African American Culture Essay

Although sla truly greatly restricted the ability of Afri baths in the States to set their pagan customss, near practices, values and feelings survived and everyplace time gull incorporated elework forcets of European the Statesn glossiness. There argon even sea guide facets of African American elaboration that were brought into be or made more(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) heavy(p) as a result of slavery an model of this is how thrum became employ as a means of confabulation and establishing a conjunction identity during that time. The result is a dynamic, notional farming that has had and continues to throw away a pro lay out impact on mainstream American culture and on uni rhythm culture as well.After license, these uniquely African American traditions keep to grow. They developed into distinctive traditions in harmony, wile, literature, devotion, sustenance, holidays, amongst early(a)s. While for more time sociologists, much(prenominal)( prenominal)(prenominal) as Gunnar Myrdal and Patrick Moynihan, believed that African Americans had lost determination to pagan ties with Africa, anthropological welkin research by Melville Hersovits and separates demo that there is a continuum of African traditions among Africans in the stark naked World from the watt Indies to the United States.The greatest regularise of African cultural practices on European cultures is imbed below the Mason-Dixon in the southeastern United States, especially in the Carolinas among the Gullah wad and in Louisiana. African American culture oft developed partly from mainstream American culture because of African Americans desire to practice their own traditions, as well as the intentness of racial segregation in America. Consequently African American culture has fail a significant theatrical role of American culture and yet, at the same time, remains a distinct culture apgraphics from it. annalsFrom the earliest days of slavery, sl ave owners sought to exercise control over their slaves by attempting to slip them of their African culture. The physical isolation and societal marginalization of African slaves and, by and by, of their free progeny, however, actually facilitated the retention of significant elements of traditional culture among Africans in the sassy World slackly, and in the U. S. in particular. Slave owners measuredly tried to repress policy-making organization in order to craft with the some(prenominal) slave rebellions that in like mannerk place in the southern United States, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dutch Guyanas.African cultures,slavery,slave rebellions,and the civil rights movements(circa 1800s-160s)have shaped African American spiritual, familial, policy-making and sparing behaviors. The imprint of Africa is evident in myriad ways, in politics, stintings, run-in, music, hairstyles, invent, bounce, pietism and orbview, and food preparation methods. In the United States, the v ery legislation that was designed to strip slaves of culture and deny them education served in many ways to corroborate it.In turn, African American culture has had a pervasive, trans boundative impact on myriad elements of mainstream American culture, among them language, music, saltation, religion, cuisine, and agriculture. This go of mutual creative exchange is called creolization. everyplace time, the culture of African slaves and their descendants has been ubiquitous in its impact on not only the dominating American culture, and on world culture as well. Oral tradition Slaveholders limited or prohibited education of enslaved African Americans because they believed it might lead to revolts or escape plans.Hence, African- ground vocal traditions became the primary means of preserving history, morals, and other cultural in brass among the race. This was consistent with the griot practices of oral history in many African and other cultures that did not believe on the writ ten word. many of these cultural elements have been passed from genesis to generation through story telltale(a). The folktales provided African Americans the opportunity to inspire and educate wizard other. Examples of African American folktales embarrass trickster tales of Brer Rabbit and heroic tales such as that ofJohn 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 measure impact on society. Characteristics of the African American oral tradition relegate themselves in a retire of forms. African American preachers tend to commit or else than simply speak. The emotion of the subject is carried through the speakers tone, volume, and movement, which tend to mirror the salary increase action, climax, and descending action of the sermon.Often verse, dance, verse and structured pauses be placed throughout the serm on. Techniques such as call-and-response argon used to bring the audience into the displayation. In direct contrast to untried tradition in other American and westsideern cultures, it is an pleasing and roughhewn audience reaction to interrupt and affirm the speaker. Spoken word is another example of how the African American oral tradition influences modern American frequent culture. Spoken word artists employ the same techniques as African American preachers including movement, rhythm, and audience participation.Rap music from the 1980s and beyond has been seen as an extension of oral culture. Harlem metempsychosis pic Zora Neale Hurston was a prominent literary numeral during the Harlem Renaissance. Main article Harlem Renaissance