American Culture

Wynton Marsalis was on The PBS News Hour tonight, and expressed his dismay at the loss of knowledge about American culture among kids--among us all.  Several times during the interview, he doubled back on what he said, paying special attention to ignorance about African American culture as well as about American culture.  And I agree absolutely when Marsalis says that most people are so ignorant about African American culture that they don't even know that there's something to be known.  Profoundly sad.  At the same time, however, I want to think about the distinction between American and African American culture.  My idea here is pretty simple:  without the African, there really is no such thing as an American culture.

Obviously that's not to say that all American artists are African Americans.  But it is to say that what distinguishes American culture from the culture of a European nation--what makes it specifically American, in other words--is the encounter of those European cultures with the African.  There are other cultural components to the encounter, of course, most notably Native American.  And the multiple encounters give depth and texture to American culture.  But the intersection of Africa and Europe is so sustained and so central to the American experience that it is the essential element of what makes America American.

Some of what I mean is straightforwardly economic. The wealth of the North as much as of the South depends on the fact of slavery, either the Triangular Trade in slaves that made millionaires of northerners or the agricultural employment of those slaves that did the same for southerners.  Without that wealth it would have taken a great deal longer for the US to become what it became.  Indeed, the transformation of the colonies into a great nation might never have happened without Africans.

But by "culture" I suspect that Marsalis means something other than economics.  I do, at any rate.  And when it comes to the expression of the human soul associated with the arts, there is no doubt at all that without Africans, there would be no specifically American cultural expression.  I read Edward Taylor's poetry and I think I'm reading an English poet, not an American one.