Each Mardi Gras, hundreds of African-Americans spend thousands to create Native American themed costumes, which they wear in an effort to beat the others with their style.

Countrywide Home Loans was racist and automatically put African-Americans into exotic and expensive sub-prime loans they didn't want or need, and couldn't afford, according to a former employee.

My new co-authored column, Hillary Clinton’s Youth Opportunity Agenda Will Help Low-Income Fathers (Black Press USA Network, 1/25/08), discusses some small but significant proposals from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to resolve the child support problems faced by many low-income African-American fathers.

"In 1958, 53% admitted to Gallup that they would be unwilling to support an African American [...]. Even today, [...] 53% would oppose an atheist."

African-Americans have made inroads in the Democratic party--Obama's success attests to that--but what about black conservatives? Are they an anomaly or a real force? Christopher Alan Bracey discusses why black conservative thought is more important, and influential, than you may think.

African American culture in the United States includes the various cultural traditions of African ethnic groups. It is both part of and distinct from American culture. The U.S. Census Bureau defines African Americans as "people having origins in any of the Black race groups of Africa." African American culture is indigenous to the descendants in the U.S. of survivors of the Middle Passage. It is rooted in Africa and is an amalgam of chiefly sub-Saharan African and Sahelean cultures.Although slavery greatly restricted the ability of Africans in America to practice their cultural traditions, many practices, values and beliefs survived and over time have incorporated elements of European American culture. There are even certain facets of African American culture that were brought into being or made more prominent as a result of slavery; an example of this is how drumming became used as a means of communication and establishing a community identity during that time. The result is a dynamic, creative culture that has had and continues to have a profound impact on mainstream American culture and on world culture as well. After Emancipation, these uniquely African American traditions continued to grow. They developed into distinctive traditions in music, art, literature, religion, food, holidays, amongst others. While for some time sociologists, such as Gunnar Myrdal and Patrick Moynihan, believed that African Americans had lost most cultural ties with Africa, anthropological field research by Melville Hersovits and others demonstrated that there is a continuum of African traditions among Africans in the New World from the West Indies to the United States. The greatest influence of African cultural practices on European cultures is found below the Mason-Dixon in the southeastern United States, especially in the Carolinas among the Gullah people and in Louisiana.African American culture often developed separately from mainstream American culture because of African Americans' desire to practice their own traditions, as well as the persistence of racial segregation in America. Consequently African American culture has become a significant part of American culture and yet, at the same time, remains a distinct culture apart from it.