5/30/2023 0 Comments Albert raboteau slave religion![]() ![]() This vision of blacks creating their own world to the exclusion of whites has become the consensus of the 1970s. In the slave families, in the slave quarters, in the secret religious meetings the slaves resisted degradation and developed a sense of special destiny and purpose. The enslaved Africans in the New World apparently sifted through the cultural and psychological wreckage of enslavement to recover common West African religious properties and folk beliefs, and they mixed them with their New World slave experience to forge a separate Afro-American culture. Lawrence Levine, Eugene Genovese, Donald Mathews, John Blassingame, and now Albert Raboteau, among others have studied black folklore, material culture, and religious practices to discover a slave/black culture of enormous richness and power existing beyond the reach of white masters. Such nonsense no longer holds, thankfully, as recent studies of black history have shown Afro-Americans to be anything but passive recipients of white, European culture and religion. ![]() Some scholars and teachers, who should have known better, even argued that enslaved Africans in America had no religion until Europeans provided one for them. ![]() “Not too long ago, white Americans believed that black culture in America was largely a sorry effort to imitate white culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, softbound, 400 pages. ![]()
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