Personal Narrative: My Family Culture

After reading different articles and learning more about African American culture, it made me want to find out more about my own family culture. There are different traditions that are pasted down in generations, which could have been a part of African culture that we don’t realize such as parenting styles. I don’t remember hearing too many stories about my past relatives growing up, so I had to find out more on my family experiences in the south. Also, I wanted to see how spirituality played a roll in my family choices. My goal in this paper is to show how I got a better understanding of the reason my family could be structured the way it is now.
Traditions are important in any family because they help to pass down knowledge, material objects,

or even traits. In Nataka Moore and Tiffany McDowell article Expanding Adlerian Application: The Tasks, Challenges, and Obstacles for African American Parents, they talk about how in previous times African Americans went through a rough period which resulted in a certain style of parenting. For example, “Within the African American tradition, parents raise their children with encouragement to meet life challenges”, the authors are saying that parents wanted their children to reach for their goals because their ancestors have fought to make it possible for them too ( p.117). I feel like this relates to how my family is toward being successful and being told you can be whatever you want to be in life. Maybe my grandmother’s mother installed it into her mind, so she installed it into my mother which she installed into me and to be passed on.
During previous years, it wasn’t so easy to be a black woman in the south, but it came with more challenges than just being black.

In an interview I composed with my mother, I asked her “What were some challenges you had to face being a black woman in the south” which she replied “As a black woman, it was hard because you would be considered last on the totem pole, and we were seen as stereotypes such as barefoot and pregnant.” It hard to challenge these thoughts which Collins described as “controlling images” that society puts on you because of your race or sexuality (pg.1). The author Rhoda Jeffries touches on some black women struggles in her article Editor’s Introduction: Fortitudinous Femininity: Black Women’s Resilience in the Face of Struggle when she says “Jeffries and Jeffries further explore the role of mentoring among Black women and challenge mass media to carefully craft images that positively depict African American women in the various roles they play in “Mentoring and mothering Black femininity in the academy: An exploration of body, voice and image through Black female characters.” (p.82) Media has a huge impact on society, which is because of what people see on television or read on social media, since people aren’t use to or don’t understand something they tend to place it on a certain race or

gender.
Spirituality is very important to my family and myself because it gives us hope and something to believe in. Another question I asked my mother in an interview was “Who do you think has played a major role in your life? ”, and one of her answers was “My mother also taught me how spiritual needs play in all our lives everyday.” My family have always been taught that God loves you no matter what, and that he doesn’t judge us because no one is perfect we all make mistakes.