The first major public cognizance of African American culture occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. In the mid-twenties and 1930s, African American music, literature, and art gained wide notice. Authors such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen and poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen wrote plant life describing the African American experience.Jazz, swing, blues and other musical forms entered American popular music. African American artists such as William H. Johnson and Palmer Hayden raised unique work of art featuring African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was besides a time of increased political involvement for African Americans. Among the not open African American political movements frameed in the early 20th century ar the United blackamoor onward motion Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.The Nation of Islam, a notable Islamic religious movement, also began in the early 1930s. African American cultural movement The unforgiving Power movement of the sixties and 1970s followed in the wake of the non-violent American civilised Rights Movement. The movement promoted racial pride and hea thusish cohesion in contrast to the foc us on integration of the Civil Rights Movement, and adopted a more militant stupefy in the face of racism. It also inspired a new rebirth in African American literary and artistic expressageion generally referred to as the African American or Black arts Movement. The workings of popular recording artists such as Nina Simone (Young, Gifted and Black) and The Impressions (Keep On Pushin), as well as the poetry, fine arts and literature of the time, shaped and debateed the growth racial and political consciousness. Among the most(prenominal) prominent writers of the African American humanistic discipline Movement were poet Nikki Giovanni poet and publisher Don L. Lee, who later became cognise as Haki Madhubuti poet and playwright Leroi Jones, later cognize as Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. opposite influential writers were Ed Bullins, Dudley Randall, Mari Evans, June Jordan, Larry Neal and Ahmos Zu-Bolton. other major aspect of the African American Arts Movement was the e xcerption of the African aesthetic, a return to a collective cultural sensibility and cordial pride that was frequently in evidence during the Harlem Renaissance and in the celebration of Negritude among the artistic and literary circles in the U. S. , Caribbean and the African continent to the high-pitchedest degree four decades earlier the idea that black is beautiful. During this time, there was a revitalization of occupy in, and an embrace of, elements of African culture inside African American culture that had been suppressed or devalued to conform to Eurocentric America. inborn hairstyles, such as the afro, and African wearable, such as the dashiki, gained popularity. More outstandingly, the African American aesthetic further personal pride and political consciousness among African Americans. Music pic Men playing the djembe, a traditional West African drum adopted into African American and American culture. The bags and the clothing of the man on the right ar pr inted with traditional kente cloth patterns. African American music is rooted in the typically polyrhythmic music of the ethnic groups of Africa, specifically those in the Western, Sahelean, and Sub-Saharan regions.African oral traditions, nurtured in slavery, encouraged the use of music to pass on history, teach littleons, ease suffering, and electrical relay messages. The African pedigree of African American music is evident in some common elements call and response, syncopation, percussion, improvisation, swung notes, blue notes, the use of falsetto, melisma, and complex multi-part harmony. During slavery, Africans in America blended traditional European hymns with African elements to create spirituals. umpteen African Americans sing Lift Evry Voice and Sing in addition to the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, or in lieu of it.scripted by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson in 1900 to be performed for the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the song was, and continues to be, a popular way for African Americans to recall past struggles and express ethnic solidarity, faith and record hope for the future. The song was adopted as the Negro National Anthem by the NAACP in 1919. African American children be taught the song at school, church building or by their families. Lift Evry Voice and Sing traditionally is sung immediately following, or or else of, The Star-Spangled Banner at events hosted by African American churches, schools, and other organizations.In the 1800s, as the result of the blackface minstrel show, African American music entered mainstream American society. By the early 20th century, several musical forms with origins in the African American residential district had transformed American popular music. Aided by the technological innovations of radio and phonograph records, ragtime, jazz, blues, and swing also became popular overseas, and the 1920s became k directn as the Jazz Age. The early 20th century also saw the creation of the first African American Broadway shows, films such as King Vidors Hallelujah and operas such as George Gershwins Porgy and Bess. contestation and roll, doo wop, intellect, and RB developed in the mid 20th century. These genres became very popular in white audiences and were influences