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“Acting as Freemen”: Rhetoric, Race, and Reform in the Debate over Colonization in<i>Freedom's Journal</i>, 1827–1828
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2007
Year
Critical Race TheoryColonialismDecolonialityAmerican Colonization SocietyLawPublic RhetoricWhiteness InformsRacial StudyBlack ExperienceAfrican American HistorySocial SciencesJournalismRaceSettler ColonialismWhite SupremacyAfrican American StudiesAmerican IdentityCivil RightsPost-colonial CriticismAnti-racismBlack PoliticsAfrican American SlaveryColonial StudiesFreemen ”Anti-imperialism
This essay features a debate in Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, in 1827 and 1828, concerning the proposals of the American Colonization Society. Arguments favoring colonization illuminate the ways in which whiteness informs and constrains the discourse of white self-professed reformers about race, nation, and public rhetoric. As constitutive rhetoric, the anti-colonization arguments of contributors to Freedom's Journal construct African Americans as agents, citizens, and empowered public rhetors. The exchange reveals key, often hidden aspects of the discourses of whites and of people of color about race and reform in the antebellum period and in the contemporary public sphere.