What Is The Theme Of Appeal By David Walker's Appeal

Approximately two centuries after the first Africans were brought to the New World, David Walker a free-man and abolitionist wrote one of the most revolutionary anti-slavery documents, entitled Appeal. This work widely spread across the nation, both North and South, sparking consciousness and awareness for Black slaves and freedmen, while igniting paranoia and fear for White slaveholders. Hence the title of the work, Appeal, it foreshadows the notion for immediate abolition of slavery as a means of Black slaves rising up against their white masters. In the age of modernity, Blacks in America have been affected externally and internally from Whiteness and its terror. Both Walker in Appeal and hooks in “Representation of Whiteness in the Black

With the West as the new center, those left outside the realm of European power were left to subjugation and inferiority. bell hooks in “Representation of Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, challenges her audience to consider how blackness and whiteness are symbiotic; yet in this interdependency, there lies a continual collective sense of powerlessness felt in being the other. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, the trajectory of race has led some to believe in this concept of a colorblind era and the idea of sameness, where this agenda of universal subjectivity, “we’re all human,” still consist of the assimilation of culture/ethnicity to become White is personified in the American paradigm (hook, 167). Embracing colorblindness is eliminating racial consciousness, and therefore conveniently eliminates accountability for white supremacy, leaving room for White terror to still exist. Within this white terror, “Otherness” still exist and there is a perpetual affect externally and internally of trepidation. Traveling back into time from the twentieth-first and twentieth century to the nineteenth century this notion of imaging the representation of Whiteness in Black imagination would consist of forging a system of overlapping yet dueling worlds of racialized chattel

This anti-slavery reform work was bold in its attempt to fight oppression regardless of its risk and urge White Americans to realize the moral and religious failures of human slavery. Walker explicitly spoke on the plight that Black slaves faced when it came to harsh treatment and unfair brutality from Whites. He paints the portrait of White terror as being not only unequal and inferior but being less than human. This publication helped urge and strengthen those engaged in the struggle for freedom against American terrorism. By exposing the political, social, and religious moral hypocrisy of Whites, David Walker uses this work to bring about an emotional conflict of possibly guilt when it comes to their internality of Whiteness and how it is recognized by “Others”. If not an inner emotional conflict, then Walker’s Appeal may have caused antebellum southners to be become more paranoid if not fearful, fearful of what could be their equal. Even Founding Founder, Jefferson, in his work Query 14, expressed Blackness as being inferior and less than human. With this being one of the first, anti-slavery works, Whites now had to reconsider how they viewed not only Blackness but Whiteness as