F I R S T
E D I T I O N
READINGS IN AFRICAN
AMERICAN CULTURE
RESISTANCE, LIBERATION, AND
IDENTITY FROM THE 1600S
TO THE 21ST CENTURY
by Angela Schwendiman
EASTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONV
PART ONE
1
DEFINING AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND IDENTITY:
THE TRAUMA OF SLAVERY
3
1. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of
African American Identity
5
BY RON EYERMAN
Discussion Questions
60
THE PRIVILEGE OF WHITENESS
61
2. Of Fish and Water: Perspectives on Racism and Privilege
63
BY MICHAEL K. BROWN, MARTIN CAMOY, ELLIOT CURRIE
Discussion Questions
PART TWO
110
111
RECLAIMING AFRICA’S HISTORY
113
3. Afrocentrism and Historical Models for the
Foundation of Ancient Greece
115
BY MARTIN BERNAL
Discussion Questions
124
PART THREE
125
CONSTRUCTING AN AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY
127
4. Africa and the Challenges of Constructing Identity
129
BY TUNDE ADELEKE
Discussion Questions
169
QUESTIONING THE NEED FOR RACIAL ESSENTIALISM
171
5. Afrocentric Essentialism
173
BY TUNDE ADELEKE
Discussion Questions
PART FOUR
195
197
DEVELOPING A RADICAL BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS
199
6. “Black is Beautiful!” Black Power Culture, Visual Culture,
and the Black Panther Party
201
BY AMY ABUGO ONGIRI
7. “We Waitin’ on You”: Black Power, Black Intellectuals,
and the Search to Define a Black Aesthetic
235
BY AMY ABUGO ONGIRI
Discussion Questions
275
Introduction
T
he emergence of African Americans as a distinct cultural identity
would occur over the span of several centuries and undergo the influence of specific historical and social phenomena. The Trans-Atlantic
slave trade facilitated the largest forced migration known to human
history. Also known as the African diaspora, the dispersal of people
from the west coast and central regions of Africa brought millions of
enslaved to the shores of North and South America and to the West
Indies from the 17th through the 19th centuries. While only a relatively
small portion, roughly 500,000–600,000 Africans, would reach North
America, out of this population developed a unique ethnicity based
not only on the genetic origins of their ancestry, but on the culture of
a people who were primarily raised in slavery, but who had not altogether forgotten their West African traditions and had incorporated the
colonial American ideals of egalitarianism and European culture.
Slave owners controlled their properties’ bodies, but they could not
dictate what was in their hearts and minds. Secret societies for worship
emerged, and the slaves combined African rituals and rhythms to Christian
hymns, forming the soulful spirituals and “sorrow songs,” as W. E. B.
Du Bois would call them, that would validate their existence as human
beings. A caste system, informally known as the “color line,” precluded
even free blacks from realizing the benefits of American citizenship, but
the end of slavery promised a future of equality for all Americans. In the
North, free black Americans organized their own churches and created
social organizations for the express purpose of meeting the needs of the
newly freed former slaves still adjusting to society, as well as assisting
the millions still enslaved to realize freedom. In the South, industrial
v
vi | READINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
forms of slavery dispensing the assignment of tasks and work groups
allowed the African descendants to incorporate the call-and-response
song style brought from West Africa into their everyday work songs.
African folklore and storytelling such as the tale of the tortoise and the
hare allowed the slaves to teach values to their children and preserve
their history in an oral tradition practiced in African homes. The relative
isolation, as well as the numbers of slaves from West Africa, enabled
them to preserve cultural traditions found in the preparation of food
and in the types of food, particularly rice, which the slaves brought with
them from Africa and then were later forced to produce and harvest
along the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina. The Africans
taught their enslaved descendants a very physically demanding form of
dancing, including spinning and leaping in the air and in time to the
complex rhythms, multiple harmonies, and improvised melodies played
on the drums, flutes, and banjos fashioned after the instruments played
in West Africa. Thus, the sounds of West Africa permeated the air surrounding the slave cabins. The tonal style of speaking, including the
West African diction of uh-huh and uh-uh would replace the English
spoken words of yay and nay for yes and no and influence the creation
of the southern drawl.
