Words as Weapons
The Weaponization of Language in Colonial Literature
“Language has never been neutral; it can be a weapon of destruction or of reclamation”.
In colonial journals, the “other” is defined by what sets them apart from the Eurocentric ideal. The ultimate goal of creating the “other” is to rob the subject of personhood and portray them as a threat or subhuman. To achieve this goal, weaponized language employed metaphors and images of “savagery” to depict Black people as animalistic and naturally inclined to subjugation. This seminar paper examines how 17th and 18th-century colonial literature used language to create racial hierarchies and used religious rhetoric to justify prejudiced ideas and the system of chattel slavery. Colonial journals used “othering” to separate settlers from those they enslaved, preceding the 18th-century shift toward pseudoscientific racial categorization. This rhetorical and linguistic strategy was not a coincidence, but a deliberate system created to reconcile Enlightenment ideals of liberty and self-reliance with the institution of slavery.
American colonization was the result of a deeply paradoxical mindset: the simultaneous emergence of “universal” freedom and the expansion of inhumane chattel slavery. The elite of the colonial era not only reinforced these opposing forces with chains, but they also found a new weapon in language. Settlers developed a meticulous process of “othering” built on colonists’ journals and the change in religious rhetoric of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In his 1999 speech, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel defined this particular phenomenon through the lens of the dangers of indifference, asserting that “indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction” (Wiesel). More than just a passive result of happenstance, this reduction was an intentional strategic employment of linguistics. From religious justification to hierarchies born out of pseudoscience, weaponized language created dehumanizing images of Black men, women, and children that have informed and shaped the social, political, and economic circumstances of the Black community in America since the arrival of the first slave ship upon its shores. This rhetorical strategy created a distance in morality, dividing the “Self” and the “Other” through indifference so pervasive that the complete dehumanization of a people became legally and socially normalized.
The Enlightenment Paradox and Linguistic Dehumanization
The 18th-century, known as the “Age of Reason”, is defined by its philosophy of the Enlightenment that emphasized the inalienable rights of men. American colonialism, however, stood as an audacious contradiction, as the engineers of this “universal” liberty were also the beneficiaries and active reinforcers in the expansion of the chattel slavery system. In The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, David Brion Davis argues that this was a “profound intellectual and moral tension” that necessitated an advanced system of “othering” to reconcile (Davis). To preserve the integrity of American democracy, the elites of the era redefined the image of the enslaved as outside the Enlightenment definition of “humanity”.
Reason was the main weapon in this linguistic repository. According to Enlightenment philosophy, reason was the requirement for the “universal” rights of man. Thus, colonial era literature began to depict Black people as completely devoid of reason in capability and capacity. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, founding father Thomas Jefferson exemplifies this strategy, employing pseudoscience to note that “in memory [Black individuals] are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior” (Jefferson). He framed this as a “natural” observation rather than as prejudice by using Enlightenment language of empiricism and observation to justify racial hierarchy. He then concludes that the inferiority of Black individuals is not only a byproduct of their condition, but also a “distinction which nature has made”, positioning the enslaved in a biological definition separate from the qualifications of the “natural rights” that he wrote into the nation’s Declaration of Independence.
The colonial era was marked by a pivot from 17th-century religious justifications to the biological “othering” of secularity. Earlier, New England Puritan clergyman and scholar Cotton Mather argued in favor of the justification of slavery as it contributed to bringing the “Heathens” to Christ in The Negro Christianized. Thinkers of the Enlightenment were confronted with the problem of the spread of Christianity among the enslaved; as religion became less of a marker for the “Other”, language then needed to focus on physical and intellectual characteristics. In White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan explains that the “savage” was not only the non-Christian but the “biologically distinct”. This is demonstrated in the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which codified “otherness” through the language of property and ownership as the law erased the identity of the enslaved and defined them as “chattel”, a term used for livestock.
The linguistic shift created the perilous indifference that Wiesel warns about as the ultimate weapon of othering. William Byrd II chronicles the brutality waged against those he enslaved in his Commonplace Book next to his notes of Greek philosophy and prayers, an exemplar of absolute cognitive dissonance. The language he uses turns staggering violence into an everyday mundanity, a “correction” rather than cruelty on his fellow man. It reduces the “Other” to an “abstraction”, yet it did not disrupt his Enlightenment sensibilities. The crux of the dangers of weaponized language is that it allows oppressors to perpetuate the falsehood of “Reason” and “Virtue” as they simultaneously participate in and benefit from a system of utter and total dehumanization.
