acculturation – the process of social transformation that an individual undergoes after arriving in a new location or community

“If urban life allowed slaves to meet more frequently and enjoy a larger degree of social autonomy than did slavery in the countryside, the cosmopolitan nature of cities speeded the transformation of Africans to Afro-Americans. Acculturation in the cities of the North was a matter of years, not generations.” (49)

• This is a long and complicated shift that occurs on multiple levels at different rates: physical, psychological, emotional, linguistic, and spiritual.
• Perhaps a new focus for Black and American Studies is to emphasize the acculturation of white settlers to Indigenous and African ways, redefining direction of influence and highlighting black and brown contributions to North American society and civilization.
• I’d like to know more about how the private nature of acculturation functioned in both black and white societies, as Europeans were also becoming Euro-Americans and establishing a new culture; what were the habits that each ethnic group maintained away from the public eye? (Of course this will be severely limited due to publishing history and recovery of colonial black archives.)

Janelle Poe

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