What is Black American Culture? (inspired by The Salon)

[BigMan]

I'm gonna sound dumb as fukk, but whats the difference between "Afro" vs "African"?

Alot of people don't want to be associated or confused with Africans so "Afro-" makes it clear one is of African descent without being "African". makes everyone happy imo

Yes, we are Afr'Am. Like I said, there are overarching elements to our culture & heritage that pretty general among African-Americans such as the use of red-rice(Oryza glaberrima) in our meals, use of grounded peanuts(goobers) in meals, the combination of Native-American crops with West African cooking techniques to make AA staple dishes like grits and cornbread.

And on music there's the use of strummed folk instruments like Banjo with has documented and recorded being played by African-American in just about every part of the US and Elongated Pentatonic scales with microtonal bent "blue notes" in our melodies ESPECIALLY with the trade marked raspy voices, as well as off-beat accentuation(nuts and bolts of the backbeat which is also unique to all forms of AA music and not found in other Afro-diasporan music types)


(You certainly wont find anything like that among Haitians or Martiniqueans)

^^^^Much of this has to with the common rice, cattle, cotton culture that the economic landscape of North America demanded on slave industry regardless of it was being administered by French, Spanish, or English unlike in the Caribbean and South America were Sugar & Mining where the bread and butter of the economy. Slavers in French Louisiana are noted in specifically trying to recreated the model of rice plantations of the English/British administered southern atlantic coast upon seeing their success so they could compete. So, as it was be a large number of Upper West Africans slave from the Sudan and Sahel regions were imported into the colonies and much of AA culture, if traced back, to pre-transatlantic era is rooted in the traditions of the Sudan and the Sahel. And if that wasn't enough there was the domestic slave trading once the US republic procured lands formerly under the thumb of European colonialism. The amount of people involved in this movement of slaves was even greater than that of the Transatlantic slave trade. So, no Texas nor Louisiana Africans/AA were ever in isolation from other African/AAs in other parts of the colonial or antebellum US.

And like @IllmaticDelta said there's also the common influence of the Church traditions as well.



"Free blacks", yes. Non-AA immigrants, No.

would you considered these guys AAs?

You aren't one of us so frankly we don't give a fukk "what you like"

u mad about something bro?

 

[Box Cutta]

So there was a topic back in January that seemed to touch on some of the same things being discussed here : http://www.thecoli.com/threads/no-b...roots-compared-to-caribbean-south-ame.284190/

I made a post that I feel pretty much would suffice here as well. I'll add on a couple things afterwards.

Not saying that black Americans are a lost tribe, as down South, you can still see a decent amount of traditions and culture but it pales in comparison to the Caribbean and South America.

Just seeing it in the magic thread where a lot are quick to blow off magic as real fake, where most in the Caribbean/Brazil etc no what the real deal is.

The same with the power of the music and there is a whole lot of spiritual context with it. It still exists, but the concept behind it has been a bit lost.

So is it that the dominant culture (white people) essentially whitewashed everything and you guys had to accept it? vs Caribbean islands that essentially was able to hold on to a lot of what orginally came over on them slave ships?

I think this is a simplistic understanding of our differences.

Black Americans might not have as many specific connections to African "culture" (I say culture in parentheses for a reason, more on that in a second)....but our understanding and love of general "blackness"....if anything seems stronger than many places in the world. We still have a relatively strong affinity towards our *race*....even if we haven't kept the odd cultural trinket. In my opinion, that's really more important. I don't really care if you bury or burn your dead, eat cows or worship them, say tomato or tomotto...what's important is the recognition and understanding that "we are all in this together"....and Black Americans have seldom dropped the ball there.

Most of the important "works" that deal with blackness and being black...especially amongst the diaspora....either came directly from, or were heavily influence by, African Americans.

Our social movements, political leaders, thinkers, etc...various different ideas, but all of them highly influential and for the race as a whole.

Look at Academics....Dubois alone is probably more important here than any other individual.

The arts....don't even have to talk about this. We could talk about the creation of whole new genres, we could talk about the Harlem Renaissance, we could talk about everyone from fukking leadbelly on up. And nearly every major Black American artistic movement has been tied in some way to race, and specifically, to uplifting ours.