Quintessential to the justification of chattel slavery at this time is Jefferson’s “Query XIV” in Notes on the State of Virginia. He opens his analysis by situating himself as a distant observer of the “natural”. In his observation, “The first difference which strikes us is that of colour”, the word “strikes” frames his racist lens as a natural fact that is forced upon his own rationality. This insidious rhetorical maneuver allows for a shift in agency that implies that Jefferson is not choosing to “other” Black people, just merely taking a record of a biological fact. He lists differences in physicality, the lack of European “flowing hair,” and the “more elegant symmetry of form”. Here, he has weaponized aesthetic characteristics to justify the subjugation of an entire people, reaching even further to suggest the “Other” as a departure from the ideal definition of humanity.
At the core of his paradox is his assessment of the human mind. While he describes the enslaved as “brave” and “adventuresome”, he then attributes these qualities to a “Want of fore-thought”, effectively denying the enslaved the capacity for “Reason”, the qualifying trait for citizenship. He writes, “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of size or design in their painting or sculpture” (Jefferson). He dismisses the creativity and intellect of the Black population, erasing their agency and reducing their lived experiences to pragmatic data that disregards the intellectual capacity and depth that would grant them membership into the “we” that he penned in his political documents. He effectively demonstrates the indifference that feeds weaponized language by reducing the “Other” to a natural and biological abstraction, transforming the revocation of their liberty into a necessary evil rather than a moral atrocity.
Jefferson reaches the apex of “othering” when he compares the Black individual to the “Oran-ootan”, implying that Black men prefer white women just as “the Oran-ootan has an upright preference for the women of our country over those of his own” (Jefferson). This is the most violent example of weaponized language in his text. It positions the enslaved in a taxonomic categorization between the human and the ape. Consequently, he resolves the Enlightenment paradox; if the “Other” is not fully biologically human, then the “university” rights and liberty of man do not apply to them.
The linguistic shift from religious to scientific othering reinforces racial hierarchy. In Race in North America, Audrey Smedley explains that Jefferson was not passively expressing prejudiced ideas; he was also inventing a racialized worldview that would use scientific language to build a permanent and lasting foundation for chattel slavery. Mary Louise Pratt argues that Jefferson is employing the “Imperial Gaze” (Pratt) as he views the enslaved as a natural specimen, thus developing a “contact zone” where Jefferson, as the surveyor, wields the power to define the surveyed, the enslaved. Jordan argues that as the Revolution drew near, Americans grew terrified that their liberty would be contaminated. Jefferson’s “Query XIV”, then, was an attempt at protecting the “purity” of the republic by linguistically erasing the “Other” from the qualifying population. While Jefferson employed Enlightenment language to create a biological hierarchy, he was actually building upon a foundation of Puritan rhetoric laid by earlier ministers who had become experts in using language to define humanity.
Where Jefferson weaponized the concept of “Reason”, Mather weaponized the “Word”. His text addresses the tension between the Christian obligation to spread the gospel and the economic pursuit of human property. Mather’s rhetoric depends on the strategic linguistic differentiation between the spiritual and physical. He argues that baptism does not impact the legal status of an individual, that “Your Christian-Servant will be a Better Servant, for being Christian” (Mather). He redefines “Freedom” as a spiritual concept, positing that the “Other” possesses a soul “blackened by sin” yet capable of being “washed white by the blood of the Lamb,” thereby creating a hierarchy in which spiritual equality justified physical inequality. Mather depicts the enslaved as spiritual children or servants who naturally rely on the governance of the white Christian. Salvation, then, is used to mask the intention of subjugation.
The Moral Architecture of Religious “Othering”
17th and 18th-century writers used theology as a tool of division to separate the human from the sub-human. At this time, the “Other” was not yet signified racially; it was a spiritual category: the Heathen. At the turn of the 18th-century, the religious distinction transformed into a moral infrastructure weaponized to reinforce chattel slavery. Colonial writers were able to transform the Bible into a manual for control by invoking divine providence and “natural” order.