for other genres such as surf. The dozens, an urban African American tradition of using rhyming slang to format down your enemies (or friends) developed through the smart-ass thoroughf atomic number 18 jive of the early seventies into a new form of music. In the southwesterly Bronx, the fractional speaking, half singing rhythmic street talk of rapping grew into the hugely successful cultural force known as Hip Hop.Hip Hop would become a multicultural movement. However, it is still important to many African Americans. The African American Cultural Movement of the 1960s and 1970s also provide the growth of funk and later pelvic girdle-hop forms such as rap, hip house, new jack swin g and go go. African American music has experienced far more far-flung acceptance in American popular music in the 21st century than ever beforehand. In addition to continuing to develop newer musical forms, modern artists have also started a rebirth of older genres in the form of genres such as neo soul and modern funk-inspired groups. jump picThe Cakewalk was the first African American dance to gain far-flung popularity in the United States. pic African American dance, like other aspects of African American culture, finds its earliest root in the dances of the hundreds of African ethnic groups that made up African slaves in the Americas as well as influences from European sources in the United States. Dance in the African tradition, and thusly in the tradition of slaves, was a part of both every day life and special occasions. Many of these traditions such as get down, ring shouts, and other elements of African body language survive as elements of modern dance.In the 1800s, Af rican American dance began to appear in minstrel shows. These shows often move overed African Americans as caricatures for guy to prominent audiences. The first African American dance to become popular with White dancers was the cakewalk in 1891. Later dances to follow in this tradition include the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, and the Jitterbug. During the Harlem Renaissance, all African American Broadway shows such as Shuffle A ache helped to establish and legitimize African American dancers.African American dance forms such as tap, a combination of African and European influences, gained widespread popularity thanks to dancers such as Bill Robinson and were used by leading White choreographers who often hired African American dancers. Contemporary African American dance is descended from these earlier forms and also draws influence from African and Caribbean dance forms. Groups such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance battleground have continued to contribute to the growth of this form. Modern popular dance in America is also greatly influenced by African American dance.American popular dance has also drawn many influences from African American dance most notably in the hip hop genre. Art pic Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City by Henry Ossawa Tanner 1859-1937 From its early origins in slave communities, through the end of the twentieth century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. During the period between the 1600s and the early 1800s, art took the form of wasted drums, quilts, wrought-iron figures and ceramic vessels in the southern United States. These artifacts have similarities with comparable crafts in West and Central Africa.In contrast, African American artisans like the New Englandbased engraver Scipio Moorhead and the Baltimore portrait painter Joshua Johnson created art that was conceived in a soundly western European fashion. During the 1800s, Harriet Powers made quilts in rural Georgia, United St ates that be now considered among the finest examples of nineteenth-century Southern quilting. Later in the 20th century, the women of Gees Bend developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional African American quilts with a geometric simpleness that developed separately but was like that of Amish quilts and modern art.After the American Civil War, museums and galleries began more frequently to display the work of African American artists. Cultural expression in mainstream venues was still limited by the dominant European aesthetic and by racial prejudice. To increase the visibility of their work, many African American artists traveled to Europe where they had greater freedom. It was not until the Harlem Renaissance that more whites began to pay attention to African American art in America. pic Kara Walker, Cut, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, Brent Sikkema NYC.During the 1920s, artists such as Raymond Barthe, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, and photographer James Van Der Zee became well known for their work. During the Great Depression, new opportunities arose for these and other African American artists chthonic the WPA. In later years, other programs and institutions, such as the New York City-based Harmon Foundation, helped to foster African American artistic talent. Augusta Savage, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and others exhibited in museums and juried art shows, and built reputations and followings for themselves.In the 1950s and 1960s, there were very few astray accepted African American artists. Despite this, The Highwaymen, a loose association of 27 African American artists from Ft. Pierce, Florida, created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida landscape and peddled some 50,000 of them from the trunks of their cars. They interchange their art directly to the public alternatively than through galleries and art agents, thus receiving the name The Highwaymen. Redis covered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as an important part of American folk history.Their artwork is wide collected by enthusiasts and original pieces can easily fetch thousands of dollars in auctions and sales. