October 14th
Dear Jamal, Hello Jamal. My name is Ryan and I am currently learning about how Africanisms have affected our American culture today. Africanisms are different cultural characteristics that you have like food, dance, language, and the many other cultural categories. Your foods cultural have greatly influenced American culture today. Many things that we do today has come from your culture like deep frying. Deep frying foods is a big one because deep frying things like chicken and french fries exist in fast food chains and fast food is main part of American culture. Even simple, but important things like watermelon and fried chicken has come from this Africanism. One Africanism that most people are unaware off is folk art. You decorate peoples graves with things like seashells, lamps, bottles, and upside down flowerpots to help your loved ones on their long journey to the afterworld and also to make sure they don’t come back to haunt the living. In America we may not put the same things on our loved ones graves or do it for the same reasons, but putting things on peoples graves has originated from Africa and has affected our culture. Dance is a big Africanism that has made a great influence in our culture. In your culture, someone beats the drums while the dancers imitates the beat of the drum. This has created many of the dances we do in America today like break dancing, hip-hop, kongo, square dancing, and tap dancing. Even very popular old dances like