The roots of American “othering” are found in the Puritan concept of “Covenant”. In John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity”, he established a binary worldview of the “City on a Hill” and the “heathen wilderness” (Winthrop). Here, he defines the colonist as a “Saint”, thereby defining the “Other” by their lack of divine covenant. He refers to the “Other” as a “providential hurdle” and an “instrument of Satan” instead of loving his neighbor as himself, as the Bible instructs. The disregarded theology made way for the legal codification of enslavement.
Mather’s text reveals another paradox: the imperative of winning souls to the Body of Christ threatened the enslaver’s property. In his argument for the case of baptism creating better servants, he employs the “othering” of the Black body to maintain the facade of saving the souls of the “miserable” and “dark” subhumans who could only find the path to “light” through completely submitting to a Christian master. Where Christianity was once a tool for liberating lost souls, it was now a “bridle” for the animal-like characteristics that colonists attributed to justify the condition of the enslaved. Mather’s choice of language created a “Hell without fires” that communicated to the enslaved that their earthly suffering was a divine necessity for salvation (Pierce).
It is this same misappropriated religious rhetoric that allowed Jefferson’s biological racism. When Mather uses descriptions such as “washing the soul white”, he is invoking a color-coded image that reinforces biological whiteness (Battalora). The religious “othering” of the 17th-century provided the moral language for writers to claim Blackness was a “mark of Cain”, an unerasable sign of spiritual rejection. Similarly, Mather’s public writing on the “High Theology” of the “Better Servant” is demonstrated in Byrd’s private journal. Byrd writes about “religious duties” such as reading scripture in Hebrew or Greek alongside “domestic duties” such as beating those he has enslaved. The language he uses puts that dangerous indifference into action, and his false theology prevents him from recognizing his violence as sin.
Josiah Priest’s 1843 text, Slavery, as it Relates to the Negro, or African Race, is a demonstration of the lasting impact of weaponized language. He expands on Mather’s religious justification of “othering” and adds the marker of physical appearance as a reason for subjection, “intended to separate the race from the rest of mankind” (Priest). His main claim was that at the time of the “Curse of Ham”, God altered the physical makeup of Ham’s descendants to suit them for lifelong labor. This linguistic manipulation is lethal to its victims. Framing race or skin color as a mark of divine intention frees the colonist and enslaver of moral responsibility. If racial hierarchy is divinely ordained, the suffering of the enslaved becomes a normalized natural state instead of a moral iniquity.
Priest’s weaponized language moves beyond Jefferson’s in that he invoked clinical and taxonomic language to actively revoke the personhood of the enslaved. He characterized the mental abilities of the Black individual as “naturally of a lower order” and possessing an “inclination to serve” that white Europeans did not possess. The word “natural” is particularly weaponized; as it is repeated, Priest’s attempts to create a socioeconomic system masked as an inevitable matter of biology. Thus, forging the exemplary purpose of weaponized language: using words to transform a human into a tool or resource fated for labor and the benefit of the Self. Once this transformation takes place, the Enlightenment paradox is resolved, and the “Other” is no longer a person.
In Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph, he arrives at an opposing conclusion, arguing that “There is no proportion between Liberty and Gold” and “all Sons of Adam” are entitled to equal rights. Sewall rebukes the use of the “Word” to justify the “Chain” (Sewall). This reveals Mather’s and Winthrop’s weaponization of language as a deliberate choice. Religious and Enlightenment rhetoric were the tools used to forge the creation of the “Other”.
Similarly, a major overarching theme in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is his separation of the “Christianity of Christ” and the “Christianity of this land” (Douglass). He writes, “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” (Douglass). This separation is the antithesis of Mather’s use of religious rhetoric. Douglass uses the same religious rhetoric to expose the wicked nature of the slavemaster, invoking imagery that cuts through the facade of the enslaver as the Christian gentleman farmer. Douglass’ narrative asserts that the religious language of the enslaving South was an active tool of indifference that allowed the enslaver to pray to God in the morning and, by afternoon, violently whip his fellow man. In his distinction between “true” theology and “slaveholding” piety, Douglass reclaims the high morality that Mather claimed was the natural trait of the Eurocentric Self.
