Essay On African American Tradition

Tradition in Native and African Americans
“Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we 're all living in different worlds because we 're on different continents”(Glass). Traditions can be in the form of verbal that is passed down through generation, whether they be song or tales, also they can be written or an activity. When the immigrants from over seas came over to the United States, the traditions of the Native Americans, as well as African American were torn apart and strip of their meaning. Lullaby written by Leslie Marmon Silko who is a Native American, and The Eatonville Anthology written by Zora Neale Hurston who was African American portrays how tradition was stripped of their true meaning by the whites that were in the United States. These pieces of literature are alike in their …show more content…
Oral traditions were the most common form of preserving the history and activities of Native and African Americans, their meanings got lost in generations because of outside influence. These oral traditions lost their visual representation of what they were intent to mean because the whites took over and pushed everyone to do things the way they wanted. Because the whites pushed different ethnic groups to do things the way they wanted them to be done, it lead to assimilation. Assimilating to a different way of life is hard, but in order to achieve the American dream it is needed. There are different ways to interpret the American dream, in the I Have a Dream Speech by Martin Luther King Jr., the American dream “is a dream deeply rooted in that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed- we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (King). Native and African Americans have similar and different views based on the way culture has shaped