Ignorance exists about black culture
Though well-intentioned liberals such as Zara Bennett may claim to know a lot about what goes into the culture of American blacks, her uninformed letter to the editor proves she knows little. Any student – black or white – of “black culture” understands that the American culture of blacks has as little to do with Africa as many white descendants of Europe have to do with Germany, Ireland, or Poland.Aside from the audacity of Bennett’s calling for African-American students to “account for their absence” from a program about Africa, I am appalled at her obvious ignorance of the role black Americans have played in American culture. Jazz music, which Zara mentions in her letter, for example, has much more to do with the American derived blues idiom than with anything African.To be sure, present day “black culture” owes a lot to the music and rhythm of Africa, but for Zara to question why black folks don’t show up every time somebody mentions the word “Africa” is ignorance in its lowest form. The black population was well represented last year when Pulitzer-prize winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis came to campus with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, where he presented “Blood on the Fields,” an American story about the courage, soul and gutbucket grandeur of the black experience in America. Perhaps the reason so few blacks attended this program on Africa is because we are tired of being told that in order to talk about great achievements of black folks, we have to go back to Africa or African history. Informed observers of the American black experience see this notion for what it is: intellectual garbage.As far as Wynton Marsalis is concerned – and you can include me in this camp as well – the most important part of my history began that first day my descendants arrived in this new and strange land, where they would eventually not only conquer a new language and legal system, but also participate in and add to the American cultural landscape. Mine is a history derived from the likes of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and indeed, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and George Gershwin. Americans in America.
Jason Harrisonsenior, political science
