Black Studies: The Socialization Of Blacks Into American Culture

When reading the first chapter of the mis-education of the Negro book, the two most interesting items that I found was how it explained about blacks being hopeless, “to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless...". To me this first point meant how the teachings towards blacks is as if blacks were a curse and not meant to move forward because of their struggles and being black. The second point that interests me is the part when a student was in a Negro summer school with a white instructor who used such a textbook that states white people are superior to blacks. And the student said why and the instructor said he wanted the students to get that point of view.

Talking Black In America addresses how advanced, unique, and culturally important African American English is (Hutcheson and Cullinan, 2017).

Social Imagination is something that everyone should learn how to use on a day to day basis. This is simply being able to think one way about something but while also being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and think the same way they do. This helps to broaden your horizon on how you really look at things. You could use this to realize what is going on in the world and what is happening with people. There are plenty of different ways this can be used. For personal ways you can just look at a social event lets take the black lives matter protests and use a different perspective than you usually would weather that is in displeasure from it or approval. Another way is someone drinking an energy drink everyday some people would view this as not being very healthy at all while another person would see this and say this is helping that person build more energy to achieve whatever they have going on that day.

Culture is such a broad and complex term that can be defined in numerous ways. It is said that in part is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, communication, belief, art, literature, and music one acquires upon learning and transmitting characteristics from previous generations. Culture is symbolic communication, and its symbols are learned and carefully perpetuated in a society through its institutions. In Black Culture and Black Consciousness by Lawrence W. Levine, he carefully attempts to uncover Afro-American culture during the antebellum and postbellum periods. More often than none, historians like to emphasize the things that get lost in the culture of Afro-Americans when they are taken from Africa and forced to live as enslaved people in North America. However, in Levine’s book, we discover that he carefully

The American culture is define to everyone in their own way. Everyone grows up differently in a particular community that shares the same languages, values, rules, and customs. The American Culture on that is consider to be a “melting pot”, because of all the different cultures that reside inside of it making it so diverse. Race in this country has never been a great topic throughout history. African Americans play a huge role into defining what our culture is as a whole, as well as being a part of racism for the past 250 years.

Music is a creative art form that allows the artist to construct something that expresses a purpose. It evolves over time and changes as the world changes, taking on many different motivations behind the melody and lyrics. In today’s society, anger, oppression, racism, and negative opinions rule the media and popular culture. I believe that African Americans need to show their self worth and not let white people hold them back. With the music in white culture often mocking African American culture and portraying negative stereotypes, African Americans have to find ways to gain respect. In acknowledgement of the negative portrayal of their culture, African Americans respond by creating songs and videos that express their pride in their culture and heritage, react to white oppression, and communicate their independence.

As the United States kept on expanding, it started to face many problems. Education was vital in the 1800’s. The citizens of America wanted to establish schools which would educate the next laboring generation. A lot of people, as well as Horace Mann thought that all children had the right to go to school and get an education. This then brought up the problem of free public schooling for all kids. A bad side of this was African-American and Irish Catholic people were left out of this opportunity that started a little hypocrisy. This made the opportunities for women even stronger. Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, and Mary Lyon were important to this battle. The reason for the movement is to offer an education to everyone despite level of class,

When I survey the landscape in black America, it does not take long for me to recognize the massive impression of a vehement struggle of a collective group of people to simply keep their head above water. The problem in the black community is that it is where every ill of this nation is felt first. It is the place in which much of the economic devastation is felt and absorbed in order to relieve some of the pressure off of this nation’s more affluent citizens.

Africans have, since the early settlement of America, has had a great influence in the nation’s growth. These contributions to the United States from enslaved Africans have been greatly portrayed in American culture. Varying from cuisine, to song and dance are not only portrayed today but it has a deep-rooted impact throughout the United States. During the middle passage, enslaved Africans were forced to abandon their everyday lives, their families and their homes and forced to adapt to a new lifestyle they knew nothing of. However, upon arrival into the New World, due to their prior knowledge and wisdom from back home, they were able to quickly adapt and custom themselves to this new lifestyle in order to survive with the hope of potentially one day returning back to Africa. Unfortunately, African contributions to the culture of the United States has received little to no recognition and it has been taken credit for by Europeans and Whites since the early establishment of the United States.

The American Negro Academy, the first Black intellectual society, started the trend of establishing Black elitist groups who valued higher education. Unlike Booker T. Washington, Crummell’s Academy taught others that the race should learn self-sufficiency, not relying on social inclusion from Whites. He understood that Whites and Blacks would probably never peacefully coincide because the “race-problem” encompassed all of American history. In fact, the growth of Black and White populations would only continue to cultivate the problem.

The Unites States is a true melting pot of ethnicities and cultures. For many members of minority groups a certain hybridity is readily adopted, but for others, cultural assimilation can be quite difficult. Chicana author, Sandra Cisneros described this phenomenon as “always straddling two countries… but not belonging to either culture” (Doyle. 54). African American author, Alice Walker shared Cisneros’ sentiment, but focused her attention on the assimilation of black cultures and subcultures within the United States. Cisneros and Walker make the same poignant statement about the strains of cultural assimilation, with reconciliation of split identities as the goal, in their respective works, 1991’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and 1973’s “Everyday Use,” yet their unique ethnic perspectives allow them to make it in surprisingly different ways.

Abstract: Since the Transatlantic Slave Trade, African Americans have been dependent upon those of fairer complexions to educate them about the culture and history of their own people. Unfortunately, the trip over to the Americas caused them to lose touch with several parts of their being; native tongues, culture/heritage and most of all their self-righteous. Somewhere along the way they forgot that they are creators of every major practice; from metallurgy to agriculture; practices that essentially influenced the entire world. The Transatlantic Slave Trade essentially and effectively brainwashed a group of people. It caused people of the African diaspora to lose sight of who they really are; installing negative and inferior perception of their ancestry, while also installing white superiority through their mindsets. African Americans innately depended on white people for every part of their life, even later slavery. In regards to education, African Americans depended on white Americans to build infrastructures for the education of black people. This unfortunately continued the cycle of white dependency. While African Americans thought they were enhancing their knowledge, all they were doing was becoming more equipped servants to their white

Many Americans point to the suffering of the African American experience from the internal problems in African Americans communities; however, they neglect the external social constraints that African Americans have faces in America. African Americans have suffered oppression through social institution through factors such as Segregation, Racial Crimination, and Mass incarnation. The constraint of segregation was a way of social, political, and economical control over African Americans. African Americans are usually a racial group that is associate with crime. Research and statistics has shown that African Americans are those that are majority incarnated in the United states. Many white Americans kept

Introduction to African American Studies was the class that I decided to take this summer because I am genuinely interested in learning more about the cultures and lifestyles of African Americans through out history and I want to further my knowledge beyond just learning about what was taught to me in secondary school. I do not know much about African American studies as I have not taken any courses on it or relating to it in the past but I hope that I can gain a lot of information on the topic through out this intellectual experience. I also hope to gain a better understanding of the history of Africans and African Americas and be able to dive deeper into this topic instead of just hitting the surface as I feel as though my previous experiences with this topic have covered. In just this first weeks lesson I have learned about the three great principles that characterize the “Black Intellectual Tradition” and how these three principles are used and perceived.

I have traveled all over the world but I have never been down South. Being from New York has also given me a very narrow perspective of African American culture. The purpose of this research project is to gain some understanding of Black culture specifically in the South. College has exposed me to a lot of people who were born and raised in the South and some of my closest friends are southerners. By researching the history, culture, and demographic information of the South, I plan on becoming a more well-informed American.