Word: negroness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Black Laughter. Nor, they hasten to add, is it necessarily a superior one. Although educational psychologists have long insisted that Negro dialect shows all the characteristics of cultural deprivation, Stewart and his fellow investigators argue that linguistically it is as rich and diverse as standard spoken English. Many white Americans were astonished when Muhammed Ali, who earned reams of sports-page attention with his endless flow of doggerel, flunked an Army intelligence test. Psychologist Stephen Baratz, of the National Institute of Mental Health, insists that there was really nothing particularly surprising about his jab at poesy: Negro children usually start...
...differences between white and black American culture go well beyond speech patterns. In a pioneering study called The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), the late Melville Herskovits, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, argued that many black cultural patterns are basically African in origin. Although his thesis was initially dismissed by the majority of sociologists and anthropologists-including most Negro experts-the Cultural Mafia agrees with Herskovits. Its members believe that they have discovered a number of behavioral parallels between native Africans and black Americans. One similarity is the typical way that many Negroes laugh: they cover their mouths, lower...
Another example is Negro eating habits. Unlike white Americans, who tend to dine with their families at certain ritual hours, many blacks eat whenever they feel like it, taking food from pots and dishes that always seem to be simmering on the kitchen stove. In Africa, tribesmen still leave food on a fire in the middle of the village for everyone to sample. Another Afro-American characteristic is the habit of eye rolling. Typically, blacks roll their eyes upward when they are daydreaming; preoccupied whites gaze vacantly into space...
White Americans not only misunderstand these cultural traits but are frequently annoyed by them-the volume of Negro voices, for example, which are often loud and boisterous because blacks are frequently less inhibited in public than whites. If a Negro youngster responds to a white teacher's scolding with a "Tsk, tsk," she will probably assume that the child is perhaps a little bit contrite. The black teacher, on the other hand, is more likely to recognize tongue clicking-possibly another African habit-as a sign of a youngster's deep resentment...
Alien Culture. The Cultural Mafia has just begun to explore the behavioral characteristics of Negro life, but its ideas have already provoked a lively professional debate. Many sociologists and anthropologists argue that the supposed correlation between the American ghetto and the African village is tenuous at best. Black Sociologist James Elsberry, assistant director of New York's Center for Urban Education, contends that the black man's distinctive cultural patterns are due not so much to his African past but to his long alienation from the hostile white American society around...