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Excerpted Inspirations #165
Excerpted Inspirations #164
Excerpted Inspirations #163
![[Nikole Hannah-Jones describes the new culture that enslaved Black people created in the void left by the absence of their cultures of origin.]
Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated to communicate with both Africans who used various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of dress, the defining flair, stems from the desires of enslaved people -- shorn of all individuality -- to assert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear a hat in a jaunty manner or knot a head scarf intricately. Today's avante-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people's determination to feel fully human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of Black art and music comes from a culture that rejected convention in order to cope with constant disruption. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names often derive from the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many Black Americans, particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European or from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessentially American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi delta, we birthed jazz and the blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.
Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echo Africa but are more than African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation's most significant original culture.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Democracy," in The 1619 Project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine (2021), pp. 34-35](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6feacf_1f2d4db4796f44868bed7ec721aaaafd~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_1930,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6feacf_1f2d4db4796f44868bed7ec721aaaafd~mv2.jpg)
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