Native Writers And Intellectuals Presented The Time

Raquel Spencer Antebellum black writers and intellectuals presented the time as one that not only required defending the people’s rights to merely exist as citizens in America but also desperately called for proving that blacks were even a part of the human race. With scientific racism emerging out of the 18th century enlightenment, European influences on racial classification had permeated the minds of white slavery advocates and intellectuals. By using techniques simliar to classifying the animal kingdom, racist ideology provided generous and universally accepted rationalization for the popular idea that black men and women were inherently inferior and had natural incapacities. This ideology was used to justify and popularize black†¦show more content†¦For example, environmentalist defenses of the unity of mankind projected that men all have the same human characteristics. â€Å"Rather than equal before god, men were equal before their environment. The fact that all men became da rkened by exposure to the sun was of a significantly different order than the fact that all men came to face the justice of God.† At this point arguments based on overarching spiritual equality of all men would become increasingly rare. In it’s plaee, black ethnology became the main defense used by black thinkers and writers. Black intellectuals on a broad spectrum such as Russwurm, Douglass, Smith, Washington, Pennington, and a plethora of others claimed ancestry to Egypt and Ethiopia. In claiming the glories of both ancient civilizations black writers intended to counter the belief that blacks did not and could not produce any poets, mathemeticians, or anything above servanthood-ready individuals. White counterarguments consisted of two ideas: the curse of Ham and that egyptians were not black, and if there were blacks they were servents. Through the 19th century white southerners often spoke of AAs as the children of Ham and did not invoke this genealogy to tie the b lack race to egypt. white people had identified the Hamites as the negro people and viewed their color as a curse. this view was popular when presenting the negro as inferior by nature and a natural slave. southern