Say It Loud, I'm Black And I'm Proud....name a Caribbean or South American artist who put out a song as blatantly pro-black and as influential as this. Name a diasporan black leader more important than MLK or Malcolm.

In regards to "culture" : As I've said many times......"culture" is overrated. If you live in a wealthy country...your "culture" is likely based around over-consumption and ultra-consumerism. If you live in a poorer country...your "culture" is likely based around survivalism, mercantilism, or some other less-complicated way of living. But all that shyt changes once those poor countries start developing...hell, we've already seen traces of this in Africa. Let one of those countries economy have some sort of miracle growth...people will immediately want shopping centers, stupid movies based on celebrities, terrible, unhealthy food....most of the shyt that truly separates our ways of living now would vanish.

But you're telling me that because BA's don't....samba dance and sacrifice chickens...that we are somehow lagging behind others in regards to our connection to Africa? I don't buy it.

There is really a lot more you could say about this topic (For one thing, using these gigantic areas such as Africa and South America, and trying to make generalizations out of them, is bogus from the get go really), but I think this is the gist of what I feel.

@froggle , no disrespect. This isn't a "call out" or anything like that, I just quoted your post for context.

I must re-iterate that I personally feel that the main distinction between "cultures" in the modern world is essentially between rich and poor. Consumption/Consumerism versus Survivalism/Mercantilism. While discussing different cultures is intriguing, I feel like people tend to focus on this....old style, cultural anthropologist type of perspective...and rarely even delve into economic systems, political systems, media consumption, etc.

Do you have easy access to clean, potable water?
Was your baby delivered in a hospital?
Do you buy your food from a grocery store?
Do you have access to the kind of technology that would easily allow for you to post on this message board?

These aren't simple things...like food spices or hat designs...these are the major aspects of life. These are the every day things. These are the questions that define how people actually live.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Your talking dumb shyt breh.

African American is a race, and is not an ethnic distinction.



We do not share any of this with African people.

We do share all of that with other Americans

Dog, are you dumb? AfroAmericans are an ethnic group within America that has roots in Africa. AfroAmericans are an ethnic group


Ethnic group

An ethnic group or ethnicity is a socially defined category of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social, cultural or national experience.[1][2] Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language and/or dialect, ideology, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, physical appearance, etc.

 

[Box Cutta]

We lost our indigenous language, art, religion, and social habits..........

But mostly, to me, culture is a mindset, or set of beliefs or standards that are adhered to in order to generate productive(or destructive) behavior..... and blacks in America don't have our own...

@Peter Vecsey , while I understand your insistence that "culture" is more about some sort of ideology, I am not particularly certain where you would draw the discrepancy between a people 'with' and 'without' their own culture (Or, mindset/ideology). Everyone believes in something. Most people want to be family oriented. Most people want law and order. Most people want a long and healthy life.

There are certainly some extremes, for instance, I would assume that Shaolin Monks are well off the charts from how most people in the world are living. But when you account for economic mobility and access to education...people are rather similar across the board. The last giant discrepancy amongst relatively similarly situated nations was probably the split between the capitalist and the collectivist....but that mostly faded with the Soviet Union.

You brought up Haiti having it's own culture earlier, as opposed to AA's that do not...I hate to get all patronizing and paternalistic towards others.....but what could possibly define Haitian culture right now, more than fending against poverty, economic stagnation, political corruption, and general disruption? Isn't it more pragmatic to view their lifestyles through a lens like...quality of life? Give every Haitian a million dollars and they'll turn that bytch into South Beach.

What I'm basically asking you is : Is culture something "Big" (Economy, political system, legal system) or is it something "Small" (Courtship, food preparation, instruments)? I think I've made it clear that I believe the focus should be about the big, wide-scale aspects. And from my perspective, it's actually fine to de-emphasize the differences between "cultures". But you're perspective seems to be that "culture" is about these small, nearly indistinguishable ways in which people think. And, by definition, shouldn't smaller discrepancies lead to the acknowledgement of *more* cultures, and not less? Yet somehow, Black Americans are singularly, individually, the ONLY group on earth that just magically doesn't have a "culture"...because we live in the same country as other people. And I just don't know where the line is being drawn.