By the 19th century, civil war tore the nation asunder; in 1863,
President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and declared
the conflict a war to end slavery. The announcement inspired millions
of blacks, and 200,000 slaves would join the ranks of the Union to fight
for freedom. After four years of war, the nation began the slow and arduous process of rebuilding. More than 4 million blacks—descendants
of Africans who had preserved remnants of their former identities and
African culture through the isolation of slavery, the vast majority largely
uneducated (for this had been prohibited by law)—entered the American
economy with nothing more than the skills they had acquired through
years of forced drudgery along with the scars of inhumanity.
During Reconstruction, Congress would pass the nation’s first civil
rights legislation embodied in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to
the Constitution, articulating the end of slavery and acknowledging
birthright citizenship for the first time, regardless of race, equal protection under the law, and guaranteeing, for men, at least, the right to
vote. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson made the doctrine of “separate but
equal” the law of the land, and the dark period of Jim Crow began.
Institutionalized racism, epitomized by legal segregation, sowed the
seeds for the ongoing struggle for equality and identity that would dictate
Introduction | vii
the lives and characterize the culture, as well as the social philosophy,
of African American people. Some scholars theorize it was the failure of
Reconstruction to integrate blacks into the fabric of American society,
as well as their long sojourn on American soil as slaves, that provided
the basis for the emergence of a distinct African American identity.
This trait unified a people not only by race, but by a shared collective
memory of slavery, which helped to construct the identity of a people.
The trauma of slavery, experienced in retrospect by their descendants
through their missing family histories, identities, and exclusion from
American culture, society, and history, would unite African Americans
in the United States.
The readings included in this book attempt to explore not only how
African Americans and their culture and identity were expressed and
formed, but features articles that analyze the role of collective memory in
providing a people with a collective identity, as well as a means for developing narratives and coping strategies to deal with the trauma of slavery
in retrospect and as an ongoing entity of exclusion from mainstream
American history, culture, and society. Examining white privilege in
American society today allows students to explore and discuss the many
ways in which “race-neutral” policies and social practices perpetuate
racial disparities embedded within the nation’s institutions and thereby
continue to favor and unconsciously validate white identity.
Scholarship and readings that challenge the tales of slave traders
who encountered 16th-century Africans and perceived them as inferior
reject established, preconceived notions that blacks had no culture or
any written histories. Modern translations of written manuscripts once
buried beneath the sand dunes of former West African empires and
universities reveal the glory of Africa’s past and refute the previously
accepted worldview of blacks as perceived through the racialized lens
of 19th-century historians during the height of Eurocentric thinking.
Theories and scholarship included in this book provide groundwork
for students to discuss why Victorian scholars removed documentation
from history that supported the existence of advanced black African
civilizations that predated European intervention in West Africa prior to
the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Such readings also lay the foundation for
examining the early work of Pan-Africanists, who sought to unify people
of African descent on the diaspora in attempts to address the effects of
colonialism and the color line, as well as provide a historical context
from which to analyze the role of Afrocentrists, who not only sought to
reclaim Africa’s history, but sensed the unique desire to recognize an
viii | READINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
essential black identity, vindicate her people, and restore them and the
continent to their former glory.
Research enclosed in the book reveals the different ways in which
the former slaves constructed new identities for themselves, as well as
identifies the major historical events that contributed to a knowledge
and understanding of an emergent, postbellum African American cultural group and identity that would at once embrace its roots in slavery
while anticipating their assimilation into the larger culture and fabric
of American society. The shattered dreams of this delay would fracture
the black community into multiple variations and expressions of black
culture and identity, from rejecting any connection with slave culture
and identity and embracing a separatist black nationalism, to espousing cultural pluralism, where the black community could recognize its
ancestral culture and ethnicity while embracing its American identity
through pluralism, to rejecting both identities, classifying themselves as
neither being “essentially African nor essentially American,” but defined
within a broader, universal context of being “human,” to rejecting all
previous racial categories and identifying solely as American.
