I was at a church seminar this morning and had the opportunity to talk with a young man who confessed to coming from a "messy, broken background." I nodded my head, understanding and empathizing with his experiences.

 Culture or Development: The Tradeoff

I wonder if America will turn into a nation of bikes.  People need an alternative means of transportation because of how expensive fuel is.  People are being priced out of their cars.  Four dollars of gas is more than many people can afford.  Gas is too expensive for many jobs, especially entry level jobs.

From a medical stand point of view, HIV/AIDS is obviously a devastating disease that has created a profound sense of helplessness within the medical field because it seems as if they can’t find a cure for it and though many attempts are being made; they are just that attempts---but obviously we all hope they will mushroom into something great! However, how do we address what we obviously know is here and won’t go? We have made great strides in educating people about the disease and for developed countries people with the disease actually can live longer than previous times. However, to what extent can we attribute our “ways of life” to this problem? How responsible are we for the causes of the deadly disease. Individual responsibility is often thought of when we ask these questions, but for me I want to ask: to what extent is society as a whole responsible.

A Culture of Oppression: Education, Deafness, and Blackness in America

The word ‘culture’ is so malleable, flexible, all
encompassing (at least from a cosmopolitan point of view) that I feel any
person wishing to deny a certain group the right to constitute themselves a
specific culture to entirely out of line. If any group of people can find
something in common with one another that allows them to feel safe, accepted,
and allows them to relate, I believe they should be able to label it their
culture. Subcultures, or cultures that do not necessarily find themselves in
the same social hierarchy as mainstream cultures, are still cultures regardless

Greetings!

   I've had the chance to meet with wonderful people at this conference. Thank you for the opportunity. Those that I haven't met with, I am interested in historical and cultural development. I am collaborating with The Sankofa Saturday School porgram which is held in Queens, New York at The African Poetry Theater for children ages 5-17.

    I hope to start an Afro-centric library at the school. At the Sankofa Saturday School, we also hope to expand the current curriculum. Also, I am in the midst of planning several cultural events that involve the children and the community. This is the first program at the Queens site, there is one is Brooklyn, New York that has been a three year success. We hope for the same in Queens.

As an
African-American, I have always believed that it was possible for a Black man
to lead our nation. Now in the 21st century, my thoughts have not
changed. It will take honesty, and a willingness to work with all cultures in
order for a Black man to succeed as the next president of The United States of
America. Barack Obama is the first African-American male to exert characteristics
that will implement change in the 21st century. Looking at his life,
while reading Dreams for My Father,
made me look deeper in to the history of our leaders and why we have not
reached this point until now regarding an actual bid for the white house. One

Besides being the workhorses of a growing young nation, African slaves brought with them their music, art, culture, and food. All modern music can be traced back to roots in slavery and Africa: country, rock, jazz, and especially hip hop. The influences of African artistic expression and shared culture can easily be seen, but what is often looked over are the not so easily recognizable economic influences of African slaves.

Wow, I've got the urge to throw up and cry at the same time just thinking about it... Blackface started out in the late 1700s as a performance in which white people made themselves up to appear black in order to exploit and bastardize what was then African American culture for the pleasure of a white audience. It was often the only exposure that audience members had to said culture.

Until college, I thought blackface was something you only read about in books (I thought the same about lynching ). But then it appeared at college parties, on America's Next Top Model,

and in drag shows. Apparently it's all the rage at halloween gatherings.

From the When not in Africa. . . blog.

Culture is not very easily defined. Anthropologists give us a few attempts at definition and the real meaning must lie somewhere in there. In 1871, Tylor called culture, "That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a man as a member of society." Keesing and Stathern stress the idea of culture in their definition, "systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that human beings live." We can at least gather that culture is a set of guidelines, whether written or unwritten, which are meant to direct a society. We think less about our cultures as being guidelines and can see culture as more of a means or way of seeing things from a perspective. In Culture, Health, and Illness, we can learn that there are different levels of culture: culture as a 'facade to the world at large,' culture as the assumptions known to a group, and culture where the rules are taken for granted and implicit, impossible for the average person to be aware.