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African-American culture,^[1][2] also known as Black American culture or Black culture in American English,^{[3][4][5][6][7]} refers to the cultural expressions of African Americans, either as part of or distinct from mainstream American culture. African-American culture has been influential on American and global worldwide culture as a whole.^[8][9][10] Black culture has historically labeled its arts, institutions, social and political groups, businesses and more with the Black American cultural meaning of the word Black, not a racial meaning as many people globally are racially black but have a different culture. One example of this would be the Black Panther Party, founded in the United States.

African-Americans have faced systemic and violent racism through periods of enslavement, discriminatory Jim Crow laws, segregation, as well as through the civil rights movement. This racism has led to African-Americans being excluded from many aspects of American life and these experiences have profoundly influenced African-American culture.^[11][12] Moreover, even in the face of these significant challenges and other experiences of racial discrimination, African Americans have demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity in producing distinctive traditions and radical innovations in music, art, literature, religion, cuisine, and other fields. These cultural expressions often serve as powerful apparatus for advancing racial justice which shapes African-American culture.^[13]

African-American cultural history

From the earliest days of American slavery in the 17th century, slave owners sought to exercise control over their slaves by attempting to strip them of their African culture. In the New World in general and in the United States in particular, the physical isolation and the societal marginalization of African slaves and, later, the physical isolation and the societal marginalization of their free progeny facilitated the retention of significant elements of traditional culture among Africans. Slave owners deliberately tried to repress independent political or cultural organization in order to deal with the many slave rebellions or acts of resistance that took place in the United States, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dutch Guyanas.^[14]

African cultures, slavery, slave rebellions, and the civil rights movement have all shaped African-American religious, familial, political, and economic behaviors. The imprint of Africa is evident in a myriad of ways: in politics, economics, language, music, hairstyles, fashion, dance, religion, cuisine, and worldview.^[15] Throughout all of this, African Americans have created their own culture and unique history in the United States.^[16]

In turn, African-American culture has had a pervasive and transformative impact on many elements of mainstream American culture. This process of mutual creative exchange is called creolization.^[17] Over time, the culture of African slaves and their descendants has been ubiquitous in its impact on not only the dominant American culture, but on world culture as well.^[18]

Oral tradition

The Slaveholders limited or prohibited the education of enslaved Africans because they feared that it might empower their chattel and inspire or enable emancipatory ambitions. In the United States, the legislation that banned slaves from getting a formal education likely contributed to their maintenance of a strong oral tradition, a common feature of indigenous or native African culture.^[20] African-based oral traditions became the primary means of preserving history, mores, and other cultural information among the people. This was consistent with the griot practices of oral history in many native African culture and other cultures that did not rely on the written word. Many of these cultural elements have been passed from generation to generation through storytelling. The folktales provided African-Americans the opportunity to inspire and educate one another.^[20]

Examples of African-American folktales include trickster tales of Br'er Rabbit^[21] and heroic tales such as that of John Henry.^[22] The Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris helped to bring African-American folk tales into mainstream adoption.^[23] Harris did not appreciate the complexity of the stories nor their potential for a lasting impact on society.^[24] Other narratives that appear as important, recurring motifs in African-American culture are the "Signifying Monkey", "The Ballad of Shine", and the legend of Stagger Lee.

The legacy of the African-American oral tradition manifests in diverse forms. African-American preachers tend to perform rather than simply speak. The emotion of the subject is carried through the speaker's tone, volume, and cadence, which tend to mirror the rising action, climax, and descending action of the sermon. The meaning of this manner of preaching is not easily understood by European Americans or others of non-African origin. Often song, dance, verse, and structured pauses are placed throughout the sermon. Call and response is another element of the African-American oral tradition. It manifests in worship in what is commonly referred to as the "amen corner". In direct contrast to the tradition present in American and European cultures, it is an acceptable and common audience reaction to interrupt and affirm the speaker.^[25] This pattern of interaction is also in evidence in music, particularly in blues and jazz forms. Hyperbolic and provocative, even incendiary, rhetoric is another aspect of African-American oral tradition often evident in the pulpit in a tradition sometimes referred to as "prophetic speech".^[26]

Modernity and migration of African-American communities to the North has had a history of placing strain on the retention of African American cultural practices and traditions. The urban and radically different spaces in which black culture was being produced raised fears in anthropologists and sociologists that the southern African-American folk aspect of black popular culture were at risk of being lost within history. The study over the fear of losing black popular cultural roots from the South have a topic of interest to many anthropologists, who among them include Zora Neale Hurston. Through her extensive studies of Southern folklore and cultural practices, Hurston has claimed that the popular Southern folklore traditions and practices are not dying off. Instead they are evolving, developing, and re-creating themselves in different regions.^[27]

