Having never attended a “barbecue” before in my life, I decided to embark on this endeavor and immerse myself in an environment where I would feel completely uncomfortable; one that guaranteed the feeling of being the minority. Being a recently emigrated, first generation immigrant warrants insecurities within me, such as; whether or not my thoughts and actions are overly third world centric. Thus, the concept of attending a barbecue where a majority of the people would be African-Americans, whose cultural customs are somewhat diverse from my own; and the notion of socializing with them was rather daunting. Nonetheless, I discovered that a mutual friend’s family was hosting a barbeque for their annual family reunion so I decided to tag along to experience my first American “barbecue”. The barbecue was hosted in her family’s backyard in Framingham, Massachusetts, where her relatives from all over the US, and some from around the world, gathered to celebrate kinship and bond over delicious food and joyful conversations. “Barbecue” is often coined as …show more content…
Thus, Black and African psychology emerged to analyze such components as; the Black psyche and nature more in-depth. Prior knowledge of this information was crucial for my understanding and ability to relate my experiences at the event to the theories about who people of African descent are as portrayed psychologically and behaviorally in society. The Africentric theories of African American personality as proposed by Na’im Akbar’s (1979) Divine or Spiritual Core Model, Wade Nobles’s (1980) Extended-Self Model, Robert Williams’s (1981) WEUSI Model, and Kobi Kambon’s (1992) African Self-Consciousness Model share similarities and differences. The most common similarity being each theory is deeply rooted in spirituality and extracting from