3/6/08
Black culture seminar covers ideas about many cultures
By Jerriod Grizzle

JERRIOD GRIZZLE/Manning Times

University of South Carolina Professor Dr. Stephanie Mitchem talks to her audience at the Harvin Clarendon County Library about the differences in cultures at a Black History program on Feb. 28.

Using a variety of visual and audio aids such as books on black culture through the century and a collection of folk, jazz, blues, and gospel music, University of South Carolina professor of religious studies, Dr. Stephanie Mitchem spoke for an hour and a half about African American culture on Feb. 28 at the Harvin Clarendon County Library.

“Black Culture is certainly more complicated than people make it out to be,” she said.

Mitchem asked the audience to define culture in their own way.

“Culture is product and artifact. It is always in dialogue and able to move different places during different times,” she said. “Culture is permeable.”

Mitchem said there is a question of what black culture is and how races should approach it.

“Are we African-American or are we black?” she asked the audience.

Mitchem explained that black culture in a sense is shaped by African orientation only.

“There is no one black culture,” she said.

She stated that it was impossible to have a straight connection between what is African and what is black because of the worldview of black culture itself.

“Black people around the world may have a hard time connecting with black people in America because in Africa they have no lasting memory of slavery nor reparations,” she said.

Mitchem went on to give the example of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

“He is half white and half black. What culture should he say he is?” she asked.

Mitchem then stated that black culture in the United States today is really a number of different cultures mixed together.

“Take the West Indies, or part of the U.S., a lot of times what people are supposed to see goes ignored and put under the label of ‘just black,’” she said. “We say how other people are because we see them that way The U.S. black culture is different than that of another country. ”