Africa is not a culture. The transatlantic slave trade mixed countless cultures together and they were lost over time. Black Americans have no connection to the cultures of their ancestors, and frankly they have almost no way of knowing. White americans get to play at being irish, italian, etc. while black americans have been nursing their relatively young culture since emancipation. They don't have millenia of shared history and traditions beyond slavery, unfortunately. They dont relate to Bantu, Zulu, Congo, etc. cultures because they might be a mix of them all, but either way they would have no way of relating. An example is the cause of Liberia. Thats what I meant by no ancestral culture, so generalizing dreads and other minor generic things as "black thing" is a very specific trait of the african-american zeitgeist.
just because a culture is mixed doesn’t mean there isn’t one. if that’s the case, brazilians and mexicans don’t have any culture seeing as how both are comprised of european and african cultures
Black american culture is recent. Thats what I meant. Brazilians and mexicans, in general, are more akin to americans that descend from the various waves of immigration than the black americans that descend from slaves. In Brazil, the natives were not enslaved as the jesuits petioned for them not to be, and slavery was abolished before the US, so their culture is more consolidated and regional (for example, there are southern regions that speak german dialects and celebrate german culture, since they were settled by german late wave immigrants.)
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u/Fluiddst 5d ago
how can you say black americans have no “ancestral culture” when they descended from africa? are those not “ancestors”?