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was another period of resurgent interest in African American art. During this period, several African-American artists gained national prominence, among them Lou Stovall, Ed Love, Charles White, and Jeff Donaldson. Donaldson and a group of African-American artists formed the Afrocentric collective AFRICOBRA, which remains in existence today.The sculptor Martin Puryear, whose work has been acclaimed for years, is being honored with a 30-year ex post facto of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York showtime November 2007. Notable contemporary African American artists include David Hammons, Eugene J. Martin, Charles Tolliver, and Kara Walker. Literature pic Langston Hughes, a notable African American poet o f the Harlem Renaissance. African American literature has its grow in the oral traditions of African slaves in America. The slaves used stories and fables in much the same way as they used music.These stories influenced the earliest African American writers and poets in the 18thcentury such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano. These authors reached early high points by telling slave narratives. During the early 20th century Harlem Renaissance, numerous authors and poets, such as Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington, grappled with how to respond to discrimination in America. Authors during the Civil Rights era, such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation, oppression and other aspects of African American life.This tradition continues today with authors who have been accepted as an full part of American literature, with works such as Roots The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple b y Alice Walker, and Beloved by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, and serial publication by Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley that have achieved both meliorate-selling and/or award-winning status. Museums The African American Museum Movement emerged during the 1950s and 1960s to preserve the heritage of the African American experience and to ensure its proper interpretation in American history.Museums devoted to African American history are found in many African American neighborhoods. Institutions such as the African American Museum and Library at Oakland and The African American Museum in Cleveland were created by African Americans to teach and investigate cultural history that, until recent decades was to begin with preserved trough oral traditions. Language Generations of hardships imposed on the African American corporation created distinctive language patterns. Slave owners often measuredly mixed people who spoke different African languages to discourage communication in any language other than English.This, combined with prohibitions against education, led to the festering of pidgins, simplified mixtures of two or more languages that speakers of different languages could use to communicate. Examples of pidgins that became to the full developed languages include Creole, common to Haiti,and Gullah, common to the Sea Islands off the sliding board of South Carolina and Georgia. African American Vernacular English is a persona variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of the American English language closely associated with the speech of but not exclusive to African Americans.While AAVE is academically considered a legitimate dialect because of its logical structure, some of both Caucasians and African Americans consider it slang or the result of a poor command of Standard American English. Inner city African American children who are isolated by speaking only AAVE have more difficulty with standardized testing and, by and by school, moving to t he mainstream world for work. It is common for many speakers of AAVE to code thrust between AAVE and Standard American English depending on the setting. Fashion and aesthetics pic A man weaving kente cloth in Ghana.Attire The cultural explosion of the 1960s saw the incorporation of surviving cultural prune with elements from modern fashion and West African traditional clothing to create a uniquely African American traditional style. Kente cloth is the best known African textile. These festive woven patterns, which exist in numerous varieties, were originally made by the Ashanti and Ewe peoples of Ghana and Togo. Kente fabric also appears in a number of Western style fashions ranging from casual t-shirts to formal gesticulate ties and cummerbunds. Kente strips are often sewn into liturgical and cademic robes or worn as stoles. Since the Black Arts Movement, traditional African clothing has been popular amongst African Americans for both formal and informal occasions. some other common aspect of fashion in African American culture involves the appropriate dress for reverence in the Black church. It is expected in most churches that an individual should present their best appearance for worship. African American women in particular are known for wearing vibrant dresses and suits. An interpretation of a passage from the Christian Bible, very woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head , has led to the tradition of wearing elaborate Sunday hats, sometimes known as crowns. Hair Hair styling in African American culture is greatly varied. African American hair is typically composed of tightly turn curls. The predominant styles for women involve the straightening of the hair through the application of heat or chemical processes. These treatments form the base for the most usually socially acceptable hairstyles in the United States.Alternatively, the predominant and most socially acceptable practice for men is to leave ones hair n atural. Often, as men age and begin to lose their hair, the hair is either closely cropped, or the head is shaved completely free of hair. However, since the 1960s, natural hairstyles, such as the afro, br instigates, and dreadlocks, have been maturation in popularity. Although the association with radical political movements and their extensive difference from mainstream Western hairstyles, the styles have not yet attained widespread social acceptance.Maintaining facial hair is more prevalent among African American men than in other male nations in the U. S. In fact, the soul patch is so named because African American men, particularly jazz musicians, popularized the style. The election for facial hair among African American men is due partly to personal taste, but because they are more prone than other ethnic groups to develop a condition known as pseudofolliculitis barbae, commonly referred to as razor bumps, many prefer not to shave. Body imageThe European aesthetic and att endant mainstream inventions of beauty are often at betting odds with the African body form. Because of this, African American women often find themselves under pressure to conform to European standards of beauty. Still, there are individuals and groups who are working towards raising the standing of the African aesthetic among African Americans and internationally as well. This includes efforts toward promoting as models those with clearly defined African features the mainstreaming of natural hairstyles and, in women, fuller, more voluptuous body types.Religion While African Americans practice a number of religions, Protestant Christianity is by far the most popular. Additionally, 14% of Muslims in the United States and Canada are African American. Christianity pic A river baptism in New Bern, conglutination Carolina near the turn of the 20th century. The religious institutions of African American Christians commonly are referred tocollectively as the black church. During slavery , many slaves were stripped of their African printing systems and typically denied free religious practice.Slaves managed, however, to hang on to some practices by integrating them into Christian worship in secret meetings. These practices, including dance, shouts, African rhythms, and overenthusiastic singing, remain a large part of worship in the African American church. African American churches taught that all people were equal in Gods eyes and viewed the doctrine of obedience to ones master taught in white churches as hypocritical. Instead the African American church focused on the message of equality and hopes for a better future.Before and after emancipation, racial segregation in America prompted the increment of organized African American denominations. The first of these was the AME Church founded by Richard Allen in 1787. An African American church is not necessarily a separate denomination. Several predominantly African American churches exist as atoms of predominan tly white denominations. African American churches have served to provide African American people with leadership positions and opportunities to organize that were denied in mainstream American society.Because of this, African American pastors became the bridge between the African American and European American communities and thus play a crucial role in the American Civil Rights Movement. Like many Christians, African American Christians sometimes participate in or attend a Christmas play. Black Nativity by Langston Hughes is a re-telling of the classic Nativity story with gospel music. Productions can be found a African American theaters and churches all over the country. Islam pic A member of the Nation of Islam selling merchandise on a city street corner.Despite the popular assumption that the Nation represents all or most African American Muslims, less than 2% are members. Generations before the approach of the Atlantic slave trade, Islam was a thriving religion in West Africa due to its peaceful introduction via the lucrative trans-Saharan trade between prominent tribes in the southern Sahara and the Berbers to the North. In his attesting to this fact the West African prentice Cheikh Anta Diop explained The primary reason for the success of Islam in Black Africa onsequently stems from the fact that it was propagated peacefully at first by solitary Arabo-Berber travelers to certain Black kings and notables, who then spread it about them to those under their jurisdiction Many first-generation slaves were often able to retain their Muslim identity, their descendants were not. Slaves were either forcibly converted to Christianity as was the case in the Catholic lands or were besieged with gross inconviences to their religious practice such as in the case of the Protestant American mainland.In the decades after slavery and particularly during the depression era, Islam reemerged in the form of highly visible and sometimes controversial heterodox