Black Culture and Black Consciousness

I make no apology for including this immense and important work. So much of the music I love originated with the kidnapping of black people from Africa.

This book shows how not merely the music of Africa but whole swathes of culture now considered “American” were imported along with the slaves. How did they cope with being ripped from their homeland, transported across the Atlantic in chains, and forced to work in the fields of an alien land?

Levine lays it all out, including everything from Black religion to Black comedy, and despite what you might think, it’s a real… show more.

Though the title suggests a rather exclusive focus on black culture, this incisive yet impassioned book shows that culture continually evolving and adapting, as traditional African practices and beliefs interacted with those of the whites who first enslaved African peoples and later consigned them to the hardship and humiliation of the Jim Crow system. The result is a brilliant, engaging, almost seamless narrative of the ongoing cultural synthesis that shaped the identities of both blacks and whites, in the South, and ultimately, throughout the nation.