My Cultural Background
As an African American my culture of origin is connected both with the culture of America and with the culture of Africa. My ancestors came to America as part of the slave trade. During that time, they adopted Christianity as their religious culture; so ultimately, the culture of my people is a mix of European, American and African ideas and values. Predominantly, though, the culture of my people is American and Christian. In the 20th century, some people in my community took to practicing Islam as a way to further develop their sense of their African ancestry. Overall, the culture is diverse and depends on many different inputs. This paper will describe some of those inputs, how they impact my community, and show how they are social, cultural, political and economical.
The circumstances under which my people’s culture migrated to the U.S. were not positive: slavery was a negative experience for blacks. They had to deal with a lot of suffering prior to emancipation and even after the end of slavery they had to deal with Jim Crow laws, segregation and many other problems that the ruling class in America kept alive. From beginning till now, African Americans have had mainly a culture of suffering but it has made their community closer in many ways and there are still a lot of traditional concepts and values that African Americans retain.
Issues that divide members within this group tend to be associated with identity politics. Some members of this group think that everything has to be politicized and that in order for the African American to truly become authentic he has to get back to his African roots. But others don’t have any sense of any roots in Africa, no more than the descendents of a German American immigrant have any sense of roots in Germany after so many generations of passed. Alice Walker (1973) gave the best description of this division in her short story “Everyday...
Thus, some people in my community have fabricated a culture from themselves that is both disconnected from their American culture and from actual African culture. They also distance themselves from their Christian culture and this is evident in the extent to which religion plays a role in their day-to-day lives.
For many African Americans, religion is very important. Some are Protestant and some are Catholic. Some are Muslim. At the end of the day, religion is important to those people who practice it and those African American families who do not practice any type of religion tend to be disconnected from positive cultural inputs. In these cases, they tend to rely on popular music such as hip hop and rap, or social media and TMZ for their dosage of cultural inputs. Thus, there is really a night-and-day difference between African Americans who are grounded by religious inputs and live their religious values in their lives, and African Americans who latch onto the superficial aspects of modern culture and live their lives according to these often glib and pretentious values.
Gender roles and expectations among men and women African Americans are traditional for the most part; however, in recent decades, the family dynamic has broken up and many families are single-parent families. In black families where both parents are still together, there is usually a strong religious element to the family and women are more focused on domestic aspects of the family and men with the work aspect. In single-parent families, women have no choice but to leave the house and work to support what is left of the…