movements in the African American club. The first of these of note was the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali. Ali had a profound influence on Wallace Fard, who later founded the Black nationalist Nation of Islam in 1930. Elijah Muhammad became head of the organization in 1934. Much like Malcolm X, who left the Nation of Islam in 1964, many African American Muslims now follow traditional Islam.A survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations shows that 30% of Sunni Mosque attendees are African Americans. African American orthodox Muslims are often the victims of stereotypes, most notably the assumption that an African American Muslim is a member of the Nation of Islam. They are often viewed by the uneducated African-American community in general as less authentic than Muslims from the Middle East or South Asia small-arm credibility is less of an issue with immigrant Muslims and Muslim world in general. Other religionsAside from Christianity and Islam, there are a lso African Americans who follow Judaism, Buddhism, and a number of other religions. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a appeal of African American Jewish religious organizations. Among their varied teachings, they often include that African Americans are descended from the Biblical Hebrews (sometimes with the paradoxical claim that the Jewish people are not). There is a small but growing number of African Americans who participate in African traditional religions, such as Vodou and Santeria or Ifa and diasporic traditions like Rastafarianism.Many of them are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean and South America, where these are practiced. Because of religious practices, such as beast sacrifice, which are no longer common among American religions and are often legally prohibited, these groups may be viewed negatively and are sometimes the victims of harassment. Life events For most African Americans, the observance of life events follows the pattern of mains tream American culture. There are some traditions which are unique to African Americans.Some African Americans have created new rites of passage that are linked to African traditions. Pre-teen and teenage boys and girls take classes to make them for adulthood. They are typically taught spiritualty, responsibility, and leadership. Most of these programs are modeled after traditional African ceremonies, with the focus largely on embracing African ideologies rather than specific rituals. To this day, some African American couples choose to jump the eelpout as a part of their wedding ceremony.Although the practice, which can be traced sanction to Ghana, fell out of favor in the African American community after the end of slavery, it has experienced a slight resurgence in recent years as some couples seek to reaffirm their African heritage. Funeral traditions tend to vary based on a number of factors, including religion and location, but there are a number of commonalities. Probably the most important part of death and dying in the African American culture is the gathering of family and friends. Either in the last days before death or shortly after death, typically any friends and family members that can be reached are notified.This gathering helps to provide spiritual and emotional support, as well as assistance in making decisions and accomplishing everyday tasks. The spirituality of death is very important in African American culture. A member of the clergy or members of the religious community, or both, are typically present with the family through the entire process. Death is often viewed as transitory rather than final. Many services are called homegoings, instead of funerals, based on the belief that the person is going home to the afterlife. The entire end of life process is generally treated as a celebration of life rather than a mourning of loss.This is most notably demonstrated in the New Orleans Jazz Funeral tradition where upbeat music, dancing, an d food encourage those pull together to be happy and celebrate the homegoing of a beloved friend. Cuisine pic A traditional soul food dinner consisting of heat up chicken, candied yams, collard chiliads, cornbread, and macaroni and cheese. The stopping point and use of many agricultural products in the United States, such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to African influences. African American foods reflect creative esponses to racial and economic oppression and poverty. Under slavery, African Americans were not allowed to eat better cuts of meat, and after emancipation many often were too poor to afford them. Soul food, a hearty cuisine commonly associated with African Americans in the South (but also common to African Americans nationwide), makes creative use of inexpensive products procured through farming and subsistence hunting and fishing. Pig intestines are poached and sometimes battered and fried to make chi tterlings, also known as chitlins. Ham hocks and neck bones provide seasoning to soups, beans and boiled greens (turnip greens, collard greens, and mustard greens). Other common foods, such as fried chicken and fish, macaroni and cheese, cornbread and hoppin john (black-eyed peas and rice) are prepared simply. When the African American world was considerably more rural than it generally is today, rabbit, possum, squirrel, and waterfowl were important additions to the diet. Many of these food traditions are especially predominant in many separate of the rural South. Traditionally prepared