African American culture
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African American culture is both part of, and distinct from American culture. From their earliest presence in North America, Africans and African Americans have contributed literature, art, agricultural skills, foods, clothing styles, music, and language to American culture.
In the United States, the term "urban culture" is considered a euphemism for African-American culture and is sometimes used as a racially neutral alternative.
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[edit] Language
Distinctive patterns of language use among African Americans arose as creative responses to the hardships imposed on the African American community. Slave owners often intentionally mixed people who spoke many different African languages to discourage communication in any language other than English on their plantations. One response to these conditions was the development of pidgins, simplified mixtures of two or more languages that speakers of different languages could use to communicate with each other.[1] Some of these pidgins eventually became fully developed Creole languages spoken by certain groups as a native language. Significant numbers of people still speak some of these Creole languages, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. African American Vernacular English, also called Black English or Ebonics, is a type variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of the American English language spoken by many African Americans that shares some grammatical and orthographical features with Creole and West African languages.
[edit] Religion
Enslaved Africans brought their own religious beliefs and practices with them when they were forced on ships from Africa to the New World, but slaveowners mounted a systematic and brutal campaign to de-Africanize them, and strip them of their mostly animist, polytheistic, or Muslim beliefs. African religious practices, considered "heathen", were strictly forbidden, and drums were outlawed for fear that the talking drum would be used by slaves to communicate over distances to plot rebellions.
[edit] Christianity
- See also: African American church
- See also: Christian views on slavery
When Pope Nicholas V instituted hereditary slavery of Africans[citation needed] with his Dum Diversas, he did so by classifying Africans as Muslims and pagans. Thus, for centuries it was expected that slaves who converted to Christianity would have to be freed. For this reason, slave owners prevented their "property" from learning about Christianity.
Later, Christianity was used as a tool to subjugate slaves and make them easier to control. Whites deliberately omitted or downplayed its equalizing and liberating elements and dogma and emphasized passages of the Bible that urged obedience to one's master and piety. However, slaves seized upon the story of Moses leading the "children of Israel" out of Egypt to the "Promised Land," and Old Testament notions of a fierce, warrior God who protected his faithful.
Worship developed by African slaves included such elements of West African religions as ring shouts; call and response; a belief in the supernatural; and the existence of the Kalunga Line, the unseen line beneath bodies of water where one could commune with the spirits of deceased ancestors, and related river cults. The practice of some captives snatching up their children and hurling themselves into the sea during the Middle Passage is regarded by some historians as not simply suicide, but an act of fear and desperation committed in the hope that, in death, they would join their ancestors at "home on the other side."
Many of these African influences persist today in mainstream African-American religious worship: in the "amen corner," praise shouts, ring shouts, "gettin' happy," and in gospel music; altered states of consciousness and speaking in tongues; and in the resonance of the Jordan River in spirituals and liturgical imagery and in full-immersion and river baptism. Some historians contend that the persistence of Islamic religious practice and culture can be seen in the continuing custom among older women of the Georgia Sea Islands and elsewhere in the South to cover their heads with hats or scarves during worship. The so-called "hat queens" of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), women known for their striking millinery in worship, also may be, at least in part, a continuation of this Islamic tradition.
The language of Negro spirituals, regarded by whites as mere expressions of faith, contained messages of endurance and deliverance. Some songs, like I Got Shoes ("Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven ain't goin' there") secretly mocked the hypocritical piety of slavemasters. Slaves also used shouts, praisesongs and hymns to sound warnings and signal escape attempts. The singing of Steal Away ("to Jesus") was a widely used code to signal that the time to escape had come. A seemingly innocent shout in an open field of, "Bird in the air!" served as a diversion to armed, game hunting overseers and a signal to those prepared to do so to take flight and head North to freedom. And the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot ("comin' for to carry me home") was used often to refer to the Underground Railroad.
Richard Allen was a former slave and an influential deacon and elder at the integrated and affluent St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. In 1787, Allen founded the all-black Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church after St. George's white members, increasingly uncomfortable with the large number of blacks the charismatic Allen had attracted to the church, began relegating black worshipers to the church balcony. Over time, growing numbers of African-American congregations withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1816, representatives of these congregations convened to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church, consecrating Allen is their bishop. The AME Church became the first national black Church in U.S. history.
Historically, separate churches have enabled blacks to worship in their own culturally distinct ways and assume positions of leadership denied to them in mainstream America. In addition to their religious role, African American churches traditionally have provided political leadership and served social welfare functions, such as providing for the indigent and establishing schools, orphanages and other social service institutions.
The comment by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, that, "...eleven o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour, and Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week," remains true today. The polarization of American society along racial lines is, perhaps, starkest when it comes to religious worship.
Today, the vast majority of African Americans practice some form of Protestantism, with evangelical churches, such as the pentecostal COGIC; A.M.E., Baptist and Methodist churches accounting for the majority of church membership. Black membership in the Catholic Church also has risen steadily over the past half decade, in great part the result of parents eschewing public education for their children and opting to send them instead to Catholic schools. Because of the persistence of segregation and separatist choice, and because of their fundamentally more African styles of worship, generally, African Americans historically have established and maintained churches separate from those of whites.
[edit] Islam
Many Africans had been converted to Islam generations before the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through intermarriage, trade or as a result of conquest. This religious practice was quashed in the early days of slavery, but some scholars contend that the fabric of African American culture is shot through with Islamic threads evident in, among other things, the blues.
Islamic religion and practice exist in the African-American community in many forms, in black nationalist Moorish Science Temples, some in operation since 1913; in the mosques of the Nation of Islam, another black nationalist sect established in Detroit in 1931; in numerous other black nationalist-leaning masjids around the country; and in mainstream Islamic mosques, as well.
