African Heritage In America Analysis

A people’s relationship to their culture is the same as the relationship of a mother and her child. 80% of African Americans are a direct descendent of some sort of a slave brought into the United States during the 1800s. The children of slaves were taught to respect their parent’s African heritage from their mother country but as the slaves’ children had children and more and more generations were produced, the inevitable and unstoppable adoption of American culture and traditions occurred. As Martin Luther King once proclaimed, “one can live in American Society with a certain cultural heritage… and still absorb a great deal of this culture. There is always culture assimilation” (King 1964). The mixing of those two divergent cultures resulted

But as she was raised on a farm and knew little to nothing about Africa, her new persona is empty and meaningless and begins to represent her division from her family and her true self. In becoming educated, she fails to realize that she is ostracizing herself from her past and her background and unknowingly chooses to only respect what her world has become and cares about nothing about her own past, simply lifestyle. Both the lack of and the accumulation of education harm the small family and represents the estrangement of the older daughter and sister, Wangero. The short-lived education of the mother coupled with the inadequate schooling of Maggie shelter them and discourage them to hope or try for a “better” life but on the other side of the scale, Dee’s insatiable quest for knowledge, exhibited when she was younger with her forceful reading, has alienated her from her community and family. The quilts (being “pieced [together] by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee” (55) using old clothes, their grandmother’s dresses, their grandfather’s paisley shirts, and a piece of their great-grandfather’s Civil War uniform) whose ownership Dee and her mother disagreed over symbolized the contrasting interpretations of African American’s culture, traditions, and heritage. Wangero’s view, reinforced by the formal education that she received, is that the ancient African

Using intense symbolism and characterization, Alice Walker introduces the silent struggle between the interpretations of what African American culture should be, more African or more American, and how it should be treated, whether treated like a living component of one’s identity or treated as a painting at an art museum, hung up for all to see and not touch. Laying underlying in every conversation about the past, the scuffle between which way the culture should lean, causes arguments in every social class, background, gender, and age of African Americans. Walker takes a stance on this controversial topic and recounts a story of mother and daughter against daughter, old fashioned against contemporary, daily life against