FWIW...there are some major differences between the worldviews of White and Black Americans. Whether this is a "cultural" difference is a matter of semantics....but beyond the capitalistic/democratic based values that we share...White American culture seems based on 2 major assumptions (And these 2 assumptions tend to be what I dislike most about them) :

1) Exceptionalism - So, everyone knows about this. People call it "American Exceptionalism" but I would disagree...I think that's something mostly ingrained in White Americans, pretty exclusively actually.

2) Bunker Mentality - These people are the majority, control most of the wealth, political capital, everything....but still tend to believe that they are the underdogs, they are the oppressed, everything is against them.

It's clear that both of these mentalities share some common head-space...fear, paranoia, resentment, etc. And this culture of fear and resentment actually has it's origins in the antebellum south. But that's a different discussion altogether....

TL; DR : I mostly think that "culture" is an over-stated subject matter...I feel like it's a holdover of 20th Century anthropological thought, that barely even acknowledges economics or technology. Should have died with Margaret Mead.

Having said that....if all these other groups that share an extremely similar history to Black Americans have a designated "Culture"....then kill that noise about us not having one. AA creations are valuable, relevant, timeless, beautiful, and the people of our group deserve the credit that other groups are afforded for their own creations.

 

[MeachTheMonster]

Dog, are you dumb? AfroAmericans are an ethnic group within America that has roots in Africa. AfroAmericans are an ethnic group


Ethnic group

We share more of that with white Americans than Africans. And millions of white Americans share plenty of that with Africans.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

We share more of that with white Americans than Africans. And millions of white Americans share plenty of that with Africans.

This thread isn't about what or what we don't share with Africans and White Americans but what binds "AfroAmericans" together as a distinctive culture within America.

 

[MeachTheMonster]

This thread isn't about what or what we don't share with Africans and White Americans but what binds "AfroAmericans" together as a distinctive culture within America.

Our debate over the term "African American" has everything to do with that. African is not our ethnicity. American is. African American is in reference to race.

There's not much "distinctive" about our culture outside of the color of our skin.

As I asked before. Name one aspect of our culture that was created, maintained and celebrated by black people, devoid of the influence of white people.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Our debate over the term "African American" has everything to do with that. African is not our ethnicity. American is. African American is in reference to race.

AfroAmerican is our ethnicity...USA/American is our nationality and our race is black

There's not much "distinctive" about our culture outside of the color of our skin.

Yes, it's so similar that white UK dropped their own culture (British Isles, the same roots for Anglo-celtic america) for AfroAmerican music and created the British Invasian

As I asked before. Name one aspect of our culture that was created, maintained and celebrated by black people, devoid of the influence of white people.

simply put, this is what American (white) music would have sounded like w/o AfroAmericans...just like their ancestors in the British Isles









If you cant tell the difference between that and AfroAmerican music, I don't know what to tell you

 

[MeachTheMonster]

AfroAmerican is our ethnicity...USA/American is our nationality and our race is black

How can our ethnicity be African if we have nothing in common with Africans culturally?

Yes, it's so similar that white UK dropped their own culture (British Isles, the same roots for Anglo-celtic america) for AfroAmerican music and created the British Invasian

simply put, this is what American (white) music would have sounded like w/o AfroAmericans...just like their ancestors in the British Isles









If you cant tell the difference between that and AfroAmerican music, I don't know what to tell you

Your just posting a bunch of bullshyt. Obviously black people made the music, that doesn't make it black culture.

White people made basketball but you wouldn't call that "white culture"

 

[IllmaticDelta]

How can our ethnicity be African if we have nothing in common with Africans culturally?

AfroAmerican doesn't = African. The term covers both our african ancestral origin(s) and our American birth and exsistence.

Your just posting a bunch of bullshyt.

I posted truth and facts

Obviously black people made the music, that doesn't make it black culture.

White people made basketball but you wouldn't call that "white culture"

I don't GAF about basketball in regards to the topic

 

[MeachTheMonster]

AfroAmerican doesn't = African. The term covers both our african ancestral origin(s) and our American birth and exsistence.

