Wheatley’s authenticity had to be attested by elite white men to be believed.

Evidence

Hardly believing an enslaved Black girl could fathom Greek and Latin, the eighteen men probably asked her to unpack the classical allusions in her poems. Whatever their questions were, Wheatley dazzled the skeptical tribunal of eighteen men. They signed the following assimilationist attestation: “We whose Names are under-written do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 241

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: the attestation framed Black capacity as needing white males’ certification — does this anticipate later IQ-test gatekeeping and the modern authenticity problem?