Re-Claiming the Narrative through Linguistic Resistance
Colonial literature weaponized language to create an “abstraction” of Black people. Writers on the other side of this imposed social and biological binary used those same tools to deconstruct the hierarchies they were meant to perpetuate. Formerly enslaved authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Venture Smith, and Frederick Douglass reclaim collective moral, spiritual, and human dignity by deconstructing the “Self” of the colonial era.
In his Interesting Narrative, Equiano reappropriates the word “Savage”, refocusing the gaze. He describes the moment he first encountered the “White men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair” on the slave ship, terrified that they might eat him. He turns the “Travel Narrative” on itself to reimagine Europeans as the true “Savages” (Pratt) by describing their incessant cruelty and sickening greed through the lens of an innocent observer, thus proving that “othering” is linked to perspective rather than biology. Here, white readers are confronted with themselves as the “Other”.
Equiano describes the Europeans in his first encounter using horror aesthetics, painting an image of terrifying creatures with “long hair” and red faces that he was sure would kill him, implementing similar animalistic traits used to describe the enslaved. He writes, “O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God?” He goes beyond weaponizing language and turns to weaponizing theology against the enslaver. He suggests that the “Other” is actually not the enslaved, but the “Christian” would violate his own beliefs.
In Mather’s “Theology of the Useful Slave”, he sees “refinement” as a gift to the “miserable” slave from the enslaver. In her poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, Wheatley uses the word “Refin’d” to describe Black Christians, claiming for them all the highest social status of the Enlightenment. Wheatley’s use of the most popular and sophisticated poetic form of the time was not only a blow to Jefferson’s claim that Black people lacked “Design” and “Reason”, but it was also a demonstration that proved the opposite. She did not argue her humanity; she displayed it in a beautiful, undeniable exhibition of complex syntax.
The first African-American published author, Phillis Wheatley, responded directly to Jefferson’s and Mather’s condescending and paternalistic religious rhetoric and pseudo-scientific logic. Her very existence and work, which established her as a published classical poet, serve as an antithetical linguistic weapon against Jefferson’s argument of Black people’s lack of “Reason” and “Design”. Of course, Jefferson dismissed Wheatley, describing her poetry as unworthy of criticism. However, her poetry only proved that Black individuals were capable of doing what Jefferson said they were incapable of. Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” reflects on the condition of Black people in America. She writes, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (Wheatley). She uses “black as Cain” to flip the trope of the mark of religious “othering”, and positions herself as an authority of morality when she instructs “Christians” to “Remember” the spiritual sovereignty of Black people. Here, she also uses Mather’s theological rhetoric (“refined”, “angelic train”) against the othering that relegated her people to the likeness of the ape rather than a being with spiritual and intellectual substance. Wheatley’s poetry reflected her refusal to be an “abstraction”. She effectively weaponized the enslaver’s language to claim her place in the “Self”.
In her poem “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth”, she writes, “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate/ Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat. . . What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?” This line alone delivers a direct blow to Jefferson’s claim that Black individuals are “more ardent . . . but their griefs are transient” (Jefferson). Invoking the sentimentality of the unfathomable pain of loss from being torn from one’s native land in chains, she proves that she does, in fact, possess the reason and sensitivity that Jefferson’s biological racism claimed was impossible for her and her people. Both Equiano and Wheatley successfully speak the enslaver’s language with superior morality, forcing the “Self” to recognize the “Other” it created in the mirror. The danger of weaponized language lies in its power to erase the human; the power of the narrative reclaimed is found in its ability to force the human “out of darkness into marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).
The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 serve as primary evidence of weaponized language by the State. Unlike the subtler “othering” found in personal colonial journals, these codes transformed metaphors into realities. The Codes legalized the enslaved as “real estate”, effectively commodifying their very bodies as objects or goods to buy, sell, and trade. They stated that if an enslaver kills an enslaved individual during “correction”, that act of murder is not a felony because a man would not “destroy his own estate”. Legal language such as this reinforces and underwrites the indifference that creates the “Other”. It protects the enslaver from the moral and legal consequences of murder by labeling it as the mere loss of property.
Briton Hammon’s narrative was published at the height of 18th-century “othering”. He positions himself as the “humble servant” to establish a platform. However, his own records of his “Sufferings” and “Deliverance” bear witness to his humanity. Like colonial writers, he uses providential language to reflect his spirituality that the Slave Codes attempted to erase. Hammon conveys the persona of the perfect servant, but through publishing his narrative, he invokes his right to bear witness. Colonial law denied the testimony of the “Other” against the “Self”; therefore, writing his narrative of “Deliverance” transcends earthly law and instead appeals to divine authority to become the author of his own humanity.