Everyone on earth has ancestral orgins in Africa

The term Asian American references Asian as the Culture/ethnicity and American as the nationalty. It has nothing to do with ancestral orgins.

To apply that to black people our culture/ethnicity is American our nationality is American. We are American. Our race is black. Black people started to use the term African American because they wanted to reject the other terms used for our race.

I posted truth and facts

I don't GAF about basketball in regards to the topic

Yes it's very relevant.

Your argument is that since black people made jazz or rock, hip hop, ect. Then that means its "black culture"

Well white people made basketball. It would not extist without them, therefore by your logic you should call it "white culture"

 

[Jimi Swagger]

Some black Americans were here before Columbus, other are transplants. M

Never understood why people say this. Hip hop rap is a young peoples culture and extremely popular. But is grandma listening to lil wayne?

Hip hop is simply a sub-section of AA culture

Grandma's nowadays are 35 so yes. Look at Mama Dee Scrappy's mother. I'm sure some Jeezy is in her playlist along with Donnie McClurkin and Mary Mary thrown in on the side.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Everyone on earth has ancestral orgins in Africa

The term Asian American references Asian as the Culture/ethnicity and American as the nationalty. It has nothing to do with ancestral orgins.

Asian Americans are Americans of Asian descent. The U.S. Census Bureau definition of Asians refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. It includes people who indicated their race(s) as "Asian" or reported entries such as "Chinese", "Filipino", "Indian", "Vietnamese", "Korean", "Japanese", and "Other Asian" or provided other detailed Asian responses.

Yes it's very relevant.

It's not

Your argument is that since black people made jazz or rock, hip hop, ect. Then that means its "black culture"

It is

Well white people made basketball. It would not extist without them, therefore by your logic you should call it "white culture"

I never mentioned anything about sports/basketball so the topic doesn't matter

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Don't think they ever took Jazz from us. Rock n Roll I agree with though.

They didn't take Rock N Roll, the music. They took the marketing term and the coverage but AfroAmericans were still making Rock music, it just got called Blues, Funk and Soul. Rock basically became code for "white music"

 

[Supper]

@Peter Vecsey , while I understand your insistence that "culture" is more about some sort of ideology, I am not particularly certain where you would draw the discrepancy between a people 'with' and 'without' their own culture (Or, mindset/ideology). Everyone believes in something. Most people want to be family oriented. Most people want law and order. Most people want a long and healthy life.

There are certainly some extremes, for instance, I would assume that Shaolin Monks are well off the charts from how most people in the world are living. But when you account for economic mobility and access to education...people are rather similar across the board. The last giant discrepancy amongst relatively similarly situated nations was probably the split between the capitalist and the collectivist....but that mostly faded with the Soviet Union.

You brought up Haiti having it's own culture earlier, as opposed to AA's that do not...I hate to get all patronizing and paternalistic towards others.....but what could possibly define Haitian culture right now, more than fending against poverty, economic stagnation, political corruption, and general disruption? Isn't it more pragmatic to view their lifestyles through a lens like...quality of life? Give every Haitian a million dollars and they'll turn that bytch into South Beach.

What I'm basically asking you is : Is culture something "Big" (Economy, political system, legal system) or is it something "Small" (Courtship, food preparation, instruments)? I think I've made it clear that I believe the focus should be about the big, wide-scale aspects. And from my perspective, it's actually fine to de-emphasize the differences between "cultures". But you're perspective seems to be that "culture" is about these small, nearly indistinguishable ways in which people think. And, by definition, shouldn't smaller discrepancies lead to the acknowledgement of *more* cultures, and not less? Yet somehow, Black Americans are singularly, individually, the ONLY group on earth that just magically doesn't have a "culture"...because we live in the same country as other people. And I just don't know where the line is being drawn.

FWIW...there are some major differences between the worldviews of White and Black Americans. Whether this is a "cultural" difference is a matter of semantics....but beyond the capitalistic/democratic based values that we share...White American culture seems based on 2 major assumptions (And these 2 assumptions tend to be what I dislike most about them) :

1) Exceptionalism - So, everyone knows about this. People call it "American Exceptionalism" but I would disagree...I think that's something mostly ingrained in White Americans, pretty exclusively actually.

