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

[DonRe]

The Arts should only be one aspect in a long list of what constitutes black culture in america. And Project/Hood life aint culture family, its a circumstance. Maybe the positivity in what goes on there can be tied to cultural institutions success but nah man.

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

It seems you like most people use the tired excuse of the Atlantic slave trade for why AA's don't have a culture argument

Slave trade = tired excuse......... the coli ladies and gentlemen.....

But that's not what I use. I use white supremacy and the erasing of our native\indigenous tongue, religion, and mind in general

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

The bolded DOES NOT define a culture. It seems you like most people use the tired excuse of the Atlantic slave trade for why AA's don't have a culture argument. Thing is new cultures(and ethnic groups) are made and developed. You think some of these ethnic groups in Africa have been there for thousands and thousands of years? No. For example the Bantu people are recent people in southern Africa(compared to the Khoisan), they migrated northward, yet they don't know which specific place in the north they migrated from and lost all cultural connections from their origin area to develop their own culture. Which is why Bantu people either from southern, eastern or central Africa developed their OWN culture and their culture is different from one of another. And mind you there was no Bantu people 10k years ago. But does that mean Bantu people do not have a culture??????? AA's developed their own culture(its roots in the south) as a result of mixture of different African cultures and a minor bit from European culture.

But this still does not describe what AA culture is...... and so far, the only thing I got it music....

Sad to say, I think you guys are marginalizing what culture really is and what its really about........

 

[Blackout]

Are you dudes responding to my post from today or are you responding to something I said months ago. Cause I'm pretty sure I didn't say black culture or non black culture today. Nor was my argument that any of these things were or were not black culture.

My argument has always been that there is no such thing as a culture based solely or exclusively to one race. In fact, I'm pretty sure the prerequisites for a culture being a culture requires the absence of genetic identifiers

Culture is tied to a group as Ive said before.

There is culture tied to a race in a country as segregated as America.

Thanks to segregation the cultures got segregated by race as well.

Therefore there is black american culture because of that segregation.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

But this still does not describe what AA culture is...... and so far, the only thing I got it music....

Sad to say, I think you guys are marginalizing what culture really is and what its really about........

It's more than music....must have missed this post from me...

Modern music, ubran/street wear, soul food, Southern baptist churches, HBCUs, AA literature/art/movies and the vast array of dances.

This idea that AA don't have culture is dumb and idiotic, and honestly, AA culture is just as rich as most places claiming to have "their own culture"

I'll let @IllmaticDelta and @K.O.N.Y @Anghellic put in work though

to add on

Dance. AAVE and Urban AAVE. That intangible black identity that permeates throughout our population that naturally comes to us. The cool factor we're known for. Fashion and urban fashion

edit-Actually some of these overlap yours

Folklore and Oral traditions
Gospel
Shout Bands/music
Negro spirituals
Dance
HBCU
Baptist-Holiness-Pentecsotal church
Fashion
Food
Regional subcultures
Blues
Zydeco
Rock/Rock n Roll
Gullah-Geeche
Louisiana Creole
Black Indians
Mardi Gras Indians
Afro Seminole
Funk
HipHop
Jazz
Jazz funeral
Religious subcultures
Hoodoo
Voodoo
Brass Bands
HBCU bands
Black Cowboys/Rodeos
Speech/Dialects
Slang
Soul
Disco
House music
Electronic dance
Rural related culture
Civil Rights
Black Power/Pan-Africanism/Afrocentrism

...plus many other things


keep in mind that this is what makes up the modern "Afroamerican" identity and culture ..


One thing people must remember is the full blown modern AfroAmerican identity came about due to the struggle and jim crow laws. Before that, you had people with regional flavors culturally and you had different classes of AfroAmericans or what came to be Black Americans.


Origins of African-American Ethnicity or African-American Ethnic Traits


The newly formed Black Yankee ethnicity of the early 1800s differed from today’s African-American ethnicity. Modern African-American ethnic traits come from a post-bellum blending of three cultural streams: the Black Yankee ethnicity of 1830, the slave traditions of the antebellum South, and the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South. Each of the three sources provided elements of the religious, linguistic, and folkloric traditions found in today’s African-American ethnicity.30


http://essays.backintyme.biz/item/19

 

[Easy-E]

Homegirl in the salon asked how "our" boy would react (
http://www.thecoli.com/threads/what-would-our-boys-do.305846/ )


... I'm thinking who knows.. Depends on how they got raised. But then I wondered...what are the cultural things that unite the Black American community?

Obviously, the shared struggle of living in America. But what are some other things?

Are you comfortable saying that most blacks listen to R&B and rap?

Or that most like grits or whatever stereotype you can think of..

I've come across so many different black ppl that it doesn't seem to me like there's a unified culture, tbh

What say you?

The toughest thing about being black, in America, is that we are American....no Raven Symone.

But, we get treated like we're some foreign invaders--we were forced here!

So, no, I don't think there is this one black culture to unify us. And it's depression to try to only have common ground in struggle.

We are American's child that was had by a side piece, but, lives in the house with the kids with the wife--America acts like they don't want us, but, they made us (via slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality, economic discrimination).


Sidebar: I really don't think most black folk even like Rap. The biggest market, in Rap, are young white guys...

 

[IllmaticDelta]

What do yall know about the whole Black American Cowboy/Rodeo subculture? It's another ones of those regional flavors centered more around the gulf coast and mid west.

 

[*L*E*G*A*C*Y*]

This is by far the stupidest statement. I'm surprised since its coming from you...

I'm surprised I haven't been negged for that, considering I wasn't being serious.

 

[Blackout]

Sidebar: I really don't think most black folk even like Rap. The biggest market, in Rap, are young white guys...

They do. They just download it instead of buying it.

With unemployment on the rise can you blame them?

 

[*L*E*G*A*C*Y*]

White culture is maintaining racism over blacks, black culture is nothing in America but false hood dreams.

As far as it's concerned, white culture IMO is

Slavery
Genocide
Racism
Prejudice
Discrimination
Rape
Gentrification
Colonialism

 

[*L*E*G*A*C*Y*]

But to be honest, black american culture

hip-hop
R&B
House
Techno
Blues
Jazz
Soul
Disco
Breakdancing
Graffiti


But how many of those do black people in America participate in en masse?

Shyt, you talk to most young black people these days and they think house and techno is some white people stuff....which saddens and disappoints me to hear...especially as a devout fan of the music and the culture

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Slave trade = tired excuse......... the coli ladies and gentlemen.....

But that's not what I use. I use white supremacy and the erasing of our native\indigenous tongue, religion, and mind in general

Yes its a tired excuse and I stand by it. Its a tired excuse for why African Americans do not have a culture of their own, when they DO! Yes Atlantic Slave trade made African Americans lose their ancestral and cultural roots as a whole population. But even so African Americans developed their own unique culture compared to their ancestors from Africa but combining a diversity of African cultures(mainly from the Sahel area) and minor European influence.

You're not comprehending that AA's in American INVENTED their OWN culture. This is not taboo. Using your logic Haitians do not have their own culture, because their native tongue, religion and other things their ancestors had were erased during slavery...

 

[Supper]

Don't have much time, but I'll just say that the slave trade and slavery in what is today the contiguous United States wasn't only the driving force behind the breakdown of many different cultures(as there's never any one "African culture" to begin with) but the melding of them together to create a new cultural continuum(that of African-Americans).

I'll just leave this here for that still a little lost on this concept.

Ethnogenesis (from Greekethnosἔθνος, "group of people, nation", and genesisγένεσις, "beginning, coming into being"; plural ethnogeneses) is a process in which a group of people acquire an ethnicity, that is, a group identity that identifies them as an ethnic group. This can originate through a process of self-identification as well as come about as the result of outside identification.

Mapping Ethnogenesis in the
Early Modern Atlantic

^^^All the major group present in the Americas during colonial times went through this process. You didn't think the "Seminole" or "Comanche" indians were Pre-Columbian tribes did you? I guess someone should inform the Seminoles & Comanches that they are actually just displaced Creeks & Shoshone who lost their "original culture". And lets not even get on Euro-American specific identities like French-Canadian, German-Texan, Pennsylvania-Dutch, Cajun, and the WASP.

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

. Using your logic Haitians do not have their own culture, because their native tongue, religion and other things their ancestors had were erased during slavery...

Nope, that's not my logic at all..... cause Hatians do have their own true culture, and its the main reason why they were able to run them folks up outta Haiti......

 

[Bawon Samedi]

But this still does not describe what AA culture is...... and so far, the only thing I got it music....

Sad to say, I think you guys are marginalizing what culture really is and what its really about........

That post was in response to what you said, "don't know their history, or can't trace the lineage in their family over 100 years, then yeah, its hard to have a true culture"

Just because you don't know the history of your ancestors or cant trace your family to their homeland does NOT MEAN a certain group does not have a culture. Read that post again. My point was(addressing the bolded) was that new cultures(and ethnic groups) have formed recently and its not taboo. I gave you an example of Bantu people not specifically knowing their ancestral homeland or tracing their family tree to that homeland(same with AA's). Yet both groups have a culture.

If we look at African Americans as an ethnic entity and not a racial one then its culture was crafted and developed in the USA after they lost connection to Africa. No one is marginalizing what a culture is...