In order to show how black people throughout North American were culturally isolated from the start,

it Is important to recognize how strange and unnatural the initial contact with Western society was for the African. Once we realize what a shock this first encounter was, we can begin to understand the amazing albeit agonizing transformation that produced contemporary black Americans from the people who were first bound and brought to this country. Life in colonial America was completely different from what the African thought human existence should be. This was one of the most important aspects of the enslavement of the African, the radically different, even opposing cultural perspectives that the colonial American and the African brought to one another.

Early European-Americans could not appreciate the profundity of the African world view because it differed so greatly from the Western system of thought and ideas. Western culture, which views the ultimate happiness of humanity as the sole purpose of the universe, could not comprehend the goals or “canons of satisfaction” of a culture with elaborate concepts of predetermination and of the subservience of human beings to a complex of Gods. The cruelty of this misunderstanding, when contained within already terrifying circumstance of slavery, should be readily apparent.

Africans were unable to preserve many of the achievements of their civilization under a system of slavery which denied cultural autonomy to the oppressed. European-Americans immediately attempted to eradicate all manifestations of African political, social, and economic traditions. Moreover, the highly developed African system of Jurisprudence could not function under the American form of slavery. Nevertheless, Africans were able to preserve some of their own cultural perspectives, and many of the attitudes, customs, and cultural characteristics of the black American can be traced directly back to Africa. Religion, non-material aspects of

African culture, which could not be suppressed, now form the most apparent legacies of African past.

Because of the violent differences between what was indigenous to their culture and what was forced on them m slavery, Africans developed an eclectic view of the world, containing both those elements of African temperament that could not be suppressed and those elements of Western culture that were essential to survival in North America. Afro-Americans (the first American-born black people, who retained many pure Africanisms ) and later black Americans inherited these cultural complexities and added individual nuances of their own. So, after several generations in the United States, the black Americans developed a separate culture which reflects both their African and their American experience. The African culture, the retention of some parts of this culture in American, and the weight of the step-culture produced a new people.