality of possessing nuclear weapons, moving the Church from past conditional acceptance of deterrence to the moral imperative of abolition. Instead of just a few hundred nuclear weapons for just deterrence, we have thousands for nuclear warfighting that could destroy Gods creation on earth. Moreover, we are robbing from the poor and needy with current plans to spend at least $1.7 trillion to modernize our nuclear weapons and keep them forever, Archbishop Wester said.

He noted that the Catholic Church has a long history of speaking out against nuclear weapons.

The Vatican was the first nation state to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As Pope Francis declared, We must never grow weary of working to support the principal international legal instruments of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, including the Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. It is the duty of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, the birthplace of nuclear weapons, to support that Treaty while working toward universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament, Archbishop Wester said.

The Archbishops press conference may be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHS2C1wIBeQ

The pastoral letter in its entirety may be read at: https://archdiosf.org/documents/2022/1/220111_ABW_Pastoral_Letter_LivingintheLightofChristsPeace_Official_a.pdf

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Archbishop Wester Says Urgency Of Nuclear Disarmament Conversation Is Clear - Los Alamos Reporter

A first edition of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), written while the poet was enslaved to John Wheatley of Boston. The book has a brown leather cover, the original Morocco spine label and a frontispiece featuring a portrait of Phillis by Scipio Morehead.

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; background: VL1 / Shutterstock

Before Phillis Wheatleypublished her renowned collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, shed had to withstand an interrogation by 18 men deemed the most respectable characters in Boston. Their task was to determine whether an enslaved girl, estimated to be about 18 or 19 years old at the time, had in fact written the poems herself, given widespread disbelief that a person like herAfrican, Black, female, youngcould deliver such exquisite words. She passed the inspection with flying colors, the historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. says in his 2003 book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.

Born in present-day Senegal and Gambia and sold from there into bondage, Phillis arrived in the Boston docks in July 1761, likely 7 or 8 years old. The slave ship that brought her was the Phillis, which became her first name. As was the standard at the time, her surname was taken from her enslaver, a wealthy Boston merchant named John Wheatley, who intended Phillis to serve his wife, Susanna.

The young girl showed remarkable intellectual promise, and the Wheatleys provided her with instruction in several languages. She became proficient in the traditional Greek and Latin texts by age 12 and fell in love with the English poet Alexander Pope, modeling her own work after his. At just 13, she became the first published African American poet whenRhode Islands Newport Mercury paper ran her poem about a near-shipwreck in 1767 (Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind / As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind?).

As Phillis prominence grewher 1770 elegy for the Englishman George Whitefield, the influential early Methodist, was first published and sold by the Boston-born printer Ezekiel Russellthe Wheatleys sought a publisher for an anthology of her work. Yet Susanna Wheatley received no responses when she ran advertisements in the Boston papers in 1772, so the family pursued publishing options in Britain.

Phillis had accompanied John and Susannas son, Nathaniel, to London in 1771, where shed encountered a series of impressive English patrons who took an interest in her work. Among them was Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who supported abolition and was a patron of Rev. Whitefield, whom Wheatley had eulogized. The countess solicited the London publisher Archibald Bell to review the rest of the poets work. Bell said he would publish Wheatley but required proof that shed written the poems herself. Thus, when she and Nathaniel returned to Boston, Wheatley faced her literary trial before those 18 arbiters, chosen for their status as gentlemen. Their attestation of the poems authenticity was included in the book, published nearly 11 months after the inquiry.

Likely under pressure from the poets wealthy English patrons, following the books publication, John Wheatley emancipated her. She sought to make a living through her writing, but the Revolutionary War intervened, diverting some of her patrons resources elsewhere. But her 1773 collection has continued to fascinate and delight successive generations with its themes of faith and salvation, wisdom and ignorance, enslavement and freedom. The poet Kevin Young, director of the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture, says Wheatleys poems demonstrate that she was deeply attuned to the concerns of her day, often using allegory from her classics training, yet with a perspective inseparable from her African heritage and her experiences as a Black woman.

She often embodies...these female gods and muses she invokes, Young says, referring to Wheatleys use of Greek mythological imagery. Shes also protesting in many ways. When shes talking about Prometheus chained to the rock, shes thinking about bondage. Shes thinking about creativity in bondage and the fire of existence. As she writes in one poem:

Imagination! who can sing thy force?Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Currently on view at NMAAHC, a much-loved edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, with its brown leather cover and the occasional ink stain, reminds us why Wheatleys words have persevered. The remainder of her life was undoubtedly tragicwithout sponsors, she was unable to publish a proposed second anthology, and she lost multiple children in infancy after her marriage to John Peters, a free Black man. By her death in 1784 at just 31, she was impoverished and largely forgotten. Still, it remains deeply inspirational that, as Young says, Wheatley wrote her way into freedom.

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