Where the Slave Codes commodified the “Other”, Venture Smith reappropriated the language of commodity to reclaim his agency. His narrative re-weaponizes numerical values and contracts, recording precisely how much he paid to buy his own freedom and that of his loved ones: “I then agreed to give him sixty pounds for my freedom . . . I paid him forty pounds in hand, and then I borrowed twenty pounds” (Smith). In the state of Virginia, “estate” refers to an enslaved person. In Smith’s narrative, he uses “estate” in reference to the land he purchased, emphasizing the power of a single word to demonstrate the communal struggle for identity. In an Enlightenment society where property ownership was equated with reason and personhood, Smith’s meticulous attention to numbers acts as a weapon to prove his intellect. He essentially defeats the “Self” of the Enlightenment in its own game by proving his efficiency and moral superiority over his enslavers. He destroys the “animalistic” trope of Jefferson’s writing, asserting himself not as “real estate” but as a “real estate owner” (Smith).
Frederick Douglass’s Narrative analyzes the function of weaponized language. He contends that “to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one” (Douglass). He emphasizes the denial of literacy as the principal mechanism of “othering”. His narrative bridges 18th-century codes and the abolitionist movement of the 19th-century, proving that reclaiming language is the first step toward reclaiming liberty.
Douglass’s narrative opens with a striking confrontation of the lived experiences of the enslaved: “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs” (Douglass). He further argues that this denial of self-knowledge is a deliberate “fraud” committed by the enslaver to erase the history of the enslaved, not a natural circumstance. The simile he uses between the enslaved and horses is not in support of biological racism, but an indictment of enslavers and oppressors who weaponize or withhold language to create an existence for the enslaved that resembles the life of an animal.
In one of the most commonly known parts of his narrative, his owner forbids his wife from teaching Douglass to read and write: “If you teach that n*gger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave” (Douglass). This pivotal moment allows Douglas to discover language as the most significant weapon of the oppressor. He realizes that the title of “slave” is not a biological fact, just a linguistic choice; to remain a “slave”, one must maintain a state of “thoughtlessness”. Douglass’s narrative reveals literacy as the act of redefining the self.
American law attempted to erase the “Other”, but the narratives of the formerly enslaved prove that weaponized language can be reappropriated. Education for the enslaved was legally prohibited out of fear of the power of the “Word” to shatter the fabricated “Other”. Despite the law defining them as property, their stories redefined them as the authors of American identity.
Conclusion
By turning humans into “chattel” and “heathens”, colonial texts created a pervasive indifference that gave birth to the system of “othering”. Colonial literature of the 17th and 18th-centuries was not a passive observation of the prejudiced ideas of the era, but an active infrastructure that upheld chattel slavery. The transition from religious “othering” to the pseudoscientific “facts” was an intentional evolution of rhetoric. Changing the qualifications for exclusion from the non-Christian soul to the inferior mind and animal body, the elites of the era escaped the responsibility of the Enlightenment paradox. These writers, thinkers, scholars, and enslavers used tools from the “Age of Reason” to define the enslaved as subhuman, resolving the tension that existed between universal liberty and the practice of human bondage.
The narratives of the enslaved and formerly enslaved, however, prove that the weaponization of language was never exclusive to the oppressor. By reclaiming their voice, these authors flipped the imperial gaze on itself and aimed it at the colonists. Their voices did not just share their stories and lived experiences, but acted as catalysts for a linguistic resistance that confronted the Eurocentric ideal “Self” to see the “Other” as equal rather than abstract.
The most damning peril of weaponized language is its ability to sanitize and erase plain cruelty. Colonial journals and legal codes provided the cognitive and linguistic dissonance required for a society to maintain its indifference concerning the violence of chattel slavery. The legacy of such rhetoric remains the foundation for racial hierarchies that persist today. Language has never been neutral; it can be a weapon of destruction or of reclamation. Dismantling the harmful “othering” that continues to haunt the nation begins with an unflinching confrontation of words used as weapons throughout history.
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