American Culture's African Roots

• Published in: Diverse issues in higher education 1997-02, Vol.13 (25), p.26
• Main Author: Newman, Richard
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; African Americans; African Languages; Black culture; Black Dialects; Black literature; Black people; Cultural Pluralism; Culture; Dance; Family Structure; Gottschild, Brenda Dixon; Literary Genres; Literature; Minority & ethnic groups; Music; Nonfiction; Traditions; Whites
• ISSN: 1557-5411; 2163-5862

The third major point is that this process has never stopped: so much so that Black talk, walk, clothes, music, and especially the "hip" style have all come to define much of modern white middle-class America. Look at and listen to white suburban kids. This process is called Creolization, and there are more examples than can be catalogued. One major white attempt to imitate Black style was the ragtime and Cakewalk craze of the 1890s when the great Black dancer Aida Overton Walker taught Fifth Avenue society matrons how to strut at the same time white Southerners were lynching Black people at the rate of three or four a week. Of course, real Black ragtime was too strong for the white palate. But a homogenized version was appropriated by songsters like Irving Berlin, who became the "King of Ragtime," while Scott Joplin died in obscurity and poverty. There are intriguing questions here. Why was the curiosity about Black people so obsessive as to make white people actually imitate African Americans -- even to bill themselves as true "African delineators" and to praise Al Jolson in 1911 as a possessor of "true Negro unction"? We know that Black people "wore the mask" to hide their real emotions. Did whites do the same? That is, did minstrels hide behind blackface in order to act out their and their audiences' fantasies -- particularly, one might ask, when they crossed the gender as well as the racial line to dress up as African American women? Behind these mocking impersonations, [Brenda Dixon Gottschild] suggests, there is a serious power game going on, with whites using the construct of minstrelsy to be at the same time both outsider and insider in relation to Africanist life and culture. Insider? Yes, because whatever its distortions, minstrelsy did mirror reflections of authentic African American singing, dancing, humor, folklore, music, and performance style. Historian Constance Rorke points out that, "Every plantation had its talented band that could crack jokes, and sing and dance to the accompaniment of banjo and bones." And no less an authority than W. C. Handy, who began his career in the 1890s playing cornet in the band of W.A. Mahara's Minstrels, said clearly that, "Negroes were the originators of this form of entertainment."