Hidden Literacies

this rhetorical strategy

That said, the choice of this rhetorical strategy raises questions. After all, if dialect was often used to establish authority, it was usually by belittling, implicitly or explicitly, those it depicted as lacking the literacy and comparative sensibility of the writer. Here the subject is the writer’s child; the dialect, presumably, that which the child was learning in his own house. The humor of the notion that an eight-month-old could already spout the writings of Walt Whitman back to their notorious author (and have an opinion about national tariff policy) is offset by the very real racist challenge to Whitman’s stance as the poet of both slaves and masters. If Johnson hoped to tweak the Good Gray Poet, to establish a kind of fraternal equality between them, he did so by the unusual means of first paying homage (by naming his son after Whitman), and then throwing the poet’s own diction back in his face to justify racial hierarchy and a violent vision of manly friendship.

I can imagine many positions on the possible publication of this letter, from “please don’t” to a version of Toni Morrison’s stance in Playing in the Dark, in which she insists that these are pasts we have to confront, because the surest way to make it happen again is to leave the interpretive power over these documents in the hands of those whose vision of freedom does not include a vision of equality. My motivation is something like that, and a bit more.
 

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