Essay On African American Culture

Hi, Teresa: Descendants from Africa, who were born into slavery lost their culture. Slaves were not permitted to practice or speak their native language or practice their native culture. Everything was taken away from them including their name. Africa American were considered the property of their slave owner and they can do what every they please with their assets. In the Harlem Renaissance era, Africa American were free to express and show their many talents without discrimination. For the first time, they were able to show pride within their community. As you stated in your post, on African American started to develop a new culture of their own that represent who they were now and not what centuries of depression

As hip hop and rap became more anymore popular, we see the integration between these two styles of music with pop. Black culture was now popular. Many white people started rapping and some have even excelled in the genres of hiphop and

So even thought something like blackface is viewed racist and old fashion its still holds a firm foundation in American entertainment.

Even though they are shown in on media there are social sites they are shown very stereotypical. This social site is call “Vine”. This app for many phone lets people take a short video of something and post many African americans have become very fond of this app and made tons of videos of very stereotypical thing about themselves. Doing this they make it

These images idea became very popular and people came to believe that all blacks fit those

No? That's okay because of the African consist of a mixture of countries with various tribes that each have their own unique characteristics. Being so divergent and different from the black culture we forget that the black culture is an offspring from the motherland. From Singing, drumming, and dancing to food, fashion, and language the African culture has been formative and unique to the melting pot known as America. Esceppically during their resistance to slavery and their quest for freedom, African peoples differing in appearances, traditions, and language became a single people and began to share common cultural themes.

What people don’t know about our society today is that African Americas have created most of the dances we do today. As a society, we have been inspired by the native African dances because they poured their souls into the dances which all had meaning. From what I’ve noticed African Americans and dance are a pair because it brings out the rhythm and joy in folks. The musical culture is very strong and over the last few years has become stronger.

African Americans during the eighteenth century lived in small minimalist log cabins with dirt floors, brick fireplaces, and wooden chimneys.  In coastal South Carolina and Georgia, African architecture were very common  They had little furniture and a few kitchen supplies, but as time went by, the families got more supplies and the homes became more substantial (Hine, 65).  When making clothes, blacks steered toward style resembling West African culture.  African American people Africanized the South with many other things such as their religious concepts and practices, African words and modes of expression, music, cooking methods and foods, literature and art.  They also were heavy on their notions of kinship and by preserving the West African extended family, a structure for African American culture was created (Hine, 67) .

While it mostly occurred in black churches, the style shaped the Protestants of the south. In the southern colonies, black women continued to carry heavy loads balanced on their heads as their ancestors had, giving them an unusually erect posture and graceful carriage. General African standards of beauty considered a full figure to be more attractive in a woman than a slender one, and African-American women seem to have maintained this ideal. Men set themselves off by adopting individual and distinctive walking styles, probably patterned at first after those typical of African chiefs, wrestlers, and master dancers. Such forms of what today might be termed styling out were added to the looser and slower movements that typified first-generation Africans from the tropics; the result was an African-American kinesics, a language of moving the human body that soon came to typify the southern region as a whole and which probably influenced the developing American

The black culture that we see around us today is made up of many layers. There are many factors to the way blacks go about their life today. The Civil Rights movement, popular music, and a sense of wanting complete freedom, all contribute to modern black society. The Harlem Renaissance is the source of the black culture that we see today.

The lifestyle of African Americans reflects the influence of cultural traditions that originated in Africa but at the same time reflects the uniqueness of the African-American in the United States ("Black American").

It has been reproduced in Western cultures, and fashion houses. But, has it now lost its cultural significance? I believe in certain ways it has. Cultural appropriation has taken place within high levels of fashion.

African Americans were brought to the United States in the 1700s and have adapted tremendously since then. After their emancipation from slavery, African-American traditions continued to flourish, such as linguistic style, radical innovations in music, art, and literature, religion, and cultural cuisine. The greatest influence of African cultural practices on European culture is found below the Mason-Dixon line within the American South.

Pop culture has had a huge impact regarding this problem, whether it be in the music industry or fashion industry. Many ‘fashion’ designers find it okay to take designs from indigenous culture. Examples, are Junya Watanabe, a Japanese, designer created a collection that included African prints, hair styles, and Maasai beadwork (Gant). Maasai beadwork signifies different meanings to the African culture, having it displayed in a fashion show degrades the symbolic meaning it holds. Dsquared2, owned by two white men, were ‘inspired’ by Native American culture

From the 1500s to the 1700s, African blacks, mainly from the area of West Africa (today's Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Dahomey, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon) were shipped as slaves to North America, Brazil, and the West Indies. For them, local and tribal differences, and even varying cultural backgrounds, soon melded into one common concern for the suffering they all endured. Music, songs, and dances as well as remembered traditional food, helped not only to uplift them but also quite unintentionally added immeasurably to the culture around them. In the approximately 300 years that blacks have made their homes in North America, the West Indies, and Brazil, their highly honed art