Answer to Question #225872 in English for Master

Question

Identify and discuss the key areas in discussion relating to the African roots of North America culture

Answer 1

It is obvious that several significant aspects of African language, religion, music, and family structure have African roots, and that the distinctive traits of African American life are not essentially imitations or derivatives of inferior European society. What is also true — but not usually acknowledged — is that all of these African characteristics were present in British North America from the early seventeenth century onwards, and that they had a significant impact on the European culture with which they came into constant and creative touch. The “American” side of the African American equation was heavily Africanized from the start.

In America, blacks and whites lived side by side and separately, but their cultures were not different threads with a little rubbing off here and there. They were, in reality, intertwined, interpenetrating realities, each of which had already constituted a sophisticated cultural synthesis within itself.

The main point is that this process has never ceased, to the point where Black speech, movement, clothing, music, and, in particular, the “hip” style, have all come to characterize much of current white middle-class America. Take a look at and listen to the white kids in the suburbs. Creolization is the term for this process, and there are more examples than can be recorded. The ragtime and Cakewalk craze of the 1890s, when legendary Black dancer Aida Overton Walker taught Fifth Avenue society matrons how to strut at the same time white Southerners were killing Black people at the rate of three or four per week, was one notable white attempt to copy Black style. True Black ragtime, on the other hand, was far too intense for the white taste. But, while Scott Joplin died in obscurity and poverty, a homogenized version was taken by songsters like Irving Berlin, who became known as the "King of Ragtime."