Analysis Of David Walker's Appeal To The Coloured Citizens Of The World '

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challenge them. Despite their efforts, the new racial hierarchy firmly excluded African Americans from all spheres of social and political life by the 1820s. Whites used biological determinism to rationalize the increasing impoverishment of their former slaves, absolving themselves of any social responsibility, past or present. Even African Americans, who had long refused to give in to White efforts to put a racial label on them, fell victim to essentialist notions of race. Additionally, instead of refreshing White New Englanders' memory of their own enslavement, Melish argues that African Americans became complicit in creating the amnesia surrounding their own slave past by focusing on the lot of their enslaved brothers and sisters in the South. They were literally "thought out" of the community, which increasingly defined itself as antithesis to the recalcitrant South—the prototype of a "white" republic built on "free" labor. African Americans had to confront racist attitudes even when they intended to challenge them. political and social equality. Dain argues that Black writers used the idea of Egyptian Blackness to counter this assumption by highlighting the historical achievements of Black people and their contributions to civilization. This allowed them to challenge the notion of degeneration and assert their own worth and potential as equal members of society.

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