Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I think about what is coined as "chitlin culture". The type of culture found in the American ghettos. It's most prevalent among the Black underclass. I think about where this culture came from. This didn't just develop overnight. A synopsis: Some the of tenets of ghetto culture, or "chitlin culture" date back to the 19th century South. Alot of it came out of slavery. I know many people don't want to hear that. However, in order to solve a problem, one has understand where this problem came from.
The "chitlin culture" I'm talking about refers mainly to ghetto culture, and not Black culture as whole. Jazz, R&B, HBCUs, that isn't part of the chitlin culture. I was speaking with another Black man about some bad things that go on in a specific segment of the Black population, as well as some other bad things. We both agreed that ghetto culture is really "redneck culture" that made its way to the cities. Some of the worst aspects of ghetto culture borrowed from underclass southern society in the 19th century. Combination of the slave culture and the underclass southern culture, and then city life. Ralph_Kirk is an inspiration behind this thread.
I'd be willing to bet you've never been to the South.
Functional cultures preserve their past, protect their present, and plan for their future.
Preserving their past:
When I was in Hawaii, I spent several days observing the Merrie Monarch Hula festival. For a week, hundreds of native Hawaiian young men and women from dozens of hula hukilaus (dance schools) competed in displays of authentic Hawaiian hula. Hundreds of young people...for days.
When the music of a particular dance began, the audience would cheer--everyone knew the song, everyone knew the dance that should accompany it. At one point, a sixteen-year-old boy hit a particular hula move, and a gray-haired old man behind me--tears streaming from his face--declared, "When I was his age, I did that hula just like that!" Sure, these young people like hip-hop and all the modern music, but they have also taken time to "preserve their past." That's what functional cultures do.
In our past, we ADOS invented the Lindy Hop and tap. Today...pretty much only white people do those dances. The late ADOS tap master Gregory Hines remarked that except for little white girls, there wouldn't be tap in America. Same thing is happening with jazz and blues. Two more generations and jazz and blues will exist only with white patronage. Sure, we invented it...then discarded it. We boast about it, but if not for whites, it would be gone. It would be glorious if black dance companies like Alvin Ailey required all their dancers to have a background in "traditional" ADOS dances...but we don't preserve our past the way a functional culture does.
I never thought about that, but it is true. I've never been to Hawaii. However, I have been to some Greek festivals. People from Greece or people of Greek descent doing traditional Greek dances, traditional Greek music. People preserving their culture, their past, their heritage.
Growing up I always got the impression that blues music was "out", that is was old stuff. I always thought "that's Mississippi stuff from the old days. Who does that anymore?". I get what you're saying. Stuff that Black people came up with, but it isn't being preserved like it should be. While some things are best discarded, stuff like blues and jazz, that is stuff we need to hold on to.
There is still a Black audience for jazz. A few years ago I went to a jazz concert in Huntsville. Alot of Black people there. Majority Black. On the flip side, a large portion of the audience was over 30.
I'd be willing to bet you've never been to the South.
I live in the South. I grew up in the South (in Georgia specifically). My father is from the Midwest and his parents are from the South. My mother is from the South. I know alot more than you give me credit for.
One of the functions you will see in a functional culture is a firm determination of the responsibility of childcare and rearing. Functional cultures do not leave care of its children to chance or individual whim. The society will identify who is responsible and hold them accountable. The actual persons responsible for childcare may vary from society to society. It may be the parents. In old Hawaii, it was the grandparents. Some societies may pull in uncles and aunts. But every functional society nails down who is responsible and holds them accountable.
And there has been no functional culture that has left the function of childcare to single mothers, or as Oprah termed it, "Mommy alone." "Mommy alone" does not exist in any functional culture as an intentional or desirable or predominant way to rear children.
As a matter of protecting the present, functional cultures also creates and maintains its own image. A functional culture sets its own members as the epitome of all the values of that culture...it envies nothing of other cultures, even if it borrows from other cultures.
Prior to the 70s, ADOS people had scores of local newspapers, dozens of magazines. Many people are aware of Ebony, but there was a magazine for practically every word that connoted "brown" except "brown" itself: "Mahogony," "Bronze," "Sepia," "Tan," "Jet," and on and on. Ignored by white media (and ridiculed when noticed), we shaped our own image, and that was a positive image.
But when white media discovered us as a market (the Civil Rights Act provided "cover" for corporations to market to blacks without being identified as a "product for negroes," the media production companies in New York City and Los Angelas looked to their nearest resource--the urban ghettos--as their source of ADOS images.
