"You may imagine the joy manifested by these poor Africans, when they heard one of their own color address them in a friendly manner, and in a language they could comprehend!"
About this Quote
The line wants you to feel uplift before you have time to interrogate what, exactly, is being uplifted. Tappan stages a scene of salvation-by-recognition: “poor Africans” are cast as a single, pitiable mass, and the emotional climax arrives when “one of their own color” speaks to them “in a friendly manner” and in a language they understand. The setup is almost cinematic: suffering bodies, then the warm shock of being spoken to as humans. It’s abolitionist sentiment, but filtered through a manager’s eye for morale and optics.
The intent is strategic empathy. By inviting the reader to “imagine the joy,” he recruits middle-class sentimentality as a political tool: if the enslaved can be shown as responsive, grateful, and legible, the anti-slavery cause gains persuasive force. But the phrasing also reveals a paternal architecture. “Poor” does more than describe material condition; it positions Tappan (and the presumed white reader) as the competent interpreter of Black feeling. Even the seemingly progressive emphasis on “their own color” carries a quiet assumption: Black people require a racially “matching” mediator to become intelligible, a reminder that the abolitionist imagination often still ran on segregated channels.
Context matters: Tappan, a Northern businessman and leading abolitionist, worked in a movement that mixed moral urgency with public relations. This sentence reads like a dispatch meant to validate a method and soothe an audience: look, communication happened; look, gratitude followed; look, our intervention is working. The power of the passage is also its hazard: it argues for Black humanity while keeping white authorship firmly in the director’s chair.
The intent is strategic empathy. By inviting the reader to “imagine the joy,” he recruits middle-class sentimentality as a political tool: if the enslaved can be shown as responsive, grateful, and legible, the anti-slavery cause gains persuasive force. But the phrasing also reveals a paternal architecture. “Poor” does more than describe material condition; it positions Tappan (and the presumed white reader) as the competent interpreter of Black feeling. Even the seemingly progressive emphasis on “their own color” carries a quiet assumption: Black people require a racially “matching” mediator to become intelligible, a reminder that the abolitionist imagination often still ran on segregated channels.
Context matters: Tappan, a Northern businessman and leading abolitionist, worked in a movement that mixed moral urgency with public relations. This sentence reads like a dispatch meant to validate a method and soothe an audience: look, communication happened; look, gratitude followed; look, our intervention is working. The power of the passage is also its hazard: it argues for Black humanity while keeping white authorship firmly in the director’s chair.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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