African American History and Society

Franklin & Higgenbotham (2011) provide an Afro-centric view of history, albeit one that focuses on how Africa evolved vis-a-vis Europe and especially with regards to the slave trade. Salient points F&H point out include the diversity, richness, and complexity of African societies and their relationships with one another as well as with outside traders from Europe and the Middle East. Social stratification, hierarchy, and patriarchy all characterized the most powerful and important African societies. The slave trade, both trans-Atlantic and across the Mediterranean, transformed both African societies and European ones as well. The F&H book offers insight into how the systematic exploitation of disenfranchised individuals creates wealth for capitalists, but the book is not focused on slavery or economics. Rather, From Slavery to Freedom talks about how people of African decent, in the diaspora and on the continent, have made tremendous but often unheralded contributions to the arts, the sciences, philosophy, religion, and culture.
To illustrate unique aspects about African culture and the legacy and merit of some of its major civilizations, F&H occasionally touch upon the power of music. On this note, the F&H book provides a foundation for further research and understanding of articles like Giddings’s “Afrocentric Jay-Z.” American music is essentially African-American music. From folk songs and spirituals in feeding the emergence of the blues, to jazz and early rock and roll, and finally including hip-hop, the most quintessentially American musical forms are African in origin and expression. Often these musical forms have been co-opted or appropriated, for financial gain. The arrogance of racism has enabled systematic exploitation of African people and their expressive arts. Almost without exception, a pattern emerges in which the whites in American society belittle and bemoan African arts and music, only to turn around the reclaim them as their own.
Slavery has existed since the earliest sedentary civilizations arose in Africa and elsewhere in the world. As soon as wealth can be accumulated in the form of surplus goods, people in positions of power—such as landholders or those who claim their power comes from divinity—exploit others without power. The exploitation of labor and forced servitude is slavery and was not unique to Africa. African societies, particularly the great kingdoms in Western Africa, practiced slavery just as the great civilizations of the Middle East did. During the age of exploration, imperialism, and colonialism, Europeans recognized the inherent value of New World lands and quickly realized that slave labor would be the most economically feasible means of extracting the natural resources they found. Whereas slavery had typically manifested in African societies as an extension of a caste system, the new model of slavery became race-based. Race was not invented by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the trans-Atlantic slave trade ensured that race would forever define social class status, stratification, and hierarchy.
The epic memories that Giddings refers to in his analysis of Jay-Z are central to the Africanizing of African American culture. Through systematic erasing of identity, genealogy, and personal history, the oppressors have necessitated the creation of an oppositional but cohesive identity construction through the diaspora. African American culture is distinct from African culture, but it acknowledges its roots all the same. What I am left wondering about is what the future holds. We cannot move forward without reckoning with the past, and yet we cannot become mired in morbid reflection. It is important to move forward with pride and positive values, to resist pandering to people who undermine and undervalue African peoples, African cultures, and Africa America. Similarly, I question Giddings’s mentioning of matrifocal culture (p. 3). Matrifocality and feminism are not inherent to any major world society, even if there are some exceptions to the general rule of patriarchy. I would like to know how to enter into critical discourse on race that also takes gender into account.


References

Franklin, J.H. & Higgenbotham, E.B. (2011). From Slavery to Freedom. McGraw-Hill.
Giddings, G.J. (n.d.). Afrocentric Jay-Z.