African American Culture

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures relating to African American culture. This culture remain one of the most biologically diverse groups in the United States because of the historical intermingling of scores of African ethnic groups, Native Americans, and Europeans. In this paper, we have examined different dimensions such as origins, food, religion, sports, dance, music, and clothing of African American culture.

African American Culture

Introduction

African Americans are an African ethnic group whose members are citizens of the United States of America. They remain one of the most biologically diverse groups in the United States because of the historical intermingling of scores of African ethnic groups, Native Americans, and Europeans. The term African American is something of a misnomer, as the many people of African descent in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, the Antilles, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Uruguay, which like the United States are part of the Americas, are not included in the term African American (Worrell, 2005).

Among the earliest African American communities were those of African Muslim slaves. From all accounts, they were a numerical minority in this country and in the local African American populations within which they resided. However, as scholars such as Sylviane A. Diouf point out, "they preserved a distinctive lifestyle built on religious cohesiveness, cultural self-confidence, and discipline," and their memoirs form "a disproportionate number" of extant African-in-America narratives. Some scholars use data, such as the places in which certain texts have been found and the kinds of paper and ink with which they were produced, to hypothesize that African American Muslims, along with African Americans of other religious and cultural traditions, participated in an international network among African Americans and people of African descent in Brazil, Italy, and other parts of the world (Worrell, 2005). Their work suggests collaboration and cooperation melding art and aesthetics, artifice, and activism in ways that parallel or presage certain twentieth-century Pan-African, Caribbean, and Continental integrations and interventions by Harlem Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey, Jean Toomer, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Speculations about established antebellum international and interreligious networks are intriguing and merit more concentrated research. Still, the evidence that we already have makes it clear that African American Muslims were an important part of early African American culture, and that their writers, artists, and thinkers expressed ideas and conserved traditions essential to group survival and prosperity (Walker, 1999).

In this paper, we will examine the cultural background of our parents in regards to family culture and how this background impacts our personality. We will examine how the cultural background influenced the family system patterns found in our family of origin.

Discussion & Analysis

Culture relates to and determines the particular system of standards in a person's environment or society that he /she selects to interpret the behavior of others or to guide his own behavior on a given ...