Equality And Tolerance In Walt Whitman's I Sing The Body Electric

Walt Whitman, through his works, appears to display a view of equality and tolerance as a part of his mission to create great American poetry. However, despite his seemingly harmless portrayals of certain minority groups in America, mainly African-Americans and Native Americans, Whitman often reinforces the dominant views expressed by those in his own time. Moreover, he subconsciously celebrates colonialism by his praises and encouragements of westward expansion. While Whitman does sometimes focus on racial minorities in his celebration of the ordinary Americans, he does so only as a collector expanding his collection, representation for the sake of completing his portrait of American life, not giving these groups anything beyond acknowledgement of their existence in individual encounters or asides. It’s these contradictions that make the readers wonder why Whitman would appear to send messages of equality but still manage to send back the same beliefs and views of his own time. Whitman’s …show more content…
The speaker, before a passive spectator, becomes an active participant in the institution of slavery. Though he assumes this insidious role, he insists that he only does so to demonstrate the real worth of the slave because the bidders “cannot be high enough for it,” (99). The fact that the speaker refers to the male slave as an ‘it’ throws in a contradiction to what he goes on to say in the succeeding lines of the poem, praising him for his supposed actual worth. He dehumanizes the slave by reducing him to an object, of unimaginable worth nonetheless. However, despite this, the speaker lists off attributes of the slave that carry real