African or American? Africa Embedded in America

This week I was able to take a look at literature from Joseph E. Holloway, "Africa is Africanisms in American Culture," and can I say the insight I received was an interesting eye opener. Fields of forced assimilation and stolen lifestyles of Africans still remain in our every day lives. Take a look at Chapter 2: "What Africa has given America" and really listen to it.

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On any legal documentation or paperwork, you have to tick that you're African American or of another choice. On a larger scale, from the color of your skin, they will say you are Black or White. You will hear the African beats and you will taste the African cuisines. Wear the African garments and dine in their environments but will they acknowledge the fact that they were stolen?

Africa is embedded in America, deeply. We are informed of the negative areas of slavery and that people were stolen from Africa. But did you know that they were targeted? Did you know that they selectively took these people from their own land to make them work in a new land based off of observation? Members of different tribes were preferred from others and taken at higher rates.

Where Africans are lessening in various parts of Africa, they are regrowing in America.

This allows prosperity in African culture as more and more of their kind are surrounding them. The houses and fields are being filled with people native to Africa which means they had similar dialect or origins. Separation in numbers doesn't always mean downfall. Their languages continued to grow. Their songs and folklore continued to grow. Their crops and favorite foods continued to grow. Still, it was stolen again. African prosperity, away from home, was still empty. Or was it an accomplishment?

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You mean to tell me that you stole me from my home. I took my cultures and livelihood with me in my mind and my heart. You stole my music and my crops and my stories. Engraved it in the ground so greatly that people call it American. Yet, there are books rewritten to tell my original story. Yet, my cultures and livelihood still live on on your grounds. They may not know my name, but my work is still known.

So I ask you, readers, can it be viewed as an accomplishment? Though, I am gone, I am not forgotten.

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Draw your own opinion and take of this piece but I've openly given mine. I have come to understand a separation of Blacks, African American and American. The cultures are African. The food is African. Africans brought and worked it, while America simply broadcasted it. When a White American and an African have a baby, are they not then mixed? Even a single drop of African blood, the Whites will not claim them. Not the way they claimed the Africans crops and mocked their own kind in their folklore. Not the way they take African music and words and embed it in their own. It's 2024 and there are still Africans and Black people learning of their origin and culture and becoming educated; proof of their failure in making us forget who we are.

When you get a chance, take a look at the older Bugs Bunny shows broadcasted with Blackface. Take a look at where jumbo or sesame comes from. Your crops like corn and blackeyed peas, read a bit more about where they really came from. Down to their White-enhanced image of cowboys. Stay educated.