African American History · Unit 3
Syncretic Innovations: Culinary, Linguistic & Spiritual
What survived the crossing — in food, language, and sacred movement
The Middle Passage seed-braiding tradition, AAVE's rule-governed grammar, and the Ring Shout as living cosmogram.
Learning Objectives
- •Match soul food dishes to their West African counterparts and shared techniques
- •Demonstrate AAVE grammatical rules including habitual be, copula absence, and remote-past BIN
- •Explain the Ring Shout as an enactment of the Kongo Yowa cosmogram
- •Connect the post-Stono drum ban to body percussion as cultural survival
Unit 3 Knowledge Check
Score 70% or higher to complete this unit. Answers stay hidden until you submit.
1. Enslaved women sewing seeds into their hair before the Middle Passage is historically significant because:
2. Colorism — preference for lighter skin within Black communities — is described in this course as 'engineered' rather than natural because:
3. In African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the sentence 'She be working late' means something different from 'She is working late.' What does 'be' signal in AAVE grammar?
4. In AAVE, 'She be working late' and 'She working late' have different meanings. What is the difference?
5. The Ring Shout moves counterclockwise. This direction directly enacts what concept?
6. The culinary tradition of seed-braiding involved hiding seeds of okra, sesame, black-eyed peas and rice in hair. What was the effect on the American economy?
Architectures of Control: Sound and Skin
Document-Based Task · scored with the essay rubric
Analyze how colonial authorities and enslavers utilized both sensory deprivation and physical categorization to dismantle enslaved agency. Using the provided documents, compare how the suppression of cultural expression and the implementation of hierarchical skin-color distinctions served as complementary tools to stabilize the plantation system and prevent collective resistance.
Source Documents
The Negro Act of 1740 (South Carolina)
Primary SourceThomas Thistlewood’s 'Book of Common Prayer' and Plantation Journals
Primary SourceThe Invention of the White Race (Theodore Allen)
Secondary Source