soul food is often high in fat, sodium and starch.Highly suited to the physically demanding lives of laborers, farmhands and rural lifestyles generally, it is now a contributing factor to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in a population that has become increasely more urban and sedentary. As a result, more health-conscious African-Americans are using alternative methods of preparation, eschewi ng trans fats in favor of natural veg oils and substituting smoked turkey for fatback and other, cured pork products limiting the cadence of refined sugar in desserts and emphasizing the consumption of more fruits and vegetables than animal protein.There is some resistance to such changes, however, as they involve deviating from long culinary tradition. Holidays and observances pic A woman wearing traditional West African clothing lighting the candles on a kinara for a Kwanzaa celebration. As with other American racial and ethnic groups, African Americans observe ethnic holidays alongside traditional American holidays. Holidays observed in African American culture are not only observed by African Americans. The birthday of noted American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr has been observed nationally since 1983. It is one of three federal holidays named for an individual.Black register Month is another example of another African American observance that has been adopted nationally. Black History Month is an attempt to focus attention on previously neglected aspects of the African American experience. It is observed during the month of February to coincide with the founding of the NAACP and the birthdays of Frederick Douglass, a prominent African American abolitionist, and Abraham Lincoln, the United States president who signed the freedom Proclamation. Less widely observed out of doors of the African American community is Emancipation Day. The nature and timing of the celebration vary regionally.It is most widely observed as Juneteenth, in recognition of the official reading of the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865 in Texas. Another holiday not widely observed outside of the African American community is the birthday of Malcolm X. The day is observed on May 19 in American cities with a significant African American population, including Washington, D. C.. One of the most noted African American holidays is Kwanzaa. Like Emancipation Day, it is not widely observed outside of the African American community, although it is growing in popularity within the community.African American scholar and activist Maulana Ron Karenga invented the festival of Kwanzaa in 1966, as an alternative to the increase commercialization of Christmas. Derived from the harvest rituals of Africans, Kwanzaa is observed each year from December 26 through January 1. Participants in Kwanzaa celebrations affirm their African heritage and the importance of family and community by drinking from a unity cup lighting red, black, and green candles exchanging heritage symbols, such as African art and recounting the lives of people who struggled for African and African American freedom.Names African American name calling are often drawn from the same language groups as other popular name calling found in the United States. The practice of adopting neo-African or Islamic names did not gain popularity until the late Civil Rights era. Efforts to tame African heritage inspired selection of names with deeper cultural significance. antecedent to this, using African names was not practical for two reasons. First, many African Americans were several generations removed from the last ancestor to have an African name since slaves were often given European names.Second, a traditional American name helps an individual fit into American society. Another African American naming practice that predates the use of African names is the use of make up names. In an attempt to create their own identity, growing numbers of African American parents, starting in the post-World War II era, began creating new names based on sounds they found pleasing such as Marquon, DaShawn, LaTasha, or Shandra. Family When slavery was practiced in the United States, it was common for families to be disjointed through sale. Even during slavery, however, African American families managed to maintain strong familial bonds.Free, African men and women, who managed to cloud their own freedom by being hired out, who were emancipated, or who had escaped their masters, often worked long and hard to buy the members of their families who remained in bondage and send for them. Others, separated from blood kin, formed close bonds comprised of fictive kin play relations, play auntys, cousins and the like. This practice, perhaps a katzenjammer from African tradition, survived Emancipation, with non-blood family friends commonly accorded the status and titles of blood relations.This broader, more African concept of what constitutes family and community, and the deeply rooted respect for elders that is part of African traditional societies may be the genesis of the common use of the terms like aunt, uncle, brother, sister, Mother and Mama when addressing other African American people, some of whom may be complete strangers. Or, it could have arisen in the Christian church as a way of greeting fellow congregants and believers. Immediately after slavery, African American families struggled to reunite and rebuild what had been taken.As late as 1960, 78% of African American families were headed by married