Description

David Walker, 1829

This capsule draws from David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World—a declaration written against the architecture of white domestic terror that governed Black bodies through violence, law, and false morality.

“Am I not a man and a brother?” was not a plea. It was an indictment.

Walker named what the nation refused to admit: that terror against Black life was not accidental, but foundational. That enslavement, lynching, displacement, and surveillance were not excesses—but systems. That white supremacy required the constant assault on bodies of color to sustain itself.

This garment carries that refusal forward.

It confronts the lie that terror is rare. It exposes the continuity between slavery, mob violence, policing, and detention. It insists that humanity is not granted by the state—it is inherent.

Worn today, this capsule stands against every iteration of domestic white terror that marks bodies as disposable and communities as threats.

This is not history. It is a living question. And it still demands an answer.