Lastly, the text allows students to explore the creation and expression
of black power and the Black Panther Party, as well as to understand the
logic and reasoning behind the rise of its associated visual culture which
overtook radicals in the 1960s after the demise of Dr. King’s Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when it became evident to young
black activists that their nonviolent efforts to politically organize blacks
in the South were not enough. The Black Panther political ideology
was subsequently embraced and expressed, as well as defined by black
artists during the emergent black cultural arts movement through the
development of a black aesthetic that would spawn revolutionary ways of
expressing and perceiving black thought and politics in literature, poetry,
films, and music. The goal of the artist was liberation—i.e., to decolonize
minds and transform individuals through raising a consciousness of the
conditions that contributed to the oppression of the black community, and
to find and develop a new language by which to express those thoughts.
The appeal to reinvent identity through restructuring the formal context
of art would later characterize a new and emerging art form in the ghetto
known as rap, and the hip-hop culture that would follow.
DEFINING AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND
IDENTITY: THE TRAUMA OF SLAVERY
R
econstructing a cultural identity from a past that was
erased through slavery, as well as redefining a collective
identity apart from the dominant culture, has been the task of
African Americans who did not experience the “normal” process of assimilation into American society (Eyerman). African
Americans, therefore, are left to “discover” their blackness and
what that means in terms of its significance and the prospects
for healing and reconciliation for approximately 40 million
people who are descendants of slaves today.
SELECTED READING :
Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African
American Identity
BY RON EYERMAN
3
60 | READINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Discuss the role of trauma in the formation of a collective
memory and identity.
2. What is cultural trauma? Do people need to experience trauma
directly to form unity or cohesion? Why?
3. How does trauma link the past to the present? What is its negative impact at the psychological level?
4. How did the failure of Reconstruction to integrate the former
slaves help to formulate an African American identity?
5. Why can professional historical accounts be criticized for
their ethnocentrism? How does history play a role in collective memory, even when it is inaccurate? How does collective
memory, then, become more similar to myth?
6. Discuss and explain why the struggle for representation for
black Americans has been both complex and problematic.
7. How did the meaning of slavery change according to differ-
ent time periods, regions, and racial groups? What does this
reveal about the power of collective memory and identity, as
well as history, historical events, and their reconstruction and
representation?
8. Why did slavery become the “primal scene of black identity?”
Why is this significant in terms of history, collective memory,
identity, and representation?
9. How did the civil rights movement transform the cultural
trauma of a group into a national trauma? How did that movement place slavery into America’s collective memory?
10.How did blacks and whites view slavery differently, and why
is this significant in the development of a “counter memory?”
11.Discuss the impact of national and regional commemorations
of the Civil War without any physical reminders—i.e., statues,
memorials—in reference to slaves as a part of the construction
of that event or its historical memory.
THE PRIVILEGE OF WHITENESS
A
different picture of racism emerges when racism is understood as a sense of group position and as the organized
accumulation of racial advantage, a system best understood by
observing actual behavior (Brown et al.). While overt racism is
considered a thing of the past, racial grouping and the ability
to exclude people of color from social institutions reflects a
benefit as well as a “cardinal principle of white identity” that
perpetuates racial disparities (Brown et al.). How do we effectively address racism in society when the privileged status of the
dominant group goes unnoticed by them and is as natural to its
members as water is to fish?
SELECTED READING :
Of Fish and Water: Perspectives on Racism and Privilege
Y MICHAEL K. BROWN, MARTIN CAMOY, AND
B
ELLIOT CURRIE
61
110 | READINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How do you think differently about the existence of racism in
America?
2. How is racism commonly defined?
3. Identify and explain how the benefits of being white are directly
related to the costs of being nonwhite.
4. How does racism continue to affect African American lives?
5. Why are race-neutral policies not necessarily race neutral?