The lose of black culture

Essay by NemesisCollege, Undergraduate April 2002

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It all begins at 'the beginning'. One of the significant 'beginnings' in human culture has been language. The problems with our community originally began with the situation forced upon us by our white oppressors of the past. This was just the start though after slavery and the abundance of other problems we have encountered. The health, unemployment, education, and suicide problems were all created by our lack of understanding survival and the lack of proper information about our true African heritage. This can all be accredited to the muzzle that was put on our original language. The westernized idea of a black man has seemingly brainwashed us. By accepting others definition of self we have somewhat contaminated our community with a disease. By forgetting our language we are forgetting ourselves. Some people may easily say that we have no true starting language today. After reading "Decolonising the Mind", it becomes blatantly obvious taking control of a peoples {race or culture); language can lead to control of culture.

Culture can in turn give way to mental suicide, deliberate and systematic destruction of an individual or groups' mind.

In colonialism, there can be only one true goal, "to control the people's wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed, to control in other words the entire realm of the language of real life." Think about this, if a foreign culture controls another cultures' language, what type of effect will it have on culture? The answer is colonization. In seeing colonization being practiced on children, the dangers are very obvious. These children are being forced to learn a new culture and forced to behave in the ways of this foreign environment while they are still in their homeland. This can lead to some children never knowing certain ways...