Other aspects of African-American oral tradition include the dozens, signifying, trash talk, rhyming, semantic inversion and word play, many of which have found their way into mainstream American popular culture and become international phenomena.^[28]

Spoken-word poetry is another example of how the African-American oral tradition has influenced modern popular culture. Spoken-word artists employ the same techniques as African-American preachers including movement, rhythm, and audience participation.^[29] Rap music from the 1980s and beyond has been seen as an extension of African oral culture.^[20]

Harlem Renaissance

The first major public recognition of African-American culture occurred during the Harlem Renaissance pioneered by Alain Locke. In the 1920s 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 works describing the African-American experience. Jazz, swing, blues and other musical forms entered American popular music. African-American artists such as William H. Johnson, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden created unique works of art featuring African Americans.^[28]

The Harlem Renaissance was also a time of increased political involvement for African Americans. Among the notable African-American political movements founded in the early 20th century are the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Nation of Islam, a notable quasi-Islamic religious movement, also began in the early 1930s.^[30]

African-American cultural movement

The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s followed in the wake of the non-violent Civil Rights Movement. The movement promoted racial pride and ethnic cohesion in contrast to the focus on integration of the Civil Rights Movement, and adopted a more militant posture in the face of racism.^[31] It also inspired a new renaissance in African-American literary and artistic expression generally referred to as the African-American or "Black Arts Movement".

The works of popular recording artists such as Nina Simone ("Young, Gifted and Black") and The Impressions ("Keep On Pushing"), as well as the poetry, fine arts, and literature of the time, shaped and reflected the growing racial and political consciousness.^[32] Among the most prominent writers of the African-American Arts Movement were poet Nikki Giovanni;^[33] poet and publisher Don L. Lee, who later became known as Haki Madhubuti; poet and playwright Leroi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka; and Sonia Sanchez. Other influential writers were Ed Bullins, Dudley Randall, Mari Evans, June Jordan, Larry Neal, and Ahmos Zu-Bolton.

During the African American cultural Movement, Melvin Charles and Gleason T Jackson created the Black American Heritage Flag (also known as the African American Heritage Flag) in 1967 for Black Americans. It is used today as an Ethnic Flag that represents the African American people.

Another major aspect of the African-American Arts Movement was the infusion of the African aesthetic, a return to a collective cultural sensibility and ethnic pride that was much in evidence during the Harlem Renaissance and in the celebration of Négritude among the artistic and literary circles in the US, Caribbean, and the African continent nearly four decades earlier: the idea that "black is beautiful". During this time, there was a resurgence of interest in elements of African culture within African-American culture that had been suppressed or devalued to conform to Eurocentric America. Natural hairstyles, such as the afro, and African clothing, such as the dashiki, gained popularity. More importantly, the African-American aesthetic encouraged personal pride and political awareness among African Americans.^[34]

Music

African-American music is rooted in the typically polyrhythmic music of the ethnic groups of Africa, specifically those in the Western, Sahelean, and Central and Southern regions. African oral traditions, nurtured in slavery, encouraged the use of music to pass on history, teach lessons, ease suffering, and 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.^[20] During slavery, Africans in America blended traditional European hymns with African elements to create spirituals.^[35] The banjo was the first African derived instrument to be played and built in the United States. Slaveholders discovered African-American slaves used drums to communicate.^[36]

As far back as the 1700s, after drums were outlawed after the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, African Americans created hamboning, patting their bodies in order to make their music.^[37]

Many African Americans sing "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in addition to the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner", or in lieu of it. Written 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 hope for the future.^[38] The song was adopted as the "Negro National Anthem" by the NAACP in 1919.^[39] Many African-American children are taught the song at school, church or by their families. "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" traditionally is sung immediately following, or instead of, "The Star-Spangled Banner" at events hosted by African-American churches, schools, and other organizations.^[40]

In the 19th century, 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 community 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 known as the Jazz Age. The early 20th century also saw the creation of the first African-American Broadway shows, films such as King Vidor's Hallelujah!, and operas such as George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

Rock and roll, doo wop, soul, and R&B developed in the mid-20th century. These genres became very popular in white audiences and were influences for other genres such as surf. During the 1970s, the dozens, an urban African-American tradition of using rhyming slang to put down one's enemies (or friends), and the African-American tradition of rapping developed into a new form of music. In the South Bronx the half speaking, half singing rhythmic street talk of "rapping" grew into the hugely successful cultural force known as hip hop.^{[citation needed]}

Contemporary

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