culture Book ver final 5 - Flipbook - Page 99
Black Culture: Where did it come
from, where is it going?
By Charles E. Richardson
Culture: The customs, arts, social institutions, and
achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social
group.
What is African American culture? Too many times African
American culture is viewed as flawed and less than wholesome; birthed out of slavery and
splintered and synonymous with anything unsavory.
Those perceptions are the product of a White culture that has always believed Africans were
“less-than” — and throughout history, the vein of White supremacy has guided what has been
believed and written about Africans since before this country’s founding.
How firmly rooted in White supremacy is that belief? Ibram X. Kendi, in his seminal work
“Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” explains that
White people, in order to justify slavery and its continuance, had to believe, because they were
Puritans, that Africans were less than human, even though, aside from skin color there was
little difference in human anatomy. Cotton Mather, one of the leading theologians of the late
1600s, the son of Increase Mather, a Harvard president, along with John Locke, Robert Boyle,
and Isaac Newton, believed slaves, who were Black, had White souls, making it spiritually
proper to enslave their Black bodies while they lived, but if converted, their souls would turn
White in death.
American Culture
We think of the American culture, beginning with independence, however, it was the racist
views at the highest level of religious leadership that shaped racial attitudes and set the course
for African American culture. The picture of the passive slave was far from correct, it only
appeased the White conscience. Kendi wrote, “From their arrival around 1619, African people
had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals.
In all of the 50 suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American
colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting
to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.”
Not much had changed by 1919, when sociologist George Edmund Hayes, the first Black to earn
a doctorate from Columbia, identified 38 separate racial riots from that “Red Summer” in which
Whites attacked Black people. These were not the first racist attacks but were the first where
Blacks fought back.
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