David Walker Analysis

Thinking about David Walker’s Appeal and gentrification in terms of the segregation of freedom, wealth, resources, and religion, it is clear that life for freed Black people and those still enslaved in the 1800’s were more similar than different. Black folks in both positions still endured the evilness/restriction whiteness placed upon their lifestyles. From an economic standpoint and communal, Black people in America still didn’t have any control over their future nor could they fully protect their community. Those free could be recaptured and made a slave again, even if they had free papers on them. Also even after working hard, if they planned to pass things down to relatives, whiteness would quickly appear and take that away as well. Walker

Williams stated that “dedicating our lives to getting money just to give right back for someone’s brand on our body, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies” (these brands being white owned mostly). This correlates with Walker’s argument to Blacks who seem happy to be shining more shoes as opposed to having a better job, living a better life, not under white people in inferior job positions. Both men touched on the exploitation of Black people, in particular their bodies. Williams further preached about how white America “uses and abuses us, burying Black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit”. When Williams speaks on how whiteness gentrifies and takes over, even damaging the potential of Black intellectuals, Walker’s statement in article 2 connected, “it is a notorious fact, that the major part of the white Americans, have, ever since we have been among them, tried to keep us ignorant” (36). Walker also argues in article 3 about the wrong Europeans have committed in which they “have made merchandise of us, and it does appear as though they take this very dispensation to aid them in their infernal depredations upon us” (37). Both men, again in their own way understood the importance of education and that Black people are punished by being educated/not educated, in both stances white America preys upon them. Thus gentrifying our genius statement is about colonizers taking ownership Black bodies as well as of things created/done by Black