I’m really looking for what may have been the driving motivation and reward. The focus is on your personal drive for the interest and what you gained from it.
We can’t have meaningful conversations if people are scared to be honest, so please be authentic, forthcoming, and respectful. Conversely, please respond to others with compassion so that users feel safe enough to be vulnerable.
I’m a world builder, so learning about other cultures and seeing how those inspire me is just something I do often for fun.
Same, though I’m the son of a Cuban immigrant so I don’t fully fit into OP’s question… that said, I don’t have any African heritage.
In my D&D homebrew world, the Halfling culture live in a sub-tropical region. I modeled their culture, lifestyle, and traditional fighting techniques of those from Jamaica - particularly the machete martial artists. This is the video that inspired it for me.
Can’t say it’s been intense, or about any specific culture, but I just genuinely like to learn about other cultures.
I went to a 90% black k-12 advanced magnet school from 9th-12th grade in the Southeastern USA. I’m white. I never really got like an intense interest or anything. This level of stereotype culture is of limited interest to me personally. It was just my culture group for a time. I dated a black girl for awhile, and a Persian girl for awhile too. I even picked up a few lines of Farsi, although I don’t remember any of them now.
The culture is very different in the black American south. Probably the biggest takeaway I have is that poverty culture largely forms the flavor of any community, and communities without poverty have no flavor to them. The struggles are very real, but the solutions are never straight forward. Neglect and abuse causes irreparable harm and scaring as deep as a community and cultural level. Only persistent change and time can heal those wounds. No outsider has a right to minimize or belittle those traumatized by abuses and neglect.
Probably the biggest takeaway I have is that poverty culture largely forms the flavor of any community, and communities without poverty have no flavor to them.
That’s such a succinct way to put something I feel like I’ve read 400 page books about. I’d also never thought about it as one thing before: I’ve definitely had the thought that famines make the best cuisines and boredom the best games, but I’ve never put it together as a general rule.
My midwestern US schooling taught me almost nothing about African or diaspora history beyond the slave trade. When I learned that there was a whole big huge continent whose history I didn’t know, I was fascinated. Simultaneously, I was awakening to the systemic injustice that Afro-folks experience in the United States, and wanted to learn as much as I could about their background and context.
I love the blues and jazz and the history of it. The heart of American culture is black culture.