And that is the image that continues to be portrayed to the extent that we believe it ourselves. It's incredibly annoying to see ADOS youth raised by two college-educated middle-class, SUV-driving parents in the suburbs thinking they're supposed to look and act like thugs to be "black." The "adoptionist" branch--that is, the traditional branch that we could say is represented by Martin Luther King is hardly recognized as "black."
Failing to protect the present: ADOS men are notorious in rejecting our own women as standards of beauty. This is part of the chitlin culture, inculcated into us in slavery, to identify white women as our own standard of beauty. Every young boy initially thinks his own mother is the most beautiful person in the world...until the world convinces him otherwise. It is rare, however, to find men of any other ethnic group who don't include their own mothers' phenotypes within their standards of beauty.
I'm sure comedian Bill Burr thinks his black wife is hot--he's said so-- but he also still finds beautiful white women hot.
A man whose standard of beauty is not broad enough to still include his own mother's phenotype has been brain damaged. Yeah, I said it. A black man who says, "Black women are ugly" has a psychological problem. That's an anti-survival attitude.
I work with teenaged boys in my church. A few years ago, while sitting in the youth service, I heard a boy behind me saying, "I just don't like the look of dark-skinned girls." I knew the boy, I knew his mother. He and his mother both are dark-skinned. I had to turn around on him and give him some real talk about respecting himself.
Now, am I saying all black men? Of course not. But it's prevalent and exposed enough that men of other ethnic groups have noted it, and ridicule black men for it. That is a failure to protect the present, a mark of a dysfunctional culture.
I never thought about that, but it is true. I've never been to Hawaii. However, I have been to some Greek festivals. People from Greece or people of Greek descent doing traditional Greek dances, traditional Greek music. People preserving their culture, their past, their heritage.
Growing up I always got the impression that blues music was "out", that is was old stuff. I always thought "that's Mississippi stuff from the old days. Who does that anymore?". I get what you're saying. Stuff that Black people came up with, but it isn't being preserved like it should be. While some things are best discarded, stuff like blues and jazz, that is stuff we need to hold on to.
There is still a Black audience for jazz. A few years ago I went to a jazz concert in Huntsville. Alot of Black people there. Majority Black. On the flip side, a large portion of the audience was over 30.
Here's the thing about it, though: White Americans are preserving those things as part of American culture even as ADOS people abandon them.
There's something to think about with that. While saying that ADOS culture is the entrails of Anglo-American culture, we are still saying that it's an American culture. It's as American as pizza and chow mein. It's actually a good thing that white Americans accept ADOS elements of surface culture as essentially American. We should not resist that. Yeah, white people, go ahead and wear braids...normalize those ADOS styles. We'll still do it better, but go ahead and normalize it.
And ironically, that's happening with beauty standards. Even as black men reject women of dark skin, white men are beginning to embrace them. It's an oddly surprising thing that white men seem not to be subject to "colorism." If a white man has gotten over the issue of race in the first place, they don't seem to notice skin tone.
That itself was not monolithic over time. Early slaves on the East coast were more exposed to colonial aristocrats. Freed slaves from that system formed the early enclaves of freedmen in the NE (Harlem, Philidelphia) that had a quite sophisticated, genteel adoptionist culture based on those more genteel slaveowners. Some of that is still reflected in ADOS culture on the East coast, particularly away from the urban areas. If you watch the movie "Hidden Figures," you can see it. But those early genteel freedman cultures in the NE were later overwhelmed by the Great Migration.
I'd be very interested in where I might encounter any extant remnants of the old stock black northern culture.
An HBO series that also shows a bit of this pre Great Migration black northern culture is The Gilded Age.
Also interesting to hear the accent of an elderly WEB Debois, who was born in Massachusetts in the 1860's. Dont think this old New England accent even exists anymore.
I don't know, but this has been one of the more interesting threads on CD. Thank you for sharing the conversation.
__________________ ____________________________________________
My posts as a Mod will always be in red.
Be sure to review Terms of Service: TOS
And check this out: FAQ
Moderator: Relationships Forum / Hawaii Forum / Dogs / Pets / Current Events
There's interesting perspectives yet can't fully be aboard with most of the slave tie in angle. Many points to touch on and the beginning is this "stripping away african culture" theme when it's not entirely accurate portrayal. I have to cover much later.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
