African American Culture By Natasha Lightfoot

Movies and dramas are some of the artistic innovations of the human beings. They remind us of the traditional beliefs, customs and the way of life. TV dramas, for instance, are one way of teaching people about their past using an entertaining approach where characters take different roles symbolically to pass a message to the audience. Movies however, make scenes vivid and emotional as they bring a clear picture of what happened using moving images. That said, movies make it easy for one to remember, especially on parts that they find interesting or scarring. More recently, there have been a vast number of movies and TV dramas depicting African-American history. These have been under great scrutiny by blacks themselves because injustices are

She focuses on a TV drama from 1977 titled Roots. The show depicts the past histories of African-Americans, Lightfoot points out that the capturing and transportation Africans and their descendants for many years created violence in their minds, which is displayed in the black community today. Lightfoot states, “erected racial, gendered and class hierarchies that remain to this day, which has influenced many elements of American society, including demography, culture, economy, politics and the environment”. Put simply, she is stating that the past mindset of blacks and whites continues to persist in a way and we see commonalities from the past in present day society. Lightfoot also suggest the reason many African-Americans have not had adequate education as compared to their white counterparts (Lightfoot). Some time back, there was discrimination and limited movement for the Africans so that they could offer cheap labor as seen in the 1977 “Roots” films. LightFoot says that; “Prohibitions against enslaved people’s literacy, such as South Carolina’s 1740 Act following the Stono Rebellion, portended generations of under-educated black communities, which the woefully unequal education black students now receive has yet to undo” (Lightfoot). When we get to understand our past, we can easily learn the reason class hierarchies and racial injustices exist