couples. This number steadily declined over the latter half of the 20th century. A number of factors, including attitudes towards education, sexuality roles, and poverty have created a situation where, for the first time since slavery, a majority of African American children live in a home with only one parent, typically the mother. These figures appear to indicate a light-headed African American nuclear family structure, especially within a large patriarchal society.This apparent weakness is balanced by mutual aid systems established by extended family members to provide emotional and economic support. old(a) family members pass on social and cultural traditions such as religion and manners to jr. family members. In turn, the older family members are cared for by younger family members when they are unable to care for themselves. These relationships exist at all economic levels in the African American community, providing strength and support both to the African American family and the community. Politics and social issuesSince the passing of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans are voting and being elected to public office in increasing numbers. As of January 2001 there were 9,101 African American elected officials in America. African Americans are overwhelmingly Democratic. Only 11% of African Americans voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election. Social issues such as racial profiling, the racial dissimilarity in sentencing, higher rates of poverty, institutional racism, and lower access to health care are important to the African American community.While the start on racial and fiscal issues has remained consistently wide for decades, seemingly indicating a wide social divide, African Americans tend to hold the same optimism and come to for America as Whites. In the case of many moral is sues such as religion, and family values, African Americans tend to be more conservative than Whites. Another battleground where African Americans outstrip Whites in their conservatism is on the issue of homosexuality. Prominent leaders in the Black church have demonstrated against audacious rights issues such as gay marriage.There are those within the community who take a more inclusive position most notably, the late Mrs. Coretta Scott King, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, who, when asked in 2003 whether he support gay marriage, replied that he might as well have been asked if he supported black marriage or white marriage. Neighborhoods African American neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. The formation of African American neighborhoods is closely linked to the history of segregation in the United States, either through formal laws, or as a product of social norms.Despite this, African American neighborhoods have played an important role in the development of nearly all aspects of both African American culture and broader American culture. Due to segregated conditions and widespread poverty some African American neighborhoods in the United States have been called ghettos. The use of this term is controversial and, depending on the context, potentially offensive. Despite mainstream Americas use of the term ghetto to signify a poor urban area populated by ethnic minorities, those living in the area often used it to signify something positive.The African American ghettos did not unceasingly contain dilapidated houses and deteriorating projects, nor were all of its residents poverty-stricken. For many African Americans, the ghetto was home a place representing authentic blackness and a feeling, passion, or emotion derived from the rising above the struggle and suffering of being of African descent in America. Langston Hughes relays in the Negro Ghetto (1931) and The Heart of Harlem (1945) The buildings in Harlem are brick and stone/And the streets are long and wide,/But Harlems much more than these alone,/Harlem is whats inside. playwright August Wilson used the term ghetto in Ma Raineys Black Bottom (1984) and Fences (1987), both of which draw upon the authors experience growing up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, an African American ghetto. Although African American neighborhoods may suffer from civic disinvestment, with lower quality schools, less effective policing and fire protection. There are institutions such as churches and museums and political organizations that help to improve the physical and social capital of African American neighborhoods.In African American neighborhoods the churches may be important sources of social cohesion. For some African Americans the kind spirituality learned through these churches works as a protective factor against the corrosive forces of racism. Museums devoted to African American history are also found in many African American neighborhoods . Many African American neighborhoods are primed(p) in inner cities, These are the mostly residential neighborhoods located side by side(predicate) to the central business district.The built environment is often row houses or brownstones, mixed with older single family homes that may be converted to multi family homes. In some areas there are larger apartment buildings. Shotgun houses are an important part of the built environment of some southern African American neighborhoods. The houses consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways. This African American house design is found in both rural and urban southern areas, mainly in African-American communities and neighborhoods.