[edit] Other religious movements
Today, a number of African are members of a group called the Nation of Islam, a quasi-religious organization with a black nationalist liberation theology founded in 1935. Poole, who changed his name to Elijah Muhammad, soon emerged as the leader of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad established temples in Detroit, Chicago, and the Nation of Islam reached its height in the 1960s and early 1970s, steadily declining in popularity after the assassination of Malcolm X. At present, Louis Farrakhan leads the ressurected Nation of Islam.
[edit] Traditional and Animist Practices
Other African Americans continue the centuries old practice of Voodoo, or Vodun, a heavily syncretic melding of elements of Catholicism and the Yoruba and Akan religions of Nigeria and Ghana, the points of origin of many of their ancestors. Still others have begun to explore and embrace Akan and Yoruba in their purer forms. Vodun in the U.S. in the past has been most prevalent in New Orleans among adherents who were nominally Catholic. But now free to express their spirituality within a distinctly African context, many practitioners of Vodun have dropped the cloak of Catholicism completely. As with Yoruba and Akan, there are Vodun devotees in various cities nationwide. Most notably, in cities with large black and Latino populations, there is sometimes a confluence of these three religions in expatriate African and African-American communities and in the Latino community, with the practice of Santeria, the Latin American version of Vodun.
[edit] Public opinion
African Americans are more conservative on religious issues than the U.S. population as a whole[1].
[edit] Agriculture and food
- See also Soul food.
The cultivation and use of many agricultural products in the U.S., such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to African influences. African American foods reflect creative responses to racial and economic oppression. Under slavery, African Americans were not allowed to eat better cuts of meat, and after Emancipation many often were too poor to afford them. Soul food, a hearty cuisine commonly associated with African Americans in the South (but also common among blacks nationwide), makes creative use of inexpensive products procured through farming and subsistence hunting and fishing. Pig intestines are boiled and sometimes battered and fried to make “chitterlings,” or "chitlins." Ham hocks and neck bones provide seasoning to soups; beans and boiled greens (turnip greens, collard greens, and mustard greens). Other common foods, such as fried chicken and fish, cornbread and “hoppin’ John” (black-eyed peas and rice),and fried chicken are prepared simply. When the African-American population was considerably more rural than it generally is today, rabbit, possum, and squirrel, as well as waterfowl, were important additions to the diet. Many of these food traditions are especially predominant in many parts of the rural South.
In urban areas particularly, however, the diet of African Americans may vary markedly different from that of their rural counterparts. Some African Americans also have incorporated Caribbean, Latin American and African foods and preparation techniques as immigration trends broaden the exposure of African Americans to other cultural traditions.
[edit] Holidays
In 1926 African American scholar Carter Godwin Woodson organized the first Negro History Week, to focus attention on previously neglected aspects of the black experience in the United States. Woodson chose February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the anniversary of the founding of the NAACP. Renamed Black History Week in 1972, the observance was extended to become Black History Month in 1976. During February, lectures, exhibitions, banquets, cultural events, and television and radio programming celebrate the achievements of African Americans. Since 1978, the U.S. Postal Service has participated in Black History Month by issuing commemorative stamps honoring notable African Americans.
Within days of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Congressman John Conyers of Detroit introduced a bill calling for a national holiday honoring Dr. King. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, various states enacted such a holiday, but Congress did not.
Finally, in 1983, the U.S. Congress established a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. The holiday is observed annually on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King’s birthday of January 15. Like Black History Month, Martin Luther King Day emphasizes educational and cultural observances, such as lectures and exhibits about King’s life and philosophy.
African American scholar and activist "Maulana" Ron Karenga invented the festival of Kwanzaa in 1966, as an alternative to the increasing commercialization of Christmas. Derived from the harvest rituals of Africans, Kwanzaa is observed each year from December 26 through January 1. Participants in Kwanzaa celebrations affirm their African heritage and the importance of family and community by drinking from a unity cup; lighting red, black, and green candles; exchanging heritage symbols, such as African art; and recounting the lives of people who struggled for African and African American freedom. People who celebrate Kwanzaa hope to strengthen the black community by adhering to seven guiding principles, designated by words from the Swahili language:
- umoja (unity)
- kujichagulia (self-determination)
- ujima (collective work and responsibility)
- ujamaa (cooperative economics)
- nia (purpose)
- kuumba (creativity)
- imani (faith)
Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the abolition of slavery. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19 that Union troops, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that all slaves were now free. This was two and-a-half years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops present to enforce the new executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865 and the arrival of General Granger's regiment, the forces finally were strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance. Originally celebrated primarily in Texas and Louisiana, Juneteenth is now celebrated in black communities all over the U.S. with picnics, block parties, parades and family reunions.
Another important African-American holiday is Malcolm X Day, which is celebrated on May 19, to commemorate the achievements of Malcolm X, a prominent black nationalist during the days of the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X Day is celebrated in most American cities with a significant African-American population, including Washington DC.
[edit] References
- ^ Slavery In America. Retrieved on March 7, 2007.
- Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, second edition, Oxford University Press 2005
- Encyclopedia Smithsonian: African American History and Culture
- African American Culture Through Oral Tradition
- History and Memory in African American Culture
- American Dialect Links - Contains links containing information about African America Vernacular English
[edit] See also
- African American church
- African American (Contemporary issues)
- African American art
- African American dance
- African American history
- African American literature
- African American music
- African American Vernacular English
- Blackface
- Cool (aesthetic)
- African aesthetic
- Cultural appropriation
- The Frogs (club)
- Maximum Cultural Development (MCD)
- The dozens
- List of African-American-related topics
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