In some
sense cultural pluralism is a reality for everyone in America and even, to some degree, in the
other continents in which national groups or nation-states are much older.All Americans are both
American and whatever their original ethnic group or nationality was or is.
The European countries as well, though much longer ago, were made up of different
regional/ethnic groups which began to coalesce into larger groups first during the Roman Empire,
and later during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when England, France, and Spain, and
(though not yet politically unified) Germany and Italy developed unified national
identities.
In America the position of African Americans can be viewed as
distinct from other ethnicities because they were brought here by force rather than immigrating
voluntarily as others did. Speaking for all African Americans, James Baldwin once said, "I
am the only one among you who did not want to come here." In enslaving them, the whites
also attempted to divest them of their original culture. European and Asian Americans, and
Native Americans as well, generally have a specific knowledge of cultural constructs and place
names to which they can relate their pre-US identity. For most African Americans, the attempt
had been to forcibly take this identity away from them. Therefore we might say that for them,
multiculturalism has a slightly different implication than for other groups. Yet what did
survive became significant not only for the cultural pluralism of people of African descent, but
for Americans as a whole. Language, music, and religion are key factors that illustrate the
point.
It's a form of pluralism that African Americans speak English, but
also speakforms of it which have been influenced by native African elements as well as the
dialect spoken by Southern whites. Yet these dialects have been influential upon the American
population as a whole, though most whites would fail to acknowledge it. We can thus see the
pluralism within the African American community reaching out and expanding into the rest of
America. In music we see a similar dynamic. African Americans created their own musical styles
based in part on those elements retained from their pre-US cultures. But most American popular
music in general is an amalgam of older American or European styles and,
probably much more significantly, jazz, blues and other forms originated by African Americans.
Thus American music is "culturally pluralistic" in ways that, again, many white people
would probably fail to acknowledge.
In religion, though most African
Americans were made to adopt the Christianity of the whites, many have of course converted to
Islam as a religion of their forebears in Africa and because Christianity was a religion used by
slaveowners as an instrument of forced "obedience." There are other ethnic groups in
America pluralistic in religion, but usually the pluralism is not due to recent conversions but,
rather, already existed before immigration to America.
If, however, we are
speaking of African Americans who have voluntarily come to the US more
recently,from Africa itself or the West Indies, many of these unique factors noted above about
African Americans would not necessarily apply. A present-day immigrant from Kenya, for instance,
might speak both English and Swahili in the same way Italian immigrants and their children, a
century ago, would have spoken English and Italian. We would, however, need to take into account
that Kenya, like other countries, already has had the effects of European colonization upon
it.
In summary we can say that African American pluralism has some factors
that are unique, some it shares with other groups, and many which have uniquely influenced the
broader US and even world culture.
