by Charles E. Richardson
Culture: The customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.
What is African American culture? Too many times African American culture is viewed as flawed and less than wholesome; birthed out of slavery and splintered and synonymous with anything unsavory.
Those perceptions are the product of a White culture that has always believed Africans were “less-than” — and throughout history, the vein of White supremacy has guided what has been believed and written about Africans since before this country’s founding.
How firmly rooted in White supremacy is that belief? Ibram X. Kendi, in his seminal work “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” explains that White people, in order to justify slavery and its continuance, had to believe, because they were Puritans, that Africans were less than human, even though, aside from skin color there was little difference in human anatomy. Cotton Mather, one of the leading theologians of the late 1600s, the son of Increase Mather, a Harvard president, along with John Locke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, believed slaves, who were Black, had White souls, making it spiritually proper to enslave their Black bodies while they lived, but if converted, their souls would turn White in death.
American Culture
We think of the American culture, beginning with independence, however, it was the racist views at the highest level of religious leadership that shaped racial attitudes and set the course for African American culture. The picture of the passive slave was far from correct, it only appeased the White conscience. Kendi wrote, “From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the 50 suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.”
Not much had changed by 1919, when sociologist George Edmund Hayes, the first Black to earn a doctorate from Columbia, identified 38 separate racial riots from that “Red Summer” in which Whites attacked Black people. These were not the first racist attacks but were the first where Blacks fought back.
Black Freedom
That urge for Black freedom threatened the entire White power structure from the beginning and it reacted to the growing number of Africans in the colonies. Long before July 4, 1776, it was illegal for Africans to participate in American culture. In 1705, Kendi wrote, “Massachusetts authorities forbade interracial relationships, began taxing imported captives, and … rated Indians and Negroes with horses and hogs” during a revision of its tax code. “Virginia lawmakers made slave patrols compulsory for non-slaveholding Whites and seized and sold all property owned by ‘any slave.’
“The same story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized that resulted in Black destitution was blamed on Black inferiority. Past discrimination was ignored when blame was assigned. Virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed White servants with fifty acres of land. The resulting White prosperity was then ‘attributed to White superiority,’” Kendi wrote.
Resilience Throughout Time
In this pattern we see the resilience and emergence of Black culture. Though every roadblock was placed in front of Black people, they still survived. Between 1500 and 1866, nearly 12.5 million Africans, endured the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade. About 1.8 million, died during the journey, packed like sardines below decks of unventilated ships.
Once in the Americas, though called shiftless and lazy, they worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, and more during planting season in conditions described as “Hell on Earth.” Slave owners would hire out their skilled Black carpenters and blacksmiths and pocket the money. Though said to be incapable of learning, laws were still enacted making education illegal for Blacks. Following the Civil War during Reconstruction, African Americans were finally free to establish families and communities, all in the face of racial terrorism.
Blacks have survived every blow, from slavery to Jim Crow segregation, to the assassination of Black leaders and the imprisonment of Black youth and blatant police violence. Blacks have been redlined, educated in subpar schools, and still survived. Black culture is rooted in survival.
Black culture exemplifies the “Can do” spirit of their ancestors like those who revolted in the Stono Rebellion in 1739 in South Carolina to Salem Poor who fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill during the Revolutionary War to the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first Black regiment to fight in the Civil War to the six million Blacks, fleeing the oppression of the South, pulled up stakes and fled North and West from 1910 to 1970.
As the Black community enters the third decade of the 21st Century, marking more than 400 years on this continent, with all of its challenges from within and without, it continues to exhibit a culture of survival, the most basic culture of all.
