Why Whites Embrace Black Culture

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Why Whites Embrace Black Culture

Blacks' contribution to American culture is so rich and vibrant that everyone wants to benefit from it. Black culture, from the style of dress to music, has such a pervasive influence on all races.

Whites are drawn to Black culture because of the extraordinary quality of it, our aesthetic, our style." "We set the styles. We are the trendsetters of America. America is known globally for its culture, which is Black. When you look at basketball, people love Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant."

Black people continue to determine the taste of richer White people. "They want to look like us, but they don't want to be us. They don't want to live in our skin. It's kind of a cultural voyeurism. It allows White people to safely tour Blackness without being subjected to the reality of being Black. By taking in our Black culture, they are also taking in some of our political and social ideas. White America has always found Black culture to be exciting, exotic and perhaps more expressive and less restrained than what they identify as their culture. They find our culture to be very exciting and attractive.

W.E.B. Dubois once said, that we, meaning African-Americans want what is said, about us to express the best and noblest and brightness in us. It was Dubois, who wanted to educate white folks into a respect for blacks. In his book, The Souls of Black Folk, the traditions, expressive culture, and values of African-Americans had to be respected and recognized by both white and black Americans.

On that note, in the article "Why Whites Embrace Black Culture", African-Americans today, yesterday, and tomorrow exhibit a culture pride that is effervescent. The aesthetic of the black culture expands way back to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of vibrant creativity. Perhaps, this period can be considered a movie from the old to the new. The old being the stereotypical images of blacks as ex-slaves and as members of an inferior race; to the new, in which blacks recognized their own existence as a race and they articulated that existence and that culture through the arts. Then, its no surprise that whites embraces the black culture so adamantly.

Notables such as DuBois, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, and Martin Luther King have helped to define the beauty, intellectual, and admirable qualities that blacks, for so long were denied to express.

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