2) Bunker Mentality - These people are the majority, control most of the wealth, political capital, everything....but still tend to believe that they are the underdogs, they are the oppressed, everything is against them.

It's clear that both of these mentalities share some common head-space...fear, paranoia, resentment, etc. And this culture of fear and resentment actually has it's origins in the antebellum south. But that's a different discussion altogether....

TL; DR : I mostly think that "culture" is an over-stated subject matter...I feel like it's a holdover of 20th Century anthropological thought, that barely even acknowledges economics or technology. Should have died with Margaret Mead.

Having said that....if all these other groups that share an extremely similar history to Black Americans have a designated "Culture"....then kill that noise about us not having one. AA creations are valuable, relevant, timeless, beautiful, and the people of our group deserve the credit that other groups are afforded for their own creations.

I agree except on the part about taking an economic world view means being dismissive of culture. As if the arts, customs, traditions, and sensibilities of a people are solely bound to their level of material prosperity of a society. That's not to say it isn't a factor, because it is, just not the sole factor especially relating to that of folk traditions, like those between families and close friends, and more so on that dealing with higher level customs such as those that affect the administering & governing of law and politics, and even in those cases some societies around the world have developed legal systems and economic models that certainly do reflect aspects of their culture that have remain largely intact for hundreds or thousands of years and didn't just disappear once they saw economic prosperity as your logic would seem to suggest(ever heard of the sharia style court system in the Gulf Arab countries or their state religion?). Which leads me to my next point which is that the influence in the interrelations between economics/politics and culture is a two way street- Meaning a peoples' culture affects their economic activities too. A people's system of customs, traditions and sensibilities do play a major role in how they make decisions as customers and producers. Example is how the multi-national fast food chain Mc Donald's was forced to open up a bunch of vegetarian restaurants in the Hindu majority nation of India in order to appeal to the people's cultural sensibilities. This phenomenon of culture affecting economic is IMO no where more apparent then in the entertainment & tourism industries, where language, morals, artistic taste, and other cultural sensibilities together almost exclusively dictate what kind of entertainment people will market & patronize. IE The Japanese anime Pokemon was specifically tailor made to appeal to American children's taste in order to gain access to the market here. Japanese animators today rarely do that as they have together managed to create a rather large niche following from people who have over the years developed a taste for Japanese style anime(which btw has it roots in the folk art of the Meiji & pre-Meiji era of the Shogunates in Japan, which goes against your logic of culture being completely bound to level of economic prosperity and the technology of the time from which it originates rather than utilizing the economic resources and technologies available at progressive time periods to provide a more efficient vessels and wider platforms for the continuation of their culture) for their products in "the west" thanks in large part to the video game industry and pioneering big hits in the western world like DBZ and Pokemon.

Also, just as Peter Vecsey would be dead wrong in asserting that African-Americans don't have a culture of our own. It would also be just as inaccurate for you or others to continually state that African-Americans don't have any folk-level traditions, particularly those with roots that trace back to Africa via the transatlantic slave trade, like in the case of Afro-brazilians with samba, after this assertion has been picked apart on every level as being inherently false as it lies on the false premise that slave masters in the US as opposed to other places in the Americas were %100 efficient in repressing the cultures of the many groups of Africans that were present here rather than assimilating, adapting, and evolving with the environment they found themselves in just like in any other place in the Americas.
http://www.thecoli.com/threads/refu...merican-music-culture-is-europeanized.280978/

Furthermore I'm interested in knowing whether or not you really believe that traditions like Samba in Brazil will simply disappear, when and if Brazil sees economic prosperity and development and/or introductions of new technology in the country, rather than simply, like Japan, utilizing the economic resources and technologies available at progressive time periods to provide a more efficient vessels and wider platforms for the continuation of their culture. As your logic would seem to assert. Especially considering that samba has survived up until now in an economic and technological environment that is largely different then from which it originated in the 17th century sometime.

What Is the Relationship Between Culture and Economic Development?
Quote: "A community that embraces their cultural roots can see an upswing in economic development through tourism."