Lol imagine saying this out loud
the obvious thing here is that your culture is mostly invisible to you when you're living in it; it's just the thing you're doing when you talk and live with people (assuming you do that)
He can SEE non-AfAm Blacks practice culture BECAUSE it is markedly not the way he does
He can SEE non-AfAm Blacks practice culture BECAUSE it is markedly not the way he does
there it is:
there are also all sorts of very specific regional modes of address and food and music — go-go in DC and second lines in NOLA and people who speak Gullah in SC — like, so many African-American cultures and so much of it that even calling it "Af-Am culture" flattens so much!
i remember this becoming really clear to me as a teenager. i was really feeling this girl who lived in the suburbs.
So me and my friend April, from North Philly, went out to the suburbs to go to this girl's graduation party, right? And these two little girls wanted to jump double dutch —and me and my friend had to get on the ends bc we were the only ones that knew how to.
and i was like, "yo, how did these Negroes never learn to turn? tf?!?!"
But like, not long after that, the mother of girl who I was crushing on casually mentioned Jack and Jill.
I was like, "um, what's that?"
Her: "You don't know what Jack and Jill is?"
But like, not long after that, the mother of girl who I was crushing on casually mentioned Jack and Jill.
I was like, "um, what's that?"
Her: "You don't know what Jack and Jill is?"
so basically, we were having these very specifically African American experiences — like, traditions that necessitated other AfAms in social proximity to each other — and they were completely distinct from each other. and we lived like 10 miles apart.
Adding onto this: i remember getting to college and thinking it was *weird* that there were papers and books and shit written about, like code switching. Like, “Doesn’t everybody do this all the time?” It’s just hard to see your mundane interactions with other ppl as “cultural.”
But antiblackness — and internalized antiblackness, i guess — makes it even harder to see. All this culture seems self-evidently not worthy of explication/examination/critique or whatever.
It prolly doesn’t even feel like “culture,” if by “culture” we mean Important, Things in museums, or rituals that are “positive.”
And i *think* the dudes saying “African Americans don’t have a culture!” are doing a little bit (or a lot) of this.
And i *think* the dudes saying “African Americans don’t have a culture!” are doing a little bit (or a lot) of this.
