African-American culture, also known as Black American Culture or Black Culture, refers to the cultural expressions of African Americans, either as part of or distinct from mainstream American culture. African-American culture has been influential on American and global worldwide culture as a whole.
African-Americans have faced systemic and violent racism including through eras of enslavement, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the civil rights movement. This racism has led to African-Americans being excluded from many aspects of American life and these experiences have profoundly influenced African-American Culture. Moreover, even in the face of these significant challenges and other experiences of racial discrimination, African Americans have demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity in producing distinctive traditions and radical innovations in music, art, literature, religion, cuisine, and other fields. These cultural expressions often serve as powerful devices for advancing racial justice and shape African-American culture.
African-American cultural history
From the earliest days of American slavery in the 17th century, slave owners sought to exercise control over their slaves by attempting to strip them of their African culture. In the New World in general and in the United States in particular, the physical isolation and the societal marginalization of African slaves and, later, the physical isolation and the societal marginalization of their free progeny facilitated the retention of significant elements of traditional culture among Africans. Slave owners deliberately tried to repress independent political or cultural organization in order to deal with the many slave rebellions or acts of resistance that took place in the United States, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dutch Guyanas.
African cultures, slavery, slave rebellions, and the civil rights movement have all shaped African-American religious, familial, political, and economic behaviors. The imprint of Africa is evident in a myriad of ways: in politics, economics, language, music, hairstyles, fashion, dance, religion, cuisine, and worldview.Throughout all of this, African Americans have created their own culture and unique history in the United States.
In turn, African-American culture has had a pervasive and transformative impact on many elements of mainstream American culture. This process of mutual creative exchange is called creolization. Over time, the culture of African slaves and their descendants has been ubiquitous in its impact on not only the dominant American culture, but on world culture as well.
Oral tradition
The Slaveholders limited or prohibited the education of enslaved Africans because they feared that it might empower their chattel and inspire or enable emancipatory ambitions. In the United States, the legislation that banned slaves from getting a formal education likely contributed to their maintenance of a strong oral tradition, a common feature of indigenous or native African culture. African-based oral traditions became the primary means of preserving history, mores, and other cultural information among the people. This was consistent with the griot practices of oral history in many native African culture and other cultures that did not rely on the written word. Many of these cultural elements have been passed from generation to generation through storytelling. The folktales provided African-Americans the opportunity to inspire and educate one another.
Examples of African-American folktales include trickster tales of Br'er Rabbit and heroic tales such as that of John Henry. The Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris helped to bring African-American folk tales into mainstream adoption. Harris did not appreciate the complexity of the stories nor their potential for a lasting impact on society. Other narratives that appear as important, recurring motifs in African-American culture are the "Signifying Monkey", "The Ballad of Shine", and the legend of Stagger Lee.