What is true black culture to you?
We have transcended the bounds of cultural assignment. Black culture runs the gamut. We are all living some derivative of the same primary culture. We all have something in common. In America, you have hundreds of thousands of people who don’t know their ancestral heritage. It is more like awareness, a feeling, and a state of being. We are always aware of our blackness. It is what you are and who you are. We have ways of speaking to one another, of greeting one another, and we have our own slang, among other things. All of that varies from person to person, but there is a collective understanding of our past, our position, and our prospects. Black culture is making something out of nothing, finding joy in despair. It is pioneering and perseverance, fortitude, bravery, and innovation.
Black culture is the head nod of recognition when you are the only black people in the room. It is dapping somebody up when you first meet them. It is an understanding and a recognition that we all came here in the same boat. It is self-hate and self-love, slavery and freedom. It is fighting the power and having the power. It is family. It is Kwanzaa, Eid, and Christmas. It is prayer, music, spirituals, and storytelling. It is cyphers, alphabets, and mathematics. Black culture is park jams, jazz, rock n’ roll, blues, Hip Hop, soul, and punk music. It’s basketball, baseball, and football. It is scholarship and debate. It is the Harlem Renaissance and the Free Breakfast Program. It is The Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Democratic Party. It is the Underground Railroad and the March on Washington. It is Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is Lena Horne and Halle Berry. It is Baptists Churches and Mosques. It is Bboying and graffiti, photography and poetry. It is Jean Michel Basquiat and Ernie Barnes. It is NWA and Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, and MC Lyte. It is Jay-Z, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, Tribe Called Quest, Michael Jackson, and James Brown. It is John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly, Lenny Kravitz, and Prince. It is Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, Alex Haley, Tyler Perry, and Hype Williams. It’s Slash, Fishbone and Bad Brains. It is Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. It is the Talented Tenth and the bottom of the barrel. It is gold fronts and gold chains, and its bow ties and bean pies. It’s relaxed hair and Afros. It’s Emmitt Till, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. It’s Ferguson and Washington. It’s inventing traffic lights, light bulbs, the telegraph, and blood banks and more. It’s all of those things and more, and everything in between.
We play the dozens and we write dissertations. We have relaxers, locs, fades, braids, and Afros. Yes we also have some crackheads and criminals, but we also have judges and lawyers. Black culture is the brothers on the corner and Barack Obama. We have Harriet Tubman and Uncle Tom. We have priests and prostitutes. We have chitterlings lovers and vegans. We have juice bars and juke joints. We have Crips and Bloods, congressmen and CEOs. We have Soulja Boy and Sojourner truth. We have gangsters and griots. We have tap-dancing and breakdancing. We have those who are biracial, quadroon, and octaroon. We have brown eyes, green eyes, and blue eyes. We have Pyramids, Kemet, Godbody, Muslims, Christians, Rastas, The Nation of Gods and Earth, Yoruba, Santeria, Buddhists, atheists, ascetics, skeptics, monks, priests, Shaykhs… We have all of those things and everything in between. Black culture spans all the way from the oppressed and impoverished to the president.
We give examples not to equate these things in any definitive terms, but to show that for every aspect of black culture: activism, the arts, scholarship, politics, non-conformism, revolution, ghetto fabulousness, or whatever, you can find a group of black people (and people of other races) whom subscribe to it in some way. We are the creators of our culture everyday; we create the language, the fashion, the trends, the popular culture, and the customs. We are creating our culture with every move we make, and with every generation that comes forth. Black culture is having a book telling our story, passed down to us from our elders, and writing our own chapter in it. It is not something that can be completely defined by just a word, a song, or a story. So much of our cultural expression becomes dominant popular culture. We have a unique position on this Earth to write our cultural history and create our culture daily.
Though we are all different in our lifestyle choices, our appearance, and our ways, we are all united by the chains of our past, our ability to create the present, our impressive and confident will, and we are all bound together by this beautiful pigment. We also have the unfortunate responsibility of having every negative word, way, or action become indicatively and stereotypically representative of us as a people. Black culture is about us; it is us, all of us. We have always been seen as all for one and one for all, from the bottom to the top. We are alpha to omega. We embrace that too; we own that too. These are our people. A culture is as strong as its strongest people and as weak as its weakest people. The ones in the middle are the bridge that connects the two. The only way to empower a people is to seek the betterment of all of those people. Black culture is being familiar with the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, while finding joy, creating beauty, and seeing purpose in it all the while.
