Africa, Slavery, & The Roots Of Contemporary Black Culture

4 Pages 902 Words

Journal Article Summary:
“Africa, Slavery. & the Roots of Contemporary Black Culture”

Written by: Carey Pittman

Course: African-American Studies

The Americas, which include North America, South America, and Central America, soon became an outpost of West African culture going on between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century. Traces of this cultural phenomenon are still discovered today in the United States in the most recent decades of the twentieth century in the areas of: music, folktales, language, proverbs, dress, dance, medicine, food, architecture, art and religion. African cultural patterns also influenced American slavery as an institution, which occurred in the United States and in other European countries. From a contemporary perspective, the importance of slavery lies in tow areas. The first area is that slavery has been the major determinant of American/African people has been the rocky race relations and relegations that people had to follow. The legacy of slavery in the nineteenth century of slavery led to the institution, or enactment of, Jim Crow laws, which were legal guidelines designed to separate blacks and whites by placing children in segregated schools and housing. Black people were often discriminated against simply because their skin color was dark and that they were non-Caucasians in a land where Caucasians dominated the world in the United States centuries ago. Blacks weren’t allowed to vote, hold political office, to eat in certain restaurants and they were in general penalized from many activities based on one’s skin color alone. There are so often preconceived notions about Blacks that people believe; they believe that Blacks don’t belong in America and that their cultures should be ignored and not honored. There is discrimination present in the dispensation of justice and there are myths about interracial sex, and there are problems with economic an...