How Black Culture Shapes Marketing & Movements in America and the Globe

Black Culture, also known as African American/Black American Culture, has always had a profound impact on the United States of America, especially in the economy. Since the early days of the USA, during slavery, African American people were the commodity, used to pay off debts and used as collateral, while also their labor and skills, brought the USA to the superpower that it is today. Black culture dominates a large percentage of what happens in America commercially due to Black Americans setting the standard for what goes viral and sells in the nation.

According to historical reports as early as the year 1998, the ideas that advertisers get come from African Americans. Everything from food items to clothing and music, in order to sell items, The Macon Telegraph quoted Thomas J. Burrell, CEO of Burrell Communications group, a Black-owned business, as stating, “The best way to get white kids into a product is to get black kids to buy it…emulating the surface lifestyle patterns of black kids. They are buying black music, wearing hip hop clothing.” In the same report, restaurants and cosmetic brands utilize African American cultural music called Hip Hop in order to reach consumers.

Now, the history of white people emulating, or imitating African Americans, goes way back to when they first started mocking them in minstrel shows, however, as time went on, Black Americans began to dominate the culture themselves. White people tended to reach into Black American culture and pull from it what they wanted to emulate, rebrand it and cosplay it as their own culture when it fact, it was and had always been Black Culture. Elvis Pressley is the kingly example of this phenomenon because he imitated the African American singers, from the sound to the moves.

To this very day, so many reality shows, television shows and movies as well as sports events, not just in the United States but around the globe continue to imitate African Americans who have such a phenomenal culture that it has touched Africa and Europe, who copied their socio-cultural and political movements during the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and 1960s. It was African American sociocultural and political movements that inspired the Bus Boycott in the UK, and in South Africa, racially black South Africans began imitating African American zoot suit as well as the civil rights movement.

Although African Americans rarely get credit, the credit needs to be known that the soul of African Americans, the descendants of the enslaved in the United States of America, have been felt across the entire nation and the globe, from the 1600s until this very day. They have been a huge foundation and their culture has become the dominant culture around the globe.