Ive read academic journals that said immigrants assimilate fully no later than the 3rd generation.
What is Black American Culture? (inspired by The Salon)
- Thread starter OfTheCross
- Start date
Ive read academic journals that said immigrants assimilate fully no later than the 3rd generation.
Blackout
just your usual nerdy brotha
Contributions to american culture?
We have never been apart of America since its creation to consider our culture apart of American culture.
Black American culture was segregated off just like its people
BmoreGorilla
Veteran
Think about it. Most of our existence in this country has been defined by outright oppression. The church is big in our community but we were forced to be Christian. Our traditional food is essentially slave food. They took jazz from us in less than 30 years. Rock n roll even faster. Ww2 vets wanted to fight and came home to nothing. Generations thinking they need to dress, talk, and act a certain way around white folks. Hip hop is the first thing we created that is thoroughly black. We took all that oppression and created something over forty years old. Created our own rules and said shyteven older blacks were shook from. Can you imagine a WW2 saying fukk the police?
K.O.N.Y
Superstar
This can be applied to just about every "culture"/"ethnic" group
Your allowing the whole "displacedAfricanthing" to supercede our new shared identity/culture we cultivated in America
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
There are even black americans from the North who never had roots in the South. Their ancestors were slaves in the North.
Field Marshall Bradley
Veteran
Don't disagree. I was just trying to see where everyone was coming from
Field Marshall Bradley
Veteran
This was actually gonna be my next question almost per verbatim.... cause one minute we're looking to claim our displaced African ancestry for enlightment and esteem(hence, know your history), and on the other hand, we're claiming what we've added to American culture as our contemporary culture....
Don't know if that's a good idea or not...
K.O.N.Y
Superstar
Think about it. Most of our existence in this country has been defined by outright oppression. The church is big in our community but we were forced to be Christian. Our traditional food is essentially slave food. They took jazz from us in less than 30 years. Rock n roll even faster. Ww2 vets wanted to fight and came home to nothing. Generations thinking they need to dress, talk, and act a certain way around white folks. Hip hop is the first thing we created that is thoroughly black. We took all that oppression and created something over forty years old. Created our own rules and said shyteven older blacks were shook from. Can you imagine a WW2 saying fukk the police?[/QUOTE]
@ the bolded
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
christianity was reshaped by the slaves to their views
What yall know about the African influence and reinterpretation of Christianity by the slaves in America?
African American Christianity, Pt. I:
To the Civil War
The story of African-American religion is a tale of variety and creative fusion. Enslaved Africans transported to the New World beginning in the fifteenth century brought with them a wide range of local religious beliefs and practices. This diversity reflected the many cultures and linguistic groups from which they had come. The majority came from the West Coast of Africa, but even within this area religious traditions varied greatly. Islam had also exerted a powerful presence in Africa for several centuries before the start of the slave trade: an estimated twenty percent of enslaved people were practicing Muslims, and some retained elements of their practices and beliefs well into the nineteenth century. Catholicism had even established a presence in areas of Africa by the sixteenth century.
UVA Lib.
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Funeral in Guinea, west Africa, drawn by a French painter, ca. 1789 (detail)
UVA Lib.
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"Heathen practices in funerals," drawn by a Baptist missionary in Jamaica, ca. 1840 (detail)
Preserving African religions in North America proved to be very difficult. The harsh circumstances under which most slaves lived—high death rates, the separation of families and tribal groups, and the concerted effort of white owners to eradicate "heathen" (or non-Christian) customs—rendered the preservation of religious traditions difficult and often unsuccessful. Isolated songs, rhythms, movements, and beliefs in the curative powers of roots and the efficacy of a world of spirits and ancestors did survive well into the nineteenth century. But these increasingly were combined in creative ways with the various forms of Christianity to which Europeans and Americans introduced African slaves. In Latin America, where Catholicism was most prevalent, slaves mixed African beliefs and practices with Catholic rituals and theology, resulting in the formation of entirely new religions such as vaudou in Haiti (later referred to as "voodoo"), Santeria in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil. But in North America, slaves came into contact with the growing number of Protestant evangelical preachers, many of whom actively sought the conversion of African Americans.
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Slaves baptized in a Moravian congregation, drawing entitled "Excorcism-Baptism of the Negroes" in a German history of the Moravians (United Brethren) in Pennsylvania, 1757 (detail)
Religion and Slavery
In the decades after the American Revolution, northern states gradually began to abolish slavery, and thus sharper differences emerged in the following years between the experiences of enslaved peoples and those who were now relatively free. By 1810 the slave trade to the United States also came to an end and the slave population began to increase naturally, making way for the preservation and transmission of religious practices that were, by this time, truly "African-American."
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UVA Lib.
Slave preaching on a cotton plantation near Port Royal, South Carolina, engraving in The Illustrated London News, 5 Dec. 1863
On Secret Religious Meetings
"A Negro preacher delivered sermons on the plantation. Services being held in the church used by whites after their services on Sunday. The preacher must always act as a peacemaker and mouthpiece for the master, so they were told to be subservient to their masters in order to enter the Kingdom of God. But the slaves held secret meetings and had praying grounds where they met a few at a time to pray for better things." Harriet Gresham, born a slave in 1838 in South Carolina, as reported by her interviewer, ca. 1935
"[The plantation owner] would not permit them to hold religious meetings or any other kinds of meetings, but they frequently met in secret to conduct religious services. When they were caught, the 'instigators'—known or suspected—were severely flogged. Charlotte recalls how her oldest brother was whipped to death for taking part in one of the religious ceremonies. This cruel act halted the secret religious services." Charlotte Martin, born a slave in 1854 in Florida, as reported by her interviewer, 1936
"Tom Ashbie's [plantation owner] father went to one of the cabins late at night, the slaves were having a secret prayer meeting. He heard one slave ask God to change the heart of his master and deliver him from slavery so that he may enjoy freedom. Before the next day the man disappeared . . . When old man Ashbie died, just before he died he told the white Baptist minister, that he had killed Zeek for praying and that he was going to hell." Rev. Silas Jackson, born a slave in 1846 or 1847 in Virginia, as transcribed by his interviewer, 1937
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more excerpts
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Julia Cart
A Gullah "praise house," a surviving example of slaves' secret meeting places, and its pastor, Rev. Henderson; St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1995
This transition coincided with the period of intense religious revivalism known as "awakenings." In the southern states increasing numbers of slaves converted to evangelical religions such as the Methodist and Baptist faiths. Many clergy within these denominations actively promoted the idea that all Christians were equal in the sight of god, a message that provided hope and sustenance to the slaves. They also encouraged worship in ways that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, dancing, and even spirit-possession. Still, many white owners insisted on slave attendance at white-controlled churches, since they were fearful that if slaves were allowed to worship independently they would ultimately plot rebellion against their owners. It is clear that many blacks saw these white churches, in which ministers promoted obedience to one's master as the highest religious ideal, as a mockery of the "true" Christian message of equality and liberation as they knew it.
In the slave quarters, however, African Americans organized their own "invisible institution." Through signals, passwords, and messages not discernible to whites, they called believers to "hush harbors" where they freely mixed African rhythms, singing, and beliefs with evangelical Christianity. It was here that the spirituals, with their double meanings of religious salvation and freedom from slavery, developed and flourished; and here, too, that black preachers, those who believed that God had called them to speak his Word, polished their "chanted sermons," or rhythmic, intoned style of extemporaneous preaching. Part church, part psychological refuge, and part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion (Nat Turner, whose armed insurrection in Virginia in 1831 resulted in the deaths of scores of white men, women, and children, was a self-styled Baptist preacher), these meetings provided one of the few ways for enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a better future.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/aareligion.htm
what yall know about the African based frenzy dance known as the "Ring Shout" basically being the origin of "getting the holy ghost" action
Hear that Dembow/reggaeton beat they're beating/stomping out
It's a bit more complex than that
Carefully documenting African American slave foods, this book reveals that slaves actively developed their own foodways-their customs involving family and food. The authors connect African foods and food preparation to the development during slavery of Southern cuisines having African influences, including Cajun, Creole, and what later became known as soul food, drawing on the recollections of ex-slaves recorded by Works Progress Administration interviewers. Valuable for its fascinating look into the very core of slave life, this book makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of slave culture and of the complex power relations encoded in both owners' manipulation of food as a method of slave control and slaves' efforts to evade and undermine that control.
We've been playing Jazz since the 1890's and you're telling me by the 1920's, Jazz no longer was black american music?
You do realize this happened everywhere?
K.O.N.Y
Superstar
I think a healthy balance of both should be in order. But I think a keen sense of knowledge of AA history , is more important to the AA in knowing his/her place in America
We can find plenty sources of esteem in our own history
BmoreGorilla
Veteran
Soul food is essentially slave food breh. What else have we created that is as black as hip hop? Older blacks were the ones who lightened their skin and conked their hair and watched what they said around face. Hip hop generation was the first to say fukk all that we're gonna do shyt our way. Don't get name wrong the seeds were planted by Malcolm and the Panthers. Hip hop is the flower. It's the first thing that we can uniquely call our own
BmoreGorilla
Veteran
Of course but I'm only speaking on our experience
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
wtf.... this simply isn't true. There was physical segregation for sure but Black American culture has been dominating America since the the 1850's. Where do you think HillBilly music came from?
or what the early minstrel shows were trying to imitate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Plantation
